Executive Dashboards: Benefits, KPIs, and Tool

Executive dashboards are quickly becoming absolutely essential tools for executives to keep their fingers on the pulse and performance of their company.

The right dashboards pull data from throughout the enterprise making reports and metrics available at a glance and at a moment’s notice. Better still, this all happens through one intuitive portal.

Key Benefits of Executive Dashboards

Well-designed dashboards offer many significant advantages to the executive.

First, they provide broad visibility to all aspects of the business for more control. They allow management to measure the performance of everything from simple production statistics to complex ROI calculations. They save countless hours otherwise spent logging into systems, running reports, and then scanning those reports for meaningful insights to help set focus and strategy.

Great dashboards also allow execs to compare performance against budgets or plans, in order to leverage what is working and minimizing the weak links.

In spite of their power and complexity, top-notch dashboards are fairly quick to set up and intuitive to use. Truly, the greatest challenge that executives have with dashboards comes when it’s time to select the key performance indicators to pull from their vast expanse of data.

But choosing KPIs is not rocket science. The simplicity and coherence offered by well-designed dashboards allow the executive to monitor the very issues and key concerns that are most impactful to the profitability and performance of the business and its departments.

Key Performance Indicators For Your Executive Dashboards

Take a look at some of the KPIs we recommend for Finance, Marketing and Sales:

Financial KPIs

Your executive financial dashboard should give you the overall state of your company’s health. By monitoring these metrics, you should be able to identify where your money is coming from and, more importantly, were it’s spent.

These financial KPIs give you insights into your sales team performance by comparing results against targets, but they also warn you if your cashflow reaches a critical threshold so that you can take immediate actions.

Here’s a list of financial KPIs we recommend you to follow:

• Working Capital
• Operating Cash Flow
• Return on Equity
• Current Ratio
• Net Profit Margin
• Expensing Reporting Errors
• Budget vs. Actuals Variance
• Accounts Receivable Collections
• Debt to Equity Ratio
• Inventory Turnover

More financial KPIs here.

Marketing KPIs

Of course, you should also keep an eye on your marketing activities and performance. You need to make sure your team focuses on the right target and acquisition channels.

In order to understand how well your marketing team is doing, you need to track KPIs all the way throughout the acquisition funnel, from the top to bottom.

These KPIs will help you measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategy:

• Customer Acquisition Costs
• Lifetime value per customer
• Inbound Marketing ROI
• Traffic-to-Lead Ratio
• Lead-to-Customer Ratio
• Landing Page Conversions
• Organic traffic conversion rate
• Lead generation via social media

More marketing KPIs here.

SALES KPIs:

Last but not least, the sales metrics! You also need to make sure your sales reps and business development managers are focusing on the right leads and working on optimizing the sales cycle. With these metrics, you can track the performance of regional teams, product category or customer segments. This information will give you insight into which products are generating more revenue, or even identify winning strategies implemented by certain teams. Identifying successes will help you replicate them into all teams.

Here are the few sales KPIs you can track on your executive dashboard:

• New Contacts Rate
• Client Acquisition Rates
• Sales Volume Per Location
• Results vs. Targets
• Pricing Against Competitors
• Existing Client Engagement
• Customer Retention Rate
• Churn Rate
• MRR or Revenue Expansion
• Average Time to Close Deals

More sales KPIs here.

Business Intelligence For Better Decision Making

Centralizing your company data

The ideal executive dashboard can easily and automatically connect data from throughout the organization. You need to centralize the data from your CRM, support chat, helpdesk, accounting system, and all your marketing data to build the KPIs mentioned above. Centralizing data also allows you to create a single source of truth which empowers your team to make better decisions.

Your data should also be accessible on commonly-used desktops and devices and available online to those who have the permissions to access it. Up-to-date, real-time returns are optimal so that execs can act on actual and current returns, and avoid being behind the curve as they strive to stay ahead of the competition.

Data cleansing and management

To minimize costly data errors and inaccuracies, dashboard software should have the ability to cleanse, merge, and combine data from across the enterprise into a homogeneous data warehouse. If the software has features to add calculated columns, or filter, group, and pivot data, so much the better. The more the data is congruent, the more valuable its reports and insights.

Easy and quick dashboard design

Finally, decision-makers don’t want to have to spend hours coding or designing dashboards. So an executive-level dashboard requires an intuitive interface with simple and easy methods to select KPIs, enter formulas, use templates, and design a dashboard that delivers.

Executive dashboards display the metrics that support executives in monitoring and managing the most critical performance metrics of the organization. In one place, at a glance, and at any time, they can review progress and respond to events with greater accuracy, timeliness and effect.

ClicData dashboards gather data from throughout your company into a standardized data warehouse so you can access key metrics and actionable insights any time you want. Discover the intuitive design and sophisticated power of ClicData.