Your CRM dashboard is your single source of truth

If you have read some of our previous blog posts, you know that we are more interested in the outcome than the tool. And when approaching a CRM dashboard is no different. Successful startups don’t implement a CRM for the sake of having a CRM, they do it because it creates lasting value, as the company is able to track and digest the important stuff about their customers.

And guess what, customers are the backbone of any business. Actually, without customers, you don’t have a business, so it’s worth investing in your Customer Relationship Management system and using it as your mission control. Including reports and dashboards that are actionable.

A common scenario is to have your customer data siloed in the CRM tool you’re using, and then other data points stored in your database or sheets that are shared through your organization. This is a dangerous zone you definitely don’t want to be in. Duplicates, updated versions, and uncertainty taking over your day-to-day decision-making.

Other classic scenes are playing “Guess Who” with your customer base or trying to guess in which stage of the funnel is “that account” today. We believe this is not the kind of situation you want to experience at your startup. And to avoid this it’s important to treat your CRM as your single source of truth.

And at the same time, be able to quickly analyze what’s happening in there. Also, is key to not have your CRM data in silos. Instead, is better if you can have it in a place where you can cross it with data from other sources. And on top of that, you can easily share it with your colleagues.

All of this can easily be accomplished with Latitude. Let’s see how you can have a CRM dashboard up and running in a matter of minutes.

You can watch our step-by-step video here:

The important metrics for your CRM dashboard

Probably you have already searched for CRM dashboard examples in Google, and if you check the images there you might get dizzy. Full-packed dashboard with plenty of charts and KPIs that look “solid” but at the end of the day it’s difficult to draw any conclusions from it.

And yeah, we are not against setting goals at all, but sometimes having the “needle chart” setting an unattainable goal is not helping anyone. Also, if the objectives are clear, it doesn’t seem necessary to remind people about them all the time. You should know it by heart.

With this in mind, we definitely want to build a CRM dashboard that is simple and easy to use. Something that allows you to analyze your go-to-market in the most efficient way. So, what are those important metrics?

Sales Pipeline by Stage

Let’s start with the most important one. How is your sales pipeline doing? At any moment of the quarter, you want to make sure that you know how many customers you’ve won or lost during this period. Also, you need to understand what’s happening with those potential customers that are not converting to paid, or saying no to your offering.

There’s a lot of literacy on how you can dissect and label your sales pipeline, we’ll use these stages:

• Lead: We think this account might be a good fit for what we’re selling, but we haven’t started a proper conversation with them.
• Qualification: We have started the conversation, but we don’t know yet what’s going to happen.
• Proposal: We have sent a proposal to the potential client.
• Negotiation: We are negotiating with the potential client on the final terms of the deal.
• Closed Won: Congrats! The customer has accepted our proposal and we have a new client!
• Closed Lost: Sadly, they declined our proposal but hey, on to the next one :)

Monthly Sales Revenue

Okay, now comes the real sauce: money coming in. It’s cool to see how many clients you’re closing each month, but it’s even cooler to see the amount of revenue that you’re generating for the company. Here, it’s interesting to display the monthly amount so you can understand the evolution of your sales and spot trends.

Total Leads by Source

After you know how you’re clients are doing and how much money you’re able to capture each month. You can go a little up in the funnel and try to understand where your Leads are coming from. It’s surprisingly common to find people in a company that doesn’t know which is the main way their potential customers are finding them.

And that’s a huge missed opportunity to personalize and optimize your go-to-market strategy. If you ask the Marketing team they will tell you it’s Google Search providing the most leads, and then if you ask the Sales team they will tell you it’s Business Development Representatives (BDRs). In any case, figure it out for real with the proper attribution. And include this in your CRM dashboard.

Step by step with Zoho CRM

To illustrate this, we’ll be using Zoho CRM. We’ve recently launched a connector for it, so you don’t need to spend any dev time setting this up. Just plug and play.

Sign up for free

Create a Latitude account for free. There’s no commitment and you can try things on your own.

Connect your Zoho CRM

You’ll be surprised how fast and easy is to connect your Zoho CRM data to Latitude. Forget about having your dev team working on this for months. It’s a matter of minutes with Latitude now. We have outlined the step-by-step process here.

Drag and drop the source into your canvas

Cool, now you just need to create a new data project in Latitude and you’ll have your Zoho CRM source in the left menu. Just drag and drop it into the canvas and you’re ready.

Let’s start building our CRM dashboard

At this point, you have everything you need to start building your dashboard with your Zoho CRM data. As you’ve seen, it took minutes, not months to have the autonomy to query your data and start getting insights from it.

At Latitude, we firmly believe that being able to make informed decisions with the right data as fast as possible is what sets you apart from other companies and professionals. And that’s what we want to enable for you.

Let’s start building our Sales Pipeline chart: we just need to select and count the number of IDs we have in each stage of the pipeline (as described in previous sections). We run the query:

select
	COUNT(id),
	stage
from {{$1}}
group by stage

And add a bar chart to see how many (potential) customers we have in each stage:

Sales Pipeline Chart:

You have an interesting chunk of people in ‘Proposal’ and ‘Negotiation’, if you can focus on those and try to improve as much as possible your conversion rate, it seems you’ll be increasing your ‘Closed Won’ over the next week and months and that’s definitely good news for your business.

Talking about business, what about revenue? It’s cool to see how customers are flowing through the different stages of the sales pipeline, but we want to see how much revenue those ‘Closed Won’ brought every month.

We can add a WHERE block to easily filter out all those stages that are not ‘Closed Won’ and then query the resulting data like this:

select
	month,
	SUM(monthly_revenue)
from {{$1}}
group by month
order by month ASC

Connect a line chart and you have it:

Monthly Revenue Chart:

Wow, the last quarter didn’t go well. Is there an intrinsic seasonality in your market? Or did you do some changes in your strategy and actions? In any case, now you have the right information and you can make decisions and act accordingly. Let’s stay positive!

One of the questions that you might come up with is “were the leads good enough?” and this is something you can start answering by understanding where those leads came from. For that, we can create a pie chart very quickly. Go and query your data:

select
	COUNT(id),
	source
from {{$1}}
group by source

Add the pie chart:

Total Leads by Source:

Sharing with teammates

You’re set up. You have your CRM dashboard up and running, but as we were saying at the beginning this information is not meant to sit in silos. You don’t want to keep receiving questions like “how are we doing this quarter?” or “how many leads do we have in Qualification?”. Let’s share this so everyone that needs this information can easily access it. But first, we can create a view of the dashboard:

Invite new team members

You can easily grant access to this dashboard to anyone in your company by inviting them to Latitude.  Just go to Settings -> Members -> Add new member. Once they are in, you can use our multiplayer features so everyone can comment and give feedback on the canvas.

Embed your charts in Notion or other places

Assuming that you’re using Notion or another similar tool, we highly recommend that you take the charts of your CRM dashboard there so you can effortlessly share them with the rest of your team:

And copy them to Notion:

There are no excuses. The right information is flowing through your organization and everyone has access to make the right decisions for your business. Data is not hidden anymore and the best part is that you didn’t spend months of dev time building the whole thing. You just came to Latitude, connected your Zoho CRM, and built a dashboard in a matter of minutes.

If you want to build something like this, you can sign up for free and check things on your own. We have built thousands of similar data apps and we’d be more than happy to give a helping hand with this one, so feel free to reach out to us here at any time.