How to design a Sales Dashboard
Sales activity is the life blood for all businesses. People who are responsible for sales must have their fingers on this vital pulse at all times.
Traditionally, managers read sales reports in tables of numbers. Imagine if all the sales data is presented like below. It summarizes 40 thousand sales records and presents the results all in a single dashboard. This dashboard shows:
- Sales information are divided by regions and placed side by side for Regional managers.
- Tiny sparklines show various historical sale trends and is compared with historical forecasts in blue for an entire year.
- Current sales performances are immediately compared with Sales KPI levels to judge performance levels.
The great thing about using dashboards is that sales results are communicated clearly and immediately. It can align with the way people think and act so decisions can be made quicker!
A Sales Dashboard in Excel
Such dashboards are not difficult to build in Excel. Sales transaction can be extracted from the backend database systems and the numbers are simply plotted by Excel charts. Of course the analyst needs to follow certain dashboard design principles.
Related posts:
- What is a bullet chart? A bullet chart is a relatively new kind of chart...
- More Dashboard examples I know the idea of creating dashboards in Excel seems...
- Dashboard ideas from Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal have a lot of good looking...
- Creating Executive Dashboards in Excel workshop Most analysts know how to create charts in Excel. Getting...
- A Straits Times chart in Excel I came across a stock maket chart in Straits Times...
