The most common buzzword in CRM these days is “Digital Dashboard.” In effect, this refers to creating a one-stop location where a manager can see tables and graphs that reflect information from the many areas they are responsible for. For example, a sales manager might want to see a summary of calling activity, appointments set, and sales pipeline information, broken out by sales rep, all in a single view, like the one pictured here.

Sample Dashboard (Click to View Full Size)

In about an hour, we put together this dashboard for a client using readily available functions and components in Excel and MasterMine. You can do this too, or we can do it for you, by fitting together several MasterMine pivot tables and using spreadsheet formulas to read the data into a summary report.

In this case, we started with a standard MasterMine “Call Activity” report showing call activity broken out by result codes. We grouped the codes into two categories, “Connection” and “no connection.” We included the row totals, but hid the “no connections” column so we just show real contacts and total attempts.

Next, we pulled in another existing report that looks at completed Appointments and saved it in the workbook as tab “DATA1.” Columns F thru I are “reference” formulas of the form

=IF(A20 = “Grand Total”, sum(A$18:A20), GETPIVOTDATA(…)

…where the GETPIVOTDATA function pulls from a specific lookup cell in the pivot table on sheet “DATA1″ and the “IF” statement causes the whole column to total if the cell is on the same row as the Grand Total for the pivot table. This way, we accommodate the likelihood that at different times, this report might show a different number of sales reps (because some are added, or go away) while still totaling properly at the bottom.

Finally, we added a graph of the sales calling activity, clearly indicating each sales rep’s “hit rate” in their calling, which will be very useful for the client’s sales management and training efforts. The graph was included on the same page with the pivot table after it was created, by right-clicking on the graph and selecting “Location,” clicking “As object in:” and selecting the same worksheet (KPI Dashboard) on which the rest of the dashboard resides.

If you would like help building dashboards like these for your managers, or deploying them to the correct users’ GoldMine taskbars when you’re done, please give us a call and set up an appointment. The work can be quite fast, and can make a tremendous impact on your sales success in a short time!