The more products your ecommerce store sells, the more sales data you’ll have. This information can be immensely valuable, but only if you have a way to analyze it. To make sense of all this data and gauge sales performance, businesses often turn to sales dashboard software, which turns data into spreadsheets and graphs for business owners or sales executives to see at a glance.
Here’s how to create and use sales dashboards so you can use sales analytics to plot your next moves.
What is a sales dashboard?
A sales dashboard is a graphic representation of the data you have about your sales. Whether you’re a large corporation with hundreds of sales managers or you’re a sole proprietor running an ecommerce store, you can use a sales dashboard to efficiently review sales performance and plot future sales strategies.
Modern sales dashboards allow you to sort your data by various sales metrics, including the total dollar amount per purchase, the sales date, or even the number of times a sales representative made contact with a qualified lead.
Components of a sales dashboard
A sales dashboard can chart any number of key performance indicators (KPIs). Some common sales KPIs that can be included are:
- Average deal size. The average size of a single order. Sometimes it’s known as the average order value (AOV).
- Average profit margin. The profit margin of your business over a period of time, represented in a percentage.
- Conversion rate. The percentage of prospective customers in your sales pipeline who turn into paying customers.
- Cart abandonment rate. The percentage of users who add products to their shopping cart but fail to complete a purchase. A high number of abandoned carts suggests there’s too much friction in the checkout process.
- New customer orders versus returning customer orders. How new and old clients contribute to your overall sales.
- Cost of goods sold (COGS). The COGS metric reveals how much your company spends to make a product, inclusive of manufacturing, labor, and overhead costs.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC). The customer acquisition cost tells you how much your company spends, typically via advertising and promotional products, to acquire a new customer.
- Churn rate. The churn rate reflects the percentage of customers who stop buying products from your brand or fail to renew a subscription.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV). How much a customer is worth to your business over the course of their relationship with your brand. You can calculate CLV with a combination of past sales performance and forecasted revenue from a particular client.
Benefits of using a sales dashboard
Sales dashboards can show you how much revenue your business is bringing in, where it’s coming from, how your customers are behaving, and who on the sales team is outperforming others. All of this information allows you to make data-driven decisions and refine your sales strategy.
A sales dashboard makes it easy for your team to digest sales analytics because they present data as graphics—it’s easier to see which products appeal to your target audience over time by looking at a line chart rather than combing through a ledger of individual purchases. It can provide you actionable sales data like information on the items customers purchased in tandem and what stage in the sales cycle potential customers stop engaging with your business.
Sales dashboards also show you how individual sales reps are performing, which lets sales leaders know who to reward for bringing in more sales.
Examples of sales dashboards
Many software applications have sales dashboard templates so that you can easily design a sales KPI dashboard tailored to the metrics you want to track. Some popular sales dashboard examples include:
Sales leads dashboard
This sales dashboard tracks leads—people who express some sort of interest in your business by taking an action on your website like filling out a survey, messaging with sales representatives, or adding items to a shopping cart. You can track the behaviors of these people, also called prospects, as they progress through your company’s sales funnel.
This sales dashboard could help you pinpoint the source of conversion funnel leaks if not enough leads are turning into paying customers, enabling you to come up with a sales strategy to address the leaks.
Sales performance dashboard
Sales performance dashboards show the quantity and value of sales over time. They can take many different forms. A sales growth dashboard, for example, displays the change in sales over time, both in terms of units sold and revenue. A regional sales dashboard, on the other hand, breaks sales into geographic regions, which you can compare side-by-side to see variation in sales in different places.
Sales conversion dashboard
A sales conversion dashboard tracks how effective your entire sales department or individual sales representatives or sales managers are at making a sale. If you opt for a sales rep dashboard, you can compare each individual sales representative to identify a department’s top sales leader.
Sales opportunity dashboard
A sales opportunity dashboard tracks your sales opportunities—the people or businesses that are likely to become new customers. You can use a sales opportunity dashboard to estimate future revenue based on the strength of your leads and their projected spending. You can also use this dashboard to determine which sales channels are producing the strongest opportunities. This can impact decisions regarding ad spending and overall marketing budgets.
How to create a sales dashboard with Shopify
Building your ecommerce store with Shopify grants you access to an array of Shopify analytics reports. You can use these reports to generate visually friendly sales dashboards so you can easily digest your sales performance. Choose from retail sales reports, order reports, profit reports, customer reports, acquisition reports, and more. All of these reports can be downloaded and shared with your business partners. You can also view your sales dashboards in the cloud by clicking on your Shopify Analytics page.
You can get greater detail by analyzing sales by product variant SKU, product vendor, discount, traffic referrer, sales billing location, checkout currency, channel, and customer name.
Sales dashboards FAQ
How often should you update a sales dashboard?
Many small business owners review sales data on a daily or weekly basis. An ecommerce platform like Shopify will automatically update your sales dashboards whenever a transaction takes place. At any point, you can run a report and view your data graphically as a sales dashboard.
Does a sales dashboard only display historical data or can it also show real-time information?
Sales dashboards almost always offer historical data for sales teams to review, and advanced tools can also show real-time sales data. In Shopify, Live View offers real-time sales data and is available with the majority of Shopify ecommerce plans.
Can a sales dashboard be customized to fit my business needs?
Yes, you can customize your sales dashboard to represent any piece of sales data your company collects. For instance, you could generate graphs of the amount of sales in a particular region, sales to other businesses, or revenue growth over time.
Is a sales dashboard only useful for large corporations?
No—sales dashboards are useful for businesses of any size. No matter how much you sell, sales dashboards spare you the trouble of going through transaction ledgers with a calculator, adding and subtracting sales totals to draw conclusions about your sales performance. Instead, you can get a holistic snapshot of your sales operation as a table or a graph, allowing you to easily focus on big-picture sales strategy.
