Making Informed Decisions with a Dashboard
Have you and your leadership team ever found yourselves needing to make a critical decision in the business but not having the correct data to make an informed decision and you end up making a gut decision and it doesn’t necessarily go well?
If you’ve ever had that happen, read on!
I want to share with you how to put together an effective dashboard so you have all the data that you need at your fingertips to make lightning-fast decisions.
So first of all, what is a dashboard?
Well, it’s a series of numbers that’s going to tell you at a glance how you’re doing in all the different functional areas of your business.
Much like in sports, they’ve got a scoreboard that says what the score is between the teams, and the officials know the score, and the teams know the score, and the fans know the score, everyone in your organization needs to know the score.
Now, not everyone needs to know every single number but they need to know the number that is important for their functional area.
Say for instance you’ve got customer service reps. They need to know how many people have they served today.
If it’s the marketing department, they need to know how many leads did they generate with their marketing efforts?
The sales team needs to know “how many calls did I make? How many conversations? What’s my conversion ratio?”
If you’re a manufacturer, you want to measure production.
If you’re a distributor, you might want to measure inventory turns.
Each department in a business, and every business has key areas that they need to keep track of.
What are some of the challenges that we have with having a dashboard in the business?
There’s so many things you could track that sometimes we track too much, it becomes meaningless.
We want to whittle it down to just the key critical numbers in each functional area of the business that tell the story and describe the trend of what’s been happening and what is going to happen if things stay the same.
And that’s important because we need to be able to understand that trend so we can make good decisions effectively and quickly to make sure that we’re getting back on track if we’re off track, or to continue to accelerate our results if we’re on the right direction.
We don’t have to have a lot complication with dashboards.
For some companies, it’s just numbers on a whiteboard. They wipe out the number one week, put the updated number the next. The team has a meeting around it regularly, reviewing.
It could be an email communicated to everyone to let them know what’s going on. It could be an Excel spreadsheet. It could be a system like Align, that keeps track of everything for you.
So what you need in terms of a dashboard really is dependent upon your business and the level of sophistication you have. But suffice to say, you do need to have a dashboard.
You need to be reviewing your numbers on a regular basis, discussing with the team, and making sure we have an action plan to make any changes to your execution to make sure we get back on track and continue moving your business forward.
So if you have any questions about dashboards or what numbers you need to be tracking in your business or how to track them, let me know, let’s have a chat and I’m happy to help give you some guidance on that.
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