For many companies, dashboards fall in an odd place between the analytics or IT teams, and the departments that actually use them. This split is not unusual as data and analytics have long been the province of the more mathematically and technology savvy departments. But that paradigm is shifting fast.

New technologies, especially CRM solutions, are putting data in the hands of the departments that ultimately wind up using it. Creating dashboards is no longer a convoluted, confusing process and can be undertaken by nearly anyone. This means greater personalization, better functionalities, and superior performance.

So with this newfound freedom to create and utilize dashboards, how do you set up a dashboard that can deliver real value to your organization?

Here are five things you can do to take your dashboards to the next level:

1. Align Your Organization Around Dashboards

Each team can benefit from having their own dashboards to track their campaigns and projects. These dashboards provide convenient score cards for how a team is performing at any given moment and allows them to adjust their strategy accordingly.

But it is also important to have one single dashboard that your sales and marketing teams agree on as your primary revenue creation tracker. This keeps all teams aligned across your entire revenue creation operation. This dashboard needs to use consistent metrics agreed to by all teams. It’s critical that everyone understands the definition of each metric that you’re tracking.

2. Map Your Purchase Cycle

One of the most powerful things you can do in your dashboard is to track all leads as they turn into prospects, opportunities, and deals – although your definitions for each stage may differ slightly. Set up as many stages as make sense for your business, then build a report that feeds your dashboard.

For many companies, their sales cycle is just an abstract concept. They may be able to identify how many leads they have created, but will have no clue how many of those have turned into opportunities and how. While this hazy understanding of the sales cycle used to be the norm, it is now a major liability for a business.

You should be absolutely clear on how a lead is moving through your sales cycle to close. This understanding allows you to identify any weak points in your sales funnel, experiment and adjust on the fly, and automatically see the impact of strategies on your bottom line.

3. Define the Metrics to Track

Having separate teams track their own metrics can stand in the way of alignment and create all sorts of confusion during meetings. That’s why it is incredibly important to spend time defining the metrics you want to track, agreeing on the metrics that matter, and building reports for those metrics that can feed dashboards.

There is no room for subjectivity, especially when analyzing your purchase cycle. Everyone in your organization should be able to glance at your dashboard and pull the same conclusions. A purchase cycle stage is not an abstract idea. It’s a specific state that’s defined by the actions taken by the prospect, your sales team, or both. To track your leads and deals through the cycle, your team needs to agree on what specific actions define each stage, then build these into your reporting and dashboard components.

4. Social Power

Early dashboards were silos of information. You opened them up, got what you needed and went somewhere else to act on the information. This made dashboards just another tool in the long list of convoluted and inefficient business processes. Today, great dashboards are the center of collaboration for the entire sales and marketing team.

Social turns your dashboards into collaboration engines. It’s like having your company’s own internal Facebook platform built into your dashboard. People can "follow" a metric or an activity, share it with other team members, comment on it or open a conversation around it. This may sound like a bell or a whistle – but in reality, it’s hugely powerful. Great dashboards are active collaboration platforms.

5. Make it Mobile

Dashboards are too important to lock to the desktop. You need to be able to access your dashboard wherever you are. This means tablet and smartphone versions are a really good idea. A good mobile app should let you do pretty much everything you could do from your desk, including:

• Search for and browse the dashboards you’re following

• View any and all components

• Share a dashboard or component

• Collaborate with colleagues inside the dashboard

• Access recently viewed reports and dashboards when you’re offline

The best platforms will provide you with this functionality automatically. If you’ve created the perfect dashboard on your desktop, it should appear automatically on your phone, formatted, and optimized to make viewing easy — so you can take action from wherever you are.

Want to see what else you can do with your dashboards? Download this full e-book for even more.