Which KPIs a Sales Dashboard Should Show

Almost every sales team has one. It usually starts with good intentions: someone puts the month's sales, the open opportunities, each rep's calls and a dozen other charts on one screen. Three months later, only the person who built it still opens it.

It is not a tool problem. It happens in Power BI, Looker Studio and Tableau alike. It happens because the dashboard tries to answer every question at once, and in the end it answers none of them as quickly as the person who has to decide something that same morning needs.

The way to avoid it is to start from decisions, not from data: what the sales director decides every week, what each rep decides every day, and what the leadership team decides every month. Each KPI has to serve one of those decisions. If it serves none, it goes.

Activity metrics —calls, emails, meetings— help each rep organise their week, but on the leadership dashboard they tend to add noise. They reward being busy, not selling.

Charts that only change once a year, charts that repeat the same figure in another format and charts that need an explanation also go. A good test is to show it to someone on the team without saying anything: if in ten seconds they cannot tell whether the month is going well or badly, something has to be removed.

The most expensive mistake in a sales dashboard is not on the screen; it is underneath. If the CRM counts a won opportunity as a sale, accounting counts the issued invoice and marketing counts the form submission, every meeting starts with an argument about whose figure is right.

That is why each KPI should be defined once, in writing and in a single place: what a sale is, which date it counts on, what an active customer is, when an opportunity is considered lost. Ideally those definitions live in the data model —in a data warehouse such as BigQuery, Snowflake or Fabric— and not in each report, so every tool reads the same thing.