This content from: Small Business Marketing Blog - Strategies That Increase Sales

A business Dashboard is tool used to track important data about your business.

A well designed dashboard provides “at a glance” insight into your business operations. It give you one place to view your key performance indicators (KPIs), metrics, and other key data points.

Depending on the size of your business, you may have a Dashboards for the whole business, a department, or a specific process.

Dashboards use tables, charts, speedometers, red/yellow/green indicators, and other data visualization widgets to help you quickly ascertain the current performance of your business operations. They help make complex data simple. Many dashboards allow you to drill down into the underlying data when you need a finer level of detail.

They also facilitate “management by exception”, allowing you to quickly address problems or defects in your systems. For example, a “red light, yellow light, green light” dashboard let’s you know right away when there is a problem (red light). You also know when problem is brewing (yellow light). The dashboard may even tell you how to prioritize your tasks (take care of red lights first).

For example, a sales dashboard could alert your team to deals you might lose because the client has responded in the last 30 days. Or your dashboard may alert you to a low inventory situation that could halt production if not addressed.

Business dashboards save you time because once they are set up, they gather data for you automatically. They can also merge data from different systems. This merging is an important step for turning data into information that you can use for decision making. I spent much of my early career as a software developer writing code to build these type of business intelligence reports. It was a time consuming and expensive process. Now, thanks to the cloud and some clever software developers, anyone can build dashboards in minutes.

For example, think of all the metrics and analytics just related to marketing. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, website analytics, email marketing stats, Adwords campaigns, and landing pages (just to name a few) all provide metrics and data. Just logging into each site and viewing the data takes time, never mind combining them into an actionable report. Once you set up your marketing dashboard, you’ll have one place to turn to for your data and you can focus on using the data to make decisions.

There are several tools on the market today that let you create DIY dashboards. Some of the more popular ones that you may have heard of include Cyfe, Klipfolio, and Dasheroo.

My favorite tool for building dashboards is Dasheroo. Dasheroo combines powerful features with an ease of use that helps business owners get up and running in minutes. They also have a nice focus on insights rather than just data – I’ll talk more about that in future posts.

Next time I’ll show you how to get started with Dasheroo and point out some of my favorite features.

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