The power of dashboards is that the information about how your business is running is at your fingertips. You don’t have to compile tons and tons of data and spend hours and hours tallying up totals to see how your business is doing. Dashboards allow you to see clearly what’s working and what isn’t.

A great example of this was when I was presenting to high level management on Salesforce.com. After reviewing the functionality, I showed how dashboards allow users and managers to see quality reports of real time data. One of the executives stopped me and pointed out that, for the month we were looking at, cancellations exceeded sales up to that point. I remember thinking that this executive has no idea how to use Salesforce.com, but already gained insight as to a trouble area and would be able to dig deep into the problem with just a few clicks of a button. How powerful is that?!?!

At any moment, you can analyze your business, know what is working and make the necessary changes to quickly improve. Dashboards are a great way to drive adoption, especially in top management. You must have the right dashboards if it is going to work though.

In my example, the dashboards I created allowed sales managers to see one-shot sales vs. subscription sales vs. cancellations in one place.

I presented the data in monthly and YTD totals including sales treads over two quarters. I also listed the top products sold and the top customers that bought them. In real time, a manager could see (like the executive did in my demo) how business is running for the month, quarter or year and what products and customers are driving that business. For my managers, that was powerful information to have at their fingertips.

Use dashboards, gain insight and help your mangers drive the business!