I rented a Tesla this week. I don’t own a fully electric car. I have a plug-in hybrid. My friends have all told me that I am too much of a spaz to own a Tesla. I would forget to charge it. I would go stir-crazy waiting for a full battery while connected to a big red box in the middle of nowhere.
Those people were wrong! I was good with 90% of the experience. I was surprised by what I missed the most about my super-polluting-carbon-belching-earth-destroying Volvo. I missed the dashboard.
Some of us are just fine without a dashboard. Usually, it’s those of us that completely have everything squared away. I do not have everything squared away. I am easily distracted. I need information presented to me that keeps me going down the right road. If I have to look away to find it, I will end up in the wrong place.
When I first asked my developers at RepDonkey to work on my dashboard, I was presented with the most amazing looking pie-charts and waterfall graphs – big numbers that rolled up like a slot machine until it gave me the total. They were AMAZING! And totally useless.
It turns out that I only need to see two things when I am driving down the sales road. Year-over-year and month-over-month. That is my tachometer and my speedometer. Because I am DRIVING down the sales road, I only have time to glance and see the important stuff. I don’t need to be distracted by drilling down into the minutia, however, when I’m parked I might drill down a little bit.
My dashboards are laid out simply. Big picture up top. YTD over YTD and MTD over MTD in sales dollars. Followed by the same with engagement (opportunity) COUNTS as well as dollars. I want to know if I am adding more or fewer projects. Consistency is the real measure of my work. How many new deals am I bringing to the table compared to this time last year or last month? The dollar value of the new deals I am adding is interesting, but it is not a gauge of my effort.
Then I look at all that stuff for my team.
I like to measure how many entries before I look at the dollar values. Order COUNT is a better indicator of long-term health than order dollar value. Yes, we need the money part, but if we have constant customer engagement the money takes care of itself.
Dashboards can be beneficial, or they can just be a thing that makes us feel good or bad. I just want to stay on the road on the path to more sales. A simple dashboard with just a few items that you look at frequently – that is the way to go.
