Dashboard Confessional
“What gets measured gets managed.”
- Peter Drucker
A few questions for you: what is your sales conversion rate? How many outreach emails do you have to send to sign a new client? How many orders do you need to get to hit your monthly sales goal? You have these numbers somewhere, sure, but what if you could have all of them within reach at a moment’s notice? Enter the dashboard.
As a lifelong all-or-nothing-er, what I’m about to tell you is hilariously hypocritical, but true nonetheless: consistency is key to accomplishing your goals. And the best way to ensure consistency is to track your activity and numbers. If you ever had a chore chart as a wee lass or made a goal to workout x days per week and then marked your calendar for each day you actually did, the concept of the dashboard will be familiar to you.
Back when you completed your Roadmap, you made a quarterly revenue goal, profit goal, and some key measurables. Perhaps you pulled those numbers out of thin air, but more likely than that, you have an idea of how much revenue was possible based on prior knowledge like how many orders or clients you can get and how much from each one. This is where we’re going to track the actions that lead to those bigger goals.
A hypothetical example that is pretty easy for everyone: annual revenue. There are 52 weeks in the year, so essentially you’d like to make at least 2% (rounding up) of your annual goal each week to stay on track for hitting that goal at the end of the year. So for someone with an annual goal of $150,000, you’re shooting for $3,000 in revenue each week. Some weeks will obviously be higher or lower, but that’s the number at which you know you’re on track.
Another example: conversion rate. If you know that you need to close 5 orders per week to hit your revenue goal, how many potential clients do you need to talk to in order to hit that number? Depends on your conversion rate. Let’s say you convert 50%. Then you need to talk to 10 potential buyers every week. The dashboard is where you’ll track that number.
The beauty of the dashboard is that you can tie outcomes to actions. If you missed your revenue target last week, you can look at your metrics to see where you were off track. If you only talked to six potential clients when your goal every week is 10, that could be the reason why. The dashboard keeps you accountable for what actions you should be taking day in, day out to make progress.