A dashboard is a single screen that tracks a number of key metrics in real time. For sales and marketing, this is a place where the entire revenue creation team tracks your progress and collaborates around opportunities. 

Here are nine principles to create killer dashboards. As you'll see, there's no excuse for ugly dashboards anymore.

1. Align everyone around one dashboard

While you can have different dashboards for different teams and campaigns, you want one single dashboard that sales and marketing can use as their primary revenue creation tracker. Use consistent, agreed metrics so that everyone understands what you're tracking.

2. Map your purchase cycle to define stages

Track all leads as they turn into prospects, opportunities and deals. You can set up as many stages as you need and then build a dashboard that reports on all of them.

3. Define and agree on the metrics

A purchase cycle stage is defined by the actions taken by a prospect, your sales team or both. To track leads and deals through the cycle, your team must agree on the actions in each stage and then build these into your dashboard.

4. Iterate

Get out there, live with your dashboard for a period of time, get feedback from those who use it and improve it over and over again. Soon, everyone will have the ideal dashboard experience they can't live without.

5. Make sure you can drill down

Today, your dashboard needs to be a live, real-time view of your data. That means you can click on just about anything and drill down to the underlying reports, data and customer profiles.

6. Social-power your dashboard

Great dashboards are the center of collaboration for the entire sales and marketing team. The teams can follow a metric or an activity, share it, comment on it or open a conversation. It's hugely powerful and creates an active collaboration platform.

7. Integrate tasks

Capture tasks and activities in the dashboard to make sure they are accomplished. This alleviates logging in and out, sending emails or chasing phone calls. 

8. Make it pretty

This point matters. If you want people to spend time in your dashboards, you need a bit of eye candy. After all, who wants to look at a spreadsheet all day? Colorful, clear, easy-to-read charts, graphs and dials make important data jump out. 

9. Make it mobile

Dashboards are too important to lock to the desktop. You need to be able to access them anywhere, wherever you are. Ensure your dashboard is enabled for tablets and smartphones. A good mobile app should let you do everything you could from your desk.

Dashboards accelerate pipeline and it should be your revenue machine. Define some key metrics and business processes to create and drive your next killer dashboard.

Learn more in this Slideshare presentation:

Build dashboards, apps and more with Salesforce1 in this free ebook below.