9 tips for better sales & marketing dashboards

Dashboards are where marketing meets sales. You can tell a highly evolved sales & marketing operation by asking to see their marketing dashboard. If they don’t have one, they’re still in the earliest stages of the demand generation revolution.

So when Salesforce asked us to help them capture their views on marketing dashboards in a new SlideShare deck, we were in the car before they could say, “Are you in?”.

Here’s the result. We think it’s a great introduction to a tool, process and discipline that’s critical to every B2B organisation.

All about marketing dashboards

Hope you like it — and do add any thoughts about your own dashboard experiences.

The Nine Principles of Killer Dashboards from Salesforce

Marketing dashboards update

Marketing dashboards have changed a lot since we first wrote this post:

Data Lakes have sprung up to feed way better data into our marketing dashboards. They can combine data from all kinds of different sources (structured and unstructured) for later analysis.

APIs have improved so that more and more marketing applications can feed into our dashboards. Most software vendors now understand the importance of robust APIs – and that’s a really good thing.

Data visualization tools (like Tableau) have improved, making our marketing dashboards way prettier and easier to enhance. Not that eye candy is what it’s all about, but still…

Non-technical users are getting involved, making sure our dashboards are actually serving the target audiences we’re trying to serve. We’re seeing data play a greater and greater role in every B2B marketing department and dashboards are one major sign.

But the 9 principles in the Salesforce slideshare are still super-relevant. So they must have been pretty solid…

Got any ideas for better marketing dashboards?

We’d love to hear about them.