Dashboards to Drive Your Business

Access to information in advance can be the difference between making a good decision and a not-so-good decision. Dashboards were designed to concisely present the most important pieces of information to enable a good decision or complete a task.

Car dashboards include gauges or readouts on speed, RPMs, gas level, engine temperature, and in most cases, a tripometer. This information allows you to know when to get gas, travel at a safe speed and anticipate your time of arrival. Additional information such as tire pressure and oil level appears only when they need the driver’s attention. All this allows you to make good decisions and drive your car.

The same holds true for digital dashboards. They can be created to display the important information and to alert you when specific situations occur that need your attention. It’s not about clutter, it’s about cutting through the clutter to get to the golden nuggets!

Additionally, and equally as important, dashboards help make you more time efficient. At a glance you get a multiple pieces of information, usually either summarized or in short lists, to gain that “lay of the land.” Back to the car analogy—how much time would it take to find out your speed or how much gas is left without the dashboard? Can you image pulling over and measuring your gas every half hour or so? Can you imagine calculating how far you have gone in a given period of time to determine your speed? I think you get the picture.

The same holds true for business information—in all aspects of business. Data is located in many different places. Integration is better than it used to be, but many businesses still utilize specific programs for specific functions—it’s just the way it is. However, by taking advantage of the dashboards that are available, you can get quick, valuable information, and then move on to the next one, still saving time and being informed.

So what programs utilize dashboards?

Your calendar. Yep, a calendar is a dashboard of sorts because it gives you information about your schedule: events, appointments, dates, times, locations, people, and topics. All this in one place so you can make good decisions about how to effectively schedule everything, see what is coming in the future so you can prepare, and help prevent you from double-booking yourself.

Email marketing. (I am sure you are not surprised this is in the list.) The statistics about your email marketing campaigns are presented on a dashboard. You can see the email name and the size of the list it was sent to as well as how many opened, clicked, opted-out, and forwarded your email. This is all great information for the next email, or for individual follow-up. Additionally, if you are utilizing the email service provider’s social media integration you can also see who liked, shared, and tweeted your email.

Social media. Programs like TweetDeck, HootSuite, and Constant Contact’s Nutshell Mail are all great dashboard tools. They each offer a concise presentation of your social media presence across the main social media sites, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. You can see posts and conversations in a manner that makes sense to you versus chronologically, or based on the social media site’s algorism. Social media dashboards are especially useful because you are drawing information from more than one location, and then can send your own posts back to those locations from one place. The only rival to this type of time efficiency is business intelligence (BI) which is discussed below.

Customer relationship management (CRM). The dashboards you find at the multitude of CRM programs vary in what they offer as well as their complexity. Keep the design true to your need to see the information that is most important, and then receive alerts for items that need your attention now. So what is most important? Typically it is upcoming appointments and phone calls along with “opportunities” or “potentials” that are in the latter stages so you can focus on closing deals. Alerts should be deals that could be lost without quick action.

Accounting. The dashboards you find here help a business sink or swim. Information about money coming in and money going out, from whom, to whom, when and where are the keys to managing cash flow. Additional information on a strong accounting dashboard includes inventory levels, sales orders to be filled, purchase orders to be received, payroll, employee time, and job profitability.

Lastly, the grandmother of all dashboards, business intelligence (BI). The whole premise of BI is gathering information from multiple sources and presenting it on a single screen. This is truly the dashboards of dashboards with the goal of helping you run your business. Everything we have already covered is shown here, a real “bird’s eye view” that is also very specific. From cash flow, to sales projections, to email marketing success, to social media mentions, to future appointments, BI delivers data that is otherwise mountainous to obtain. The ability to see a business completely, with all departments represented—the speed, gas, RPMs, and trip-o-meter—will enable executives to drive the business in the right direction.