Ten years ago when you walked in a room with a projector the size of some small refrigerators and sat down to show a CRM package all everyone wanted to know was “Do you have a sales funnel?”  Throw it up on the screen and your CRM package was half way sold.  Now we have come full circle and when we sit down with prospects the projector barely comes into focus before the “D Word” comes out.  I am not saying that dashboards are bad, but them in context of the bigger picture.

If you start to break down the concept of Dashboards and their purpose then you must also define what a dashboard is versus other components of Business Intelligence.  In simple terms Business Intelligence or “Smart Data” is any subset of information provided in a way that accelerates decision making or management of a business.

The traditional methods of Business Intelligence for CRM purposes can be broken down into a few simple buckets.  This first category is what I call Informational (like a gauge in your car).  The better format is using Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s are have intelligence already built in). And the final category is what I would call Status Indicators (more like the lights that come on in your car when something is wrong).

Like the sales funnel from days gone by the Informational dashboards are cool to look at and they do provide some demographic information like your lead/close breakdown or the different categories for your customer service tickets.  The problem is that most of them don’t give you an action to take or a place to go from there without running additional reports to see the devil in the details.

Key Performance Indicators are far and away the best alternative because the data has been pre-screened for exactly the indicators that you are looking for so that additional reports are not necessary.  The challenge is knowing your business well enough to know what situations in the database would raise a positive or negative flag that need attention.  For instance, if you have a KPI for Activities weekly per Sales Representative it doesn’t tell you  the root cause for the issue…just that the issue needs attention.

The Status dashboards are probably the most worthless of all.  Using these types of dashboards assumes that all of your processes are outlined and you get to see where things are “stuck” in an assembly line.  If you have complicated processes then these types of dashboards have even less relevance.  If you have seven different sales processes then looking at one funnel that shows the Stage of Opportunities you have a lot of work to do to get to some valuable data on a given process.

So what is my point in telling you all of this?  Well, in all of these scenarios there is a need for the user of the dashboard to have a fair amount of internal savvy regarding the data and what to do in order to find something actionable that is meaningful to him or her in their daily role.  I tend to lean towards a different approach when dealing with data.

If you know how you want to run the business and the conditions in your database that require an actionable event then your answer is probably not in the world of dashboards but in the world of workflow and automation.  This is a bigger discussion for another blog article so I won’t delve into it here.

At the end of the day we all have more data that we will ever be able to go through and we will all be better served through notifications and alerts tied together with meaningful reports before we go buying a CRM application based on who has the prettiest dashboards.