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A dashboard nobody opens is data debt. The fix is not more widgets; it is fewer dashboards, each tied to one role and one daily action. Here are the five that work.

Rep daily dashboard

Five widgets, no more:

  1. My open deals by stage (Kanban-style funnel).
  2. My deals closing this month, sorted by close date ascending.
  3. My overdue activities count (with click-through to list).
  4. My leads contacted in last 7 days vs target.
  5. My quota attainment percent for the quarter.

The widgets answer “what am I working on today and am I behind.” Anything else is for the weekly review, not the daily.

Manager pipeline dashboard

Six widgets:

  1. Team pipeline coverage ratio (open pipeline / quota).
  2. Stage conversion rates last 90 days.
  3. Average deal age by stage.
  4. Deals slipped from last month.
  5. Top 10 deals by amount with last activity date.
  6. Reps below 50 percent attainment.

Coverage and slippage are the two metrics managers actually escalate on. Put them top-left.

Sales ops health dashboard

This one is for data quality, not pipeline:

  1. Deals without next step set.
  2. Deals without close date in next 60 days.
  3. Contacts without email or phone.
  4. Accounts without owner.
  5. Orphan activities (activities with no parent record).

Run it weekly, assign cleanup to the owner of each broken record. This dashboard prevents the quarterly “why is the forecast wrong” panic.

Marketing handoff dashboard

For the SDR-to-AE handoff:

  1. MQLs created this week.
  2. MQL-to-SQL conversion rate by source.
  3. SQLs accepted vs rejected by AE.
  4. Average time MQL to first contact.
  5. Source ROI (deal amount won / source cost).

Surface rejection reasons as a category breakdown. Marketing learns which leads to stop sending.

Forecast review dashboard

For the weekly forecast call:

  1. Commit, best case, pipeline by rep (three columns).
  2. Movement since last week (deals added, removed, slipped, closed).
  3. Top 10 must-win deals with risk flag.
  4. Deals over forecast confidence threshold but no activity in 14 days.

The movement widget is the one people actually argue about; build it as a delta, not a snapshot.

Building widgets that load fast

Each widget runs a query. Six widgets fire six parallel queries on dashboard load. Cap your dashboards at six widgets. Above that, total load time exceeds 10 seconds and people stop opening it.

For widgets that need multi-month data (quota attainment, conversion rates), use a smart list as the source instead of a live filter. The smart list precomputes nightly.

Sharing and permissions

Dashboards inherit record visibility. A manager dashboard shared with a rep will silently filter to only the rep’s records, which often surprises managers. Build separate manager-private and team-shared dashboards rather than fighting the permission model.

What to do this week

Pick the rep daily dashboard, build it for one team, and ask three reps if they would open it tomorrow morning. Iterate based on the answer.

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