You will build a one-page dashboard with a small set of measures for your team.
Most sales managers have access to more reports than they could read in a week. The CRM has a dashboard with twenty charts, finance sends a monthly pack, and someone in head office built a spreadsheet that nobody understands. Yet when you need to know whether the team is on track for next month, none of them answers the question in under a minute.
This exercise builds the one page you will actually use. You will choose up to eight measures, fill in four weeks of data, and set a regular time to look at it. We will build Wei Ming's version as the worked example, with example figures throughout.
Start from the three leading measures you chose in lesson 8.1. Add the result your team is judged on, usually revenue won. Then add only what you need to explain movements in those numbers.
Treat eight as a ceiling. Fewer is often better, because every measure on the page competes for your attention. Most of the eight should be leading, because those are the ones you can still act on.
Wei Ming chose seven:
Prospecting touches, the calls, emails and messages reps sent to new contacts. Deals that reached meeting agreed that week. Deals that reached problem confirmed that week. Proposals seen by buyers that week. Conversion from meeting agreed to problem confirmed, over the last four weeks. Average size of deals won. Revenue won.
He left out sales cycle length, because his team's deals took several weeks and a weekly figure jumped around too much to read. He planned to look at it once a quarter instead.
For each measure, write down exactly where it comes from and who updates it. Most will come from your CRM, if the stages match your written process as lesson 4.3, Key activities and tools for each stage, asked. If your team uses a spreadsheet, the same rule applies: one source per number, updated the same way every week.
Pick a fixed time to pull the numbers, such as Friday at 5pm, so each week covers the same period. If a number needs reps to log something, such as prospecting touches, make sure the logging is quick, or the number will be wrong.
Lay the page out with measures down the side and weeks across the top. Four weeks is the minimum to see a trend. One week on its own tells you very little, because a public holiday, a big tender or a sick rep can move any weekly number.
Here are Wei Ming's first four weeks, for a team of five.
Prospecting touches ran at 210, 190, 220 and then 160. Over the same weeks, 8, 7, 8 and 7 deals reached meeting agreed, while 5, 4, 5 and 4 reached problem confirmed, and buyers saw 3, 4, 3 and 3 proposals.
Conversion from meeting agreed to problem confirmed, over the four weeks, was 18 out of 30, which is 60 percent.
Revenue won was S$13,000, S$16,000, S$12,000 and S$17,000, from one, two, one and two deals. That totals S$58,000 from six deals, an average deal size of about S$9,667.
If you can, add a small line chart or arrows beside each row, so the direction is visible without reading the figures. Keep the page to one screen or one printed sheet.
A dashboard earns its place by changing what you do. Each week, before the pipeline review, read it from top to bottom and ask one question: what is moving, and what does that mean for the next few weeks?
In Wei Ming's four weeks, most measures were steady. Revenue, at S$58,000 for the period, was close to the team's run rate from module 5. The meeting-to-problem conversion of 60 percent matched the team's rate from lesson 8.2. The number that moved was prospecting touches. Week four's 160 was about 23 percent below the average of the previous three weeks.
Prospecting touches lead everything else on the page by several weeks. Meetings in week four were still normal, because they came from earlier prospecting. But fewer touches in week four would mean fewer meetings in weeks six and seven.
Wei Ming asked about it in the one-to-ones. Two reps had spent most of week four on a large tender and dropped their prospecting block. His decision was to keep the morning prospecting block, from Prospecting: build a pipeline that does not run dry, lesson 7.3, Protect a weekly prospecting block, fixed for everyone even during tenders, and to help with the tender paperwork himself. He wrote the decision in one line at the bottom of the dashboard.
Book a fixed slot to update and read the dashboard, just before your weekly pipeline review. Fifteen minutes is enough once the sources are set up. Bring the page into the review and start with the one thing that moved.
A finished dashboard fits on one page and shows up to eight measures, mostly leading, with at least four weeks of real or sample data, a trend for each row, the source of each number, and a one-line note of the coaching or management decision it led to. That is the module 8 capstone.
In the activity below you will build your own dashboard. If you do not have four weeks of data yet, fill it with sample figures, mark them as samples, and replace them week by week with real ones.
Build a one-page team dashboard with up to eight measures and four weeks of real or sample data.
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