Let’s be honest here: Sales dashboards don’t affect sales performance in a meaningful way.
They do visualize important data. You show them to C-level executives, investors and board members. They provide a high-level view of how your organization is performing.
But you can’t use that data alone to manage sales reps. Sales dashboards tell you when performance is out of line – not what to do about it. Yet, sales leaders still make the mistake of relying mainly on dashboards to coach and motivate their teams.
Here’s why that’s a mistake and how sales activity management can help:
3 problems with using sales dashboards for coaching
1. Sales dashboards are old news.
A dashboard can only tell you what’s already happened. What it doesn’t help you do is manage day-to-day sales performance. By the time you review the dashboard, you’ve already won or lost the deal. Wouldn’t it be helpful to get this information before it’s too late?
A sales activity management system updates instantly when an activity is logged. The system measures progress to goals in real time by highlighting leading indicators. Reps receive feedback on daily activity, ensuring they know exactly how they are performing at any given moment.
2. Sales dashboards aren’t easily accessible.
Many sales leaders try to measure everything with dashboards. This creates an over-abundance of raw data, and gleaning it for actionable insights is a challenge. Too much data decreases sales rep focus on the activities that actually do matter. In addition, sales dashboards are a pain to extract. Oftentimes, you have to wait for someone to pull the data before you find a problem.
With a sales activity management system, personalized scorecards follow reps throughout their CRM, ensuring that the most important metrics stay front and center. Instead of distracting reps with too much data, it enables goal management.
3. Sales dashboards are reactive.
Dashboards have data. Loads of it. But it’s not always clear what to do with the data. Because sales dashboards are old news, they don’t provide actionable insights for what you can do right now to course-correct performance.
Sales activity management software is prescriptive. When pacing to goal falls behind, the system tells users what actions they should take to get back on track. Pacing algorithms calculate how much of each activity you need to catch up, stay on pace or get ahead of your goals.
A sales dashboard communicates company performance, but it won’t guide sales performance. Consider sales activity management for a more proactive solution.
