Designing a Better Sales Pipeline Dashboard by Zach Gemignani
From the post:
What would your perfect sales pipeline dashboard look like?
The tools that so effectively capture sales information (Salesforce, PipelineDeals, Highrise) tend to do a pretty lousy job of providing visibility into that very same data. The reporting or analytics is often just a table with lots of filtering features. That doesn’t begin to answer important questions like:
- What is the value of the pipeline?
- Where is it performing efficiently? Where is it failing?
- How are things likely to change in the next month?
I’ve been annoyed by this deficiency in sales dashboards for a while. Ken and I put together some thoughts about what a better sales pipeline information interface would look like and how it would function. Here’s what we came up with:
…
A sales dashboard that at least two people like better than most offerings.
What would you add to this dashboard that topic maps would be able to supply?
Yes, I am divorcing the notion of “interface” from “topic map.”
Interface being how a user accomplishes a task or accesses information.
Completely orthogonal to the underlying technology.
Exposing the underlying technology demonstrates how clever we are.
Is not succeeding in the marketplace clever?*
*Ask yourself how many MS Office users can even stumble through a “big block” diagram of how MS Word works?
Compare that number to the number of MS Word users. Express as:
“MS Word users/MS Word users who understand the technology.”
That’s my target ratio for:
“topic map users/topic map users who understand the technology.”