In today’s data-driven world, businesses rely on insightful dashboards to make informed decisions and gain a competitive edge. To create an effective dashboard, using a user-centric approach is paramount. Understanding your audience’s needs, preferences, and limitations is crucial to designing a dashboard that meets their specific requirements. In this article, we will explore how to build a user-centric dashboard.

Understanding the User-Centric Reports Dashboard:

A user-centric reports dashboard involves placing the end-users at the heart of the design process. By comprehending your audience’s goals and technological proficiency, you can tailor the dashboard to their unique needs.

Here are key strategies to achieve a user-centric reports dashboard:

1. Analyze User Behavior:

Understand your sales team’s behaviour and preferences. Analyze data from your current dashboard, user feedback, and industry research. Identify which sales metrics and insights are most critical to them. This knowledge will guide your dashboard design decisions.

2. Empathize with Your Sales Team:

Put yourself in your sales team’s shoes. Consider their pain points and challenges. What do they need to accomplish with the dashboard? By empathizing with your team, you can design an intuitive and meaningful dashboard that addresses their specific requirements.

3. Prioritize Key Sales Data:

Place the most important sales data and insights prominently on the dashboard. Just as in journalism, critical information should be “above the fold.” Your sales team should be able to grasp essential findings without the need to scroll down.

4. Follow a Logical Flow:

Craft a coherent data story that guides your sales team through the dashboard. Present the headline sales data first, then progressively lead them through the key insights. This logical flow aids comprehension and encourages users to explore further.

5. Optimize Dashboard Layout:

Adopt the Rule of Thirds in designing the dashboard layout. Strategically position charts, widgets, and sales data elements to achieve visual balance and attract your sales team’s attention to critical areas. A well-organized design enhances the overall user experience.

6. Maintain Consistent Formatting:

Consistency in formatting is essential for a professional and user-friendly dashboard. Use a consistent colour scheme, fonts, and styles throughout the dashboard. This consistency fosters familiarity and ease of use for your audience.

7. Engage with Color Wisely:

Use colour to highlight essential sales data points and insights. However, refrain from overwhelming the dashboard with too many colours. Opt for a balanced and visually pleasing colour palette that complements your brand and ensures accessibility for all users.

8. Group Related Information:

Organize related sales data elements together, making it easy for your sales team to comprehend the relationships between different metrics. Utilize visual cues like borders or proximity to create clear distinctions between sales data groups.

A user-centric reports dashboard is a powerful tool for data-driven decision-making. By focusing on your sales team’s needs, creating an intuitive layout, and presenting meaningful sales data, you can optimize your dashboard to deliver real value. Understanding your sales team’s requirements will ensure that your dashboard becomes an invaluable resource that drives sales performance and success.

Happy dashboard designing!

With Maximizer Sales Leader Edition, you have a powerful tool to optimize your dashboard and empower your sales team with valuable insights. Take a product tour to learn more.

When creating an effective dashboard, choosing the right report widgets is paramount. Selecting visualizations that align with your audience's needs can make all the difference in providing valuable insights and driving data-driven decisions. This comprehensive guide will explore the best practices for choosing the right report widgets for a dashboard to ensure your dashboard delivers maximum impact.

Consider Your Audience

The first step in choosing the right report widgets for a dashboard is understanding your audience. Tailor your visualizations to cater to the preferences and requirements of the intended users. By doing so, you'll ensure that the dashboard is easily understandable and relevant to the individuals who rely on it for critical information.

Utilize Line Charts for Trends

Line charts for trends are indispensable for visualizing time-series data on your dashboard. Whether you're tracking monthly sales figures or quarterly growth rates, line charts enable quick identification of patterns and trends. Their simplicity and effectiveness make them the go-to choice for presenting historical data and forecasting future insights.

Opt for Bar Graphs for Comparisons

When comparing performance between different categories, such as sales across products, regions, or sales representatives, bar graphs for comparisons are a powerful option. These visualizations make it effortless for users to compare data points and identify top performers, helping them easily make informed decisions.

Use Pie Charts Sparingly

While pie charts can be visually appealing, use them sparingly and judiciously. They work best when representing the proportions of a whole, such as market share. However, in cases with multiple categories or subtle differences between them, consider alternatives like bar graphs for more straightforward and more insightful comparisons.

Leverage Tables for Detailed Data

Incorporating tables for detailed data in your dashboard can give users precise information in a well-organized format. Ensure that you strike the right balance between data comprehensiveness and readability. Additionally, consider adding interactive features like sorting and filtering options to enhance the user experience.

Utilize Gauge or Dial Charts for KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are critical metrics for monitoring progress toward specific targets. For effectively presenting KPIs, consider employing gauge or dial charts. These visualizations provide a clear and intuitive representation of progress, allowing stakeholders to grasp the current status and take appropriate actions.

In conclusion, the success of your dashboard hinges on choosing the right report widgets for a dashboard. By understanding your audience and leveraging the strengths of each visualization type, you can craft a compelling dashboard that empowers data-driven decision-making. Embrace line charts for trends, bar graphs for comparisons, and tables for detailed data while using pie charts judiciously. Additionally, gauge or dial charts will enhance your dashboard's ability to track KPIs effectively. Armed with this knowledge, you can create a powerful and impactful dashboard that confidently drives your organization forward.

See Maximizer’s latest report widgets in our self guided product tour.

In today's data-driven business landscape, choosing the right KPIs is vital to assessing and optimizing organizational performance. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) act as guiding stars, helping businesses stay on track to achieve their objectives. In this blog post, we'll explore essential factors for choosing the right KPIs that align with your business goals and industry while maintaining simplicity and accuracy. Whether you're a sales leader looking for sales intelligence tools to track "Revenue growth over time," "Number of days to close a deal," "Opportunity win rates," or seeking ways to benchmark against industry standards, this article will provide valuable insights.

Understand the Business Goals and Align KPIs Accordingly

To start, identify your business goals and align your KPIs accordingly. Whether you have long-term strategic objectives or short-term operational targets, the right KPIs should directly reflect these aspirations. For instance, sales leaders can prioritize relevant metrics like "Revenue growth over time" and "Number of days to close a deal" to gauge their team's performance and ensure it aligns with broader business objectives.

Prioritize Relevant Metrics to Optimize Performance

In the vast sea of data available, it's easy to become overwhelmed. That's why it's crucial to prioritize relevant metrics that directly impact your specific business and industry. For sales leaders, metrics like "Opportunity win rates" are pivotal in understanding how well they meet their targets. Sales Intelligence, available in Sales Leader Edition, is a pre-built reporting tool highlighting key KPIs, enabling better decision-making and performance optimization.

Keep It Simple: Focus on the Most Important KPIs

It's a common mistake to track too many KPIs at a time. Instead, aim for simplicity and focus on a manageable number of key indicators that provide meaningful insights into performance. For sales leaders, tracking KPIs like "Revenue growth over time" and "Number of days to close a deal" will give them a clear picture of their team's performance without overwhelming them with unnecessary data points.

Embrace the Power of Leading and Lagging Indicators

An effective KPI dashboard strikes the right balance between leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators offer a predictive view of future results while lagging indicators provide insights into past performance. Having both types of indicators allows sales leaders to make proactive decisions while learning from past experiences to optimize future strategies.

Read more about how to use leading and lagging indicators to sell more.

Ensure Data Accuracy: The Foundation of Reliable KPIs

The success of your KPIs relies on the accuracy of the data feeding them. Establish a robust process for data accuracy, such as regular audits and automated data integrations. Accurate data empowers sales leaders to make well-informed decisions, driving better outcomes and growth.

Benchmark Against Industry Standards for Continuous Improvement

Benchmarking your KPIs against industry standards or competitors' metrics can offer valuable insights and identify areas for improvement. Knowing how your "Opportunity win rates" compare to industry averages as a sales leader can be a powerful tool for driving growth and staying competitive.

Choosing the right KPIs is a critical aspect of business success. You can effectively track progress and optimize performance by understanding your business goals, prioritizing relevant metrics, keeping it simple, embracing leading and lagging indicators, ensuring data accuracy, and benchmarking against industry standards. Whether you're a sales leader seeking sales intelligence tools or any other business professional looking to make data-driven decisions, these insights will guide you toward success in the dynamic world of choosing the right KPIs.

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Winning the End Game: Client Follow-up

We’re wrapping up the week with our fourth and final installment of MaxTips for Financial Advisors – a series with key insights for Financial Advisors who are looking to a CRM to build their book of business. Today we cover what is perhaps the most important piece of the client communication puzzle – establishing a solid process for ongoing communication. Simply put, client ‘follow-up.”

The journey of moving away from spreadsheets and implementing a CRM can indeed be time consuming. But like any other worthy investment, dedicating the resources will pay off in spades for operational efficiency and revenue growth. If you are at the stage now where you’ve completed a clean import of your data, optimized your client profile settings, and have your client communication working in lock step across the firm, then it’s time to commit to the end game!

“The life-changing power of a CRM, especially for financial advisors, is truly in the follow up,” explains Brad Hartfield, Financial Solutions Manager at Maximizer. “When my clients discover just how much automating their follow-ups can sharpen their focus and skyrocket their productivity, they can’t imagine life without it,” he says.

Having full shared and transparent access to client data across the company is, of course, invaluable for team environments. If you’ve got a solid sales process in place, all those general but time sensitive admin tasks can be confidently delegated to junior members, leaving business development folks the bandwidth to chase the big leads.

Tried and True Tactics

Financial Advisors, more so than most sales professionals, are event- or calendar-driven. Milestone birthdays, retirement runways, contribution deadlines – everything revolves around dates. The beauty is advisors can effectively “outsource” each and every reminder they would ever need to the CRM. The magic of course is that those reminders – and the associated action items – are not only catalogued but also fully automated.

“When advisors can log onto their CRM each morning and, at the click of a button, see their a full list of their required follow-ups for that day or in days to come, it not only ensures those tasks are completed on time, but it also frees up literally hours in the advisor’s day to focus on chasing new business,” Hartfield added.

It lies with the advisor, however, to manage the best way to communicate with any given client. Some clients prefer email over calls, some prefer calls over in-person meetings. And (drumroll) your CRM can help you track this as part of your client profiling. What is most important here, however, is that regardless of how or for what reason you are connecting with a client, every interaction is archived now archived. From calls made, emails sent and meetings held to proposals delivered and documents signed, an ever-growing and comprehensive client history at your fingertips becomes a golden goose.

As discussed in our “Connecting With Clients” segment, Maximizer has long partnered with platforms familiar to and loved by financial advisors including MailChimp and Outlook. No need to switch away from the amazing productivity tools you may already be using, just bring them into the CRM fold and take your client communication game to the next level!

Read more in our MaxTips for Financial Advisor Series:

From Spreadsheets to CRM: Ensuring a smooth & successful transition

Client profiling: How a CRM makes it easy, purposeful, and profitable

Connecting with Clients: Productivity for compelling and results-driven rep-client conversations

Connecting with Clients

We continue this week with MaxTips for Financial Advisors – a four-part series with key insights for Financial Advisors who are looking to a CRM to build and expand their book of business. Today we explore the disciplines of effective client communication – not only with your clients but also within and across your company and teams.

Having previously covered the importance of robust data and how thoughtful profiling can increase productivity, the question now is how to fully optimize that newfound productivity for compelling and results-driven rep-client conversations.

Full Client History with Total Recall is a CRM Must-Have

In the world of financial advising, your CRM must have a place to record and store every conceivable type of client interaction. This is simply non-negotiable. From calls made, emails sent and meetings held to proposals delivered and documents signed, the history of every touch point should be available at touch of a button – not only for you, the rep, but also for your entire team.

“In my twenty-plus years experience, the single biggest motivation to move away from spreadsheets to a CRM is the desire for that company-wide, centralized memory bank of all client data and interactions,” explains Brad Hartfield, Financial Advisor Solutions Manager at Maximizer. “Once advisors are up and running, they realize just how valuable a CRM can be not only to service clients, but as a means to really grow their book of business,” he says.

World class financial advisor organizations are both customer-centric and team-driven. They leverage their CRM for central ‘source of truth’ for client data to ensure quality interactions each and every time a client connects with the firm. Not only does company wide transparency beget efficiency, but also instills an ever-increasing confidence by clients because you consistently demonstrate that you have your finger on the pulse.

Best-in-class Technology for Best-in-class Client Experience

When it comes to best-in-class technology, modern CRM’s do not try and reinvent the wheel – they hitch their wagon to the star performers. We’re talking about integrations – whereby various types of software “sub-systems” are brought together to create a single, unified system. Maximizer has long partnered with platforms familiar to and loved by financial advisors including MailChimp and Outlook. Again, no need to switch away from these amazing tools you may already be using, just bring them into the CRM fold and take your client communication game to the next level.

CRM Takes You Beyond the Connections

“As I like to point out to my clients, if you combine that full and documented history of all client data with a reputable SaaS-based home for that data, it becomes an invaluable asset if and when you want to cash out and sell your book of business,” Hartfield adds.

And finally, depending on both your corporate policy and federal regulations, the “total recall” functionality of a reputable and secure CRM platform may also serve your needs for legal compliance. (Be sure to have that conversation with your prospective CRM provider!)

Read more in our MaxTip for Financial Advisor Series:

Client profiling: How a CRM makes it easy, purposeful, and profitable

From Spreadsheets to CRM: Ensuring a smooth & successful transition

Winning the End Game: Client Follow-up

Getting your Client Profiles in Order

This week we’re presenting MaxTips for Financial Advisors – a four-part series with key insights for Financial Advisors who are looking to a CRM to build and expand their book of business. Today we outline best practices for general and detailed client profiling and how a CRM can make this task easy, purposeful, and profitable.

Client profiling is, simply, categorizing customers with similar characteristics. A ‘birds of a feather’ notion, not only does this help better understand the needs of different groups of clients, but also aids advisors to spot trends for business expansion and growing the sales pipeline. Similarly, detailed client profiling can do more than just remind you when to send a birthday card – it can set in motion and automate a host of updates, events and actions to improve client contact, fine tune sales strategies and drive revenue growth.

Profiling for Productivity

If you follow the business adage “measure what matters” then the client data equivalent is “profile for productivity.” The most basic fields in the world of financial advising include, of course: name and address; household structure; insurance age and birthdays (especially the ones that trigger pension or other significant events); Know Your Customer (aka KYC) reviews or upcoming expiries and renewals. Importantly, this client data is an ecosystem that requires constant gardening – from sales calls and customer meetings to lead capture, surveys and more over time.

“Creating a team culture of data integrity benefits not only advisors and their pipeline but also instills customer confidence through better and more poignant communication,” explains Brad Hartfield, Financial Advisor Solutions Manager at Maximizer. “Operationally, you can rest assured that your CRM data is a ‘source of truth’, whereby all reps and managers can access accurate and consolidated customer information and can better serve their clients as a team. No more scrambling to find that important date or note when someone is away, or has perhaps left the company,” he says.

Let’s Get Personal

According to PWC, 73% of consumers say good customer experience helps to drive their buying decisions. Additionally, 86% of customers say that they’re ready to pay more if it means getting a better, more personal customer experience.

At both the group and individual levels, getting personal using targeted communication is fundamental to the rapport and loyalty that leads to greater “stickiness,” and opens the door upselling to build the book. The trick is to scale and strengthen that level of personalization, regardless of the size of your client base.

“You’d be surprised at the deep connections you can establish with clients by knowing – and tracking – personal interests such as favorite beverages, hobbies, TV shows they watch and their pet’s name,” says Hartfield. “In fact, it’s something clients now expect as part of modern customer service, response levels and the relationship in general,” he explains.

Equally as valuable or more, robust client profiles offer deep insight and predictions into customer’s behaviours. Paired with the more personal information, advisors can be offering up valuable advise before clients even ask for it. Advisors are in the driving seat of their customer’s financial needs as well as that of their own book.

Timely and Total Recall

For quick access to important information and events, an advisor’s CRM needs to operate like a powerful search engine. Retrieving any aspect of a client’s profile must be quick and convenient. For financial advisors, as an example, you should be able to see all household structures at the click of a button. Maximizer for Financial Advisors does this exceptionally well.

Read more in our MaxTip for Financial Advisor Series:

From Spreadsheets to CRM: Ensuring a smooth & successful transition

Connecting with Clients: Productivity for compelling and results-driven rep-client conversations

Winning the End Game: Client Follow-up