When you think about developing stronger leadership throughout your company, you probably picture training sessions, strategies, and conferences designed to strengthen leadership skills. Leadership training is absolutely critical, but so is access to accurate data.
In fact, it could be argued that data is more important than leadership training. Without access to accurate data, all the training in the world won’t help your CEOs make important business decisions. Bad data will always create bad decisions, even by the best CEOs.
How accurate is your data? Is it easily accessible? Is it visual? Can your CEOs run detailed reports with the click of a button?
In addition to sending leaders to important training, consider using a visual CEO dashboard to give your leaders better visibility, and therefore better information to fuel their decisions.
If you haven’t looked into how a CEO dashboard can improve your company’s leadership strategy, the following is how it works.
What is a CEO dashboard?
A CEO dashboard, according to datapine, is “an executive management tool used to measure, track, analyze, and visualize data to empower CEOs to make data-driven decisions with the help of interactive, high-level metrics from sales, marketing, finance, and other important business areas.”
That’s a powerful definition, and for good reason — a CEO dashboard is an ideal way for CEOs to access the metrics they need to make strong business decisions. You just can’t make powerful decisions with raw data, and crunching numbers manually doesn’t compare.
CEOs make decisions that significantly alter business outcomes, and a visual dashboard provides all the information at a glance. A dashboard also allows CEOs to run various reports.
Data presentation matters for clients and team members. It’s important to tailor the way data is presented to your CEOs to be easy, automated, and accurate. That’s what makes visual dashboards ideal.
The data you’ll get from a visual dashboard includes:
- historical company trends;
- real-time insights;
- individual KPIs;
- gross profits;
- revenue;
- operating expenses;
- net income;
- EBIT %;
- monthly recurring revenue (MRR);
- paying customers for SaaS businesses;
- customer acquisition costs;
- average customer lifetime value;
- churn rates;
- return on assets and equity;
- debt-equity ratio;
- share price;
- and more.
Why is a visual dashboard necessary?
You might be wondering what’s wrong with using existing data sources, like the numbers from your shopping cart system, your bank account, your CRM, and your email marketing application.
While all of these data sources can be useful, they’re disparate and don’t talk to each other. At least, not without using multiple APIs to connect everything.
Without a dashboard, if you want to calculate your expenses, you have to log in to multiple applications and crunch those numbers manually. With a visual CEO dashboard, all the data is stored in the same database and you can not only access the data, but you can run complex reports to get numbers that would take you forever to get with manual calculations.
For this reason, having a CEO dashboard will increase data accuracy and save your company time and money.
A CEO dashboard will help your company reach its goals.
There are plenty of goal-setting strategies that work, but they’re all hard to track when you don’t have fast, visual access to performance data.
With a CEO dashboard, you’ll get a visual representation of where teams are in relation to their goals.
For example, a dashboard will show you how your sales team is doing with the following automated metrics:
- number of new customers/clients acquired year-to-date;
- amount of sales revenue generated year-to-date;
- a percentage that represents how far along you are in reaching your goal;
- For example, you might be at 67%, 25%, or 140%. This number is calculated based on target numbers you program into the application.
- customer churn rate;
- If you’re not retaining your customers, and your churn rate is high, you’ll know it’s time to work on retention strategies.
- and revenue lost as a result of lost customers.
- If your average customer is worth $300, and you lose 10 customers, that equals $3,000 in lost revenue.
Since the numbers needed for this calculation are already in the system, you’ll get to see how much money you’re losing based on your churn rate. Then, you can investigate.
For instance, it might be your pricing model, or it could be a difficult checkout process.
CEOs carry heavy responsibilities. They need the best tools.
Everyone looks up to CEOs because they are in a high position of leadership and authority. When something goes wrong in a company, the CEO usually steps up to take responsibility for the problem and find a solution.
Your CEOs don’t just sit back in their office dealing with numbers. They’re out in the world interacting and representing your brand, even if only virtually. When a CEO makes a bad business decision that impacts customers directly, they take responsibility for that bad decision, even when it wasn’t their fault.
By using a CEO dashboard, you’ll be empowering your CEOs with accurate and comprehensive data that will improve business outcomes and support the growth and success of your business.
