How to Make Your Sales Management Dashboard Even More Powerful

Today's guest post comes from Nikolay Bulava at Integros, the makers of TimeLine Viewer.

No doubt the Sugar CRM dashboard is a powerful tool for Sales Management where you can find specialized dashlets such as Pipeline or Forecast. These dashlets help to see the current state of sales, to analyze opportunities and quotes portfolios from different viewpoints. With drill down options it gives your the power to examine any diagram segments and instantly look into the details directly from dashboard.

But what do you do if you look at the pipeline and want to analyze a sudden change?

Some of the opportunities could be shifted to the latest period or, vice-versa, to the earliest one. Or some of the opportunities had changes in the amount or/and stages. But which changes took place exactly and what the amount of change? That is the question. If you manage dozens and hundreds of opportunities, figuring out the answer requires a lot of time, doesn't it?

You can make this painful, but necessary part of sales management work easier and more efficient if you use TimeLine Viewer, a special Sugar add-on for collecting and managing significant changes in your data.

First, add the report based on TimeLine data to visualize the significant changes in your portfolio and add a particular diagram to your Sales Dashboard. This view helps you to be aware of any changes that have impacted on your portfolio, as well as how many of them took place, and who is responsible for them.

Second, add the special "My TimeLine" dashlet to the dashboard and configure a dashlet filter to display just a restricted set of business events (stage changes, change in the amount and probable date of the close). This configuration makes it not only possible to view each particular change that had an impact on your pipeline, but also to collaborate with teammates in a quick and easy way in the context of any particular event.

Finally, add the Collaboration dashlet to your Dashboard to quickly review your teammates' answers directly from the dashboard.

With these improvements, your Sales Dashboard would look like the below dashboard which will empower you to manage all pipeline changes and communications directly from the dashboard. This is a piece of cake.

If you use Sugar Enterprise, we have another good piece of news for you: you can view any TimeLine feeds on your Sugar mobile as well, because Sugar Enterprise allows extending regular Sugar Mobile with useful abilities such as this.