Dashboard Blues

Dashboards need fuel.  Your business is not a glider.

Useful dashboards get used.  As I move around the market place as an ISO Specialist, I see dashboards gathering dust.

Inactivity is the problem but not the root cause.  Dashboards are not used because they show history only, due to lack of sales estimates.   They automatically gather accounting history and not predicted sales.

Accounting history is automatically gathered and sales estimates need to burn management brain cells.

History versus the future. It speaks to science versus pseudoscience.

When you have hard sciences like chemistry, physics and math compared to sciences like sociology, psychology and psychiatry the latter disciplines commonly have the word art associated with them.

Think about gypsies, crystal balls, tarot cards, futurists and wishful thinking , CPA’s do not use those tools.  They believe that there is no point in having an estimate that is not born out of facts. CPA’s wait for the business to happen before they record it. They do budgets but not sales forecasts because it requires prediction.

Dashboards need a sales pipeline that gathers everything being developed from a sales and marketing standpoint. All prospects up to and including those that your estimating department are working on.

Populating a sales pipeline ensures that there is data or a future estimate of sales. Twelve months from now for example.   Based on facts from sales, marketing and development activity.   Using worst, most likely and best case.  The dashboard does a wonderful job once you make the inputs.

The amygdala driven fight and flight attitude that most managers have, does not allow them to get into that quiet voice of their prefrontal cortex to evaluate and weigh a dollar figure on those prospects.   The algorithm in most salesforce pipelines does that for you when you load the prospect data.

The lack of data going in, creates a dashboard that is useless.

Secondly, there is so much additional information on a dashboard’s little dials, it looks like the cockpit of an eight-engine aircraft. Making the dashboard look like you need a pilot’s license to understand.

I argue you should have a low fuel light on your opening page. The fuel; sales activity, becomes a sales pipeline light.

There is no money on keeping score.  You must do your compliance accounting. This can automatically draw inputs to your dashboard from your accounting department. Nevertheless, future sales projection requires tracking sales activity.

When you have an employee CPA, it is demanded of him as a condition of employment to ensure the completion of all inputs.  However, when nepotism is involved and or the CPA is first generation tasks get dropped or left behind.

Ultimately building a dashboard that no one wants or uses.

There’s a ton of advertising by entities like BDC with the motto “stop using Excel spreadsheets and start using dashboard software.”

There’s an enormous amount of money spent on dashboards. There’s an entire section of Microsoft, Power BI software to analysis business intel.  But sales pipelines are not being used.  The sales projection number is not being put into the dashboard.

It’s like a new transport truck, polished and sitting in your yard, temporary registration stickers on the windshield but no diesel fuel. Eventually it’ll be pushed to the back of the building or scrapped. Someone has to realize. There is no fuel.  The fuel is future predicted sales from sales activity.

It’s common to make a dashboard that is utterly useless. Many consultants were evangelizing the use of dashboards. But the project seems to stop with the purchase of the dashboard software or subscription.  I have been checking in on new dashboard users after about a year to survey frequency of dashboard usage.  Satisfaction is driven by the number of people who open it first thing in the morning. Graphically it’s a downward incline, trailing off to zero use.

Maintaining sales pipeline for the dashboard inputs takes time. Failing to do so creates useless data. It looks complete because it’s a gathering of all the historical numbers, everything that happened in the past, there’s no money in keeping score.

To manage your business to a future number you need fuel, sales projections from the salesforce pipeline.  HubSpot nailed this for small and medium size enterprises.   They value sales data like a bricks and motor asset.  Accountants using HubSpot no longer rely on the sales department estimates in which they have no faith.  HubSpot builds and populates the dash board in real time.

In the absence of a well populated dash board from a sales pipeline, advocates clutter the home screen with many dials and graphs but no “fuel gauge.”