You will be able to build a one-page dashboard with a small set of measures for your team.
Wei Ming manages a sales team of five reps. Like most sales managers, he has more reports than he can read: CRM dashboards with many charts, a monthly finance pack, and head-office spreadsheets nobody understands. None of them answers "is the team on track for next month?" in under a minute.
The module 8 capstone is to build the one page you will actually use. It is a weekly dashboard of up to eight measures, each with a named source, at least four weeks of data with trends, and a fixed time each week to read it. You then use it to spot what is moving and record one coaching or management decision.
Start from the three leading measures you chose in lesson 8.1. A leading measure is one you can still act on, because it moves ahead of results. Add the result your team is judged on, which is usually revenue won. Then add only the measures you need to explain movements in those numbers.
Eight is the most the page should hold. You don't need to reach it, and fewer is often better, because every measure competes for your attention. Keep most of them leading, since those are the ones you can still do something about. If a measure's weekly figure is too volatile to read, leave it off and review it on a longer cycle.
Wei Ming chose seven measures:
prospecting touches deals reaching meeting agreed that week deals reaching 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
Prospecting touches are the calls, emails and messages reps send to new contacts. On this page they lead every other measure by several weeks. Wei Ming left out sales cycle length. His team's deals took several weeks and the weekly figure jumped around too much to read, so he planned to review it once a quarter instead.
For each measure, write down exactly where the number comes from and who updates it. Most numbers will come from your CRM, provided its stages match your written sales process, as lesson 4.3, Key activities and tools for each stage, asked you to set up. If the stages don't match, the CRM figures can't be used as a source. If your team works from a spreadsheet, the same rule applies: one source per number, updated the same way every week.
Pull the numbers at a fixed time, for example Friday at 5pm, so every week covers the same period. Where a number depends on reps logging something, such as prospecting touches, make the logging quick or the number will be wrong.
Put the measures down the side and the weeks across the top. Four weeks is the minimum to see a trend. A single week tells you little, because a public holiday, a big tender or a sick rep can move any weekly number. If you can, add a small line chart or arrows beside each row so you can see the direction without reading the figures. Keep the whole thing to one screen or one printed sheet.
Wei Ming's four weeks looked like this. Prospecting touches were 210, 190, 220 and 160. Deals reaching meeting agreed were 8, 7, 8 and 7, a total of 30. Deals reaching problem confirmed were 5, 4, 5 and 4, a total of 18. Proposals seen by buyers were 3, 4, 3 and 3. Conversion from meeting agreed to problem confirmed over the four weeks was 18 out of 30, or 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 comes to S$58,000 from six deals, an average deal size of about S$9,667 (S$58,000 / 6).
A dashboard earns its place only if it changes what you do. Each week, before the pipeline review, read it top to bottom and ask one question: what is moving, and what does that mean for the next few weeks?
Most of Wei Ming's measures were steady. The S$58,000 for the period was close to the team's run rate from module 5, and the 60 percent conversion matched the team's rate from lesson 8.2. Prospecting touches had dropped in week four. The 160 touches were about 23 percent below the average of the previous three weeks, which was about 207.
Week four meetings were still normal, because current meetings come from prospecting done in earlier weeks. A drop in touches shows up in meetings several weeks later, so Wei Ming expected fewer meetings in weeks six and seven. He asked about the drop in his one-to-ones and learned that two reps had spent most of week four on a large tender and dropped their prospecting block.
He decided to keep the morning prospecting block from lesson 7.3, Protect a weekly prospecting block, in Prospecting: build a pipeline that does not run dry, fixed for everyone even during tenders, and to help with the tender paperwork himself. He wrote that decision in one line at the bottom of the dashboard.
Book a fixed slot each week, just before the pipeline review, to update and read the dashboard. Once the sources are set up, fifteen minutes is enough. Bring the page into the review and start with the one thing that moved.
A finished dashboard is one page with up to eight measures, mostly leading, 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.
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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