Strengthening Your Sales Strategy with Sales Dashboards

Data-driven organizations succeed.

A typical sales organization has access to a wealth of actionable information. However, this data is often disparate, residing in different formats and across different sources. In order to develop better sales strategies for different products, territories, and markets, as well as for effective sales forecasting, sales teams need easy, seamless interaction with their data. They need to be empowered by reporting and dashboard visualization software to help them make better decisions towards their sales and revenue goals.

What’s a Sales Dashboard
Sales dashboards provide a single, interactive view to sales data mashed-up from spreadsheet, databases, and other applications or data sources across the organization.

Why use a Sales Dashboard
Any end user can now make the most out their information at hand. A sales dashboard showing consolidated sales information and statistics will empower any user in making better decisions and give them a clear advantage in
1) Self service reporting with less reliance on IT,
2) Generating reports on the fly with real time data,
3) Sales forecasting,
4) Making better business decisions.

Six key performance indicators that every sales team member needs:
- Actual Sales by Region
- Actual Sales by Year, Quarter, Month
- Actual Sales by Product Type
- Actual Sales by Category
- Actual vs Plan by Region
- Sales and Percent Growth by Product

Below are examples of how JReport can be used to create effective sales dashboards for a fictitious coffee shop.

Sales Dashboard 1:
1. Country Sales by Category: a bar chart shows the sales by each country. The dashboard allows users to filter the Country Sales by Category chart by choosing Year and Region. The dashboard also offers drill down capabilities. Users can click on each country name and see a detailed report of sales by territory within that country.
2. Sales by Category: a pie chart shows the total sales by each coffee product category (Blends, Bold, Espresso, Exotic, Flavored, and Mild). The pie chart can be further drilled down by clicking on each section of the chart to view by product name.
3. A bench chart shows the relative performance between the top 10 customers.
4. The Orders Table shows unit price and quantity details by quarter and by country. Dashboards can have the flexibility of showing both summary and detailed data.

Sales Dashboard 2:
1. Actual vs Plan Sales Month gives an indication on how actual sales matched up with the plan.
2. Yearly Sales by Region breaks out performance for each region by year. For each year you can drill down to quarter and month.
3. A donut chart shows sales broken out by product type and category.
4. A crosstab shows sales by category and region. Each dimension allows the user to drill down, for example, Mild coffee sales in Europe by country.
5. A bullet chart shows sales and profit vs the plan for each region.
6. A summary table shows sales, plan, variance, and profit by category. The user can drill down or up for grouping by other dimensions.