What You Need to Think About Before Building a Dashboard

Transcript

Why Dashboards Start With Data, Not Visuals

Good day. My name’s Mike from Lone Wolf Unleashed, and today we’re going to be talking about the things you need to be thinking about when you’re building dashboards.

I was catching up with a customer this week and he’s implementing a new CRM, which is exciting because his existing ecosystem is a bunch of files in his file explorer. He’s really growing now and needs to make it scalable so he can bring people in and have them operate within a central system. Part of that is just having visibility around the types of things that are happening — looking at the different metrics across the board.

You can’t manage what you’re not measuring, as the saying goes — often misquoted, but basically it means that if he wants to keep growing his business and keep freeing up time, implementing a system is a good idea.

The challenge is that there are some ideas for a dashboard, and a dashboard is just a place for people to come in and see at a glance what the numbers are doing. So I’m going to take you through the concepts you need to be thinking about when building a dashboard.

And spoiler alert — it’s not really visual-based. The visuals are the last thing you need to worry about. What we want to make sure is that the right information is in the right place, available for the dashboard to use.

The Sales Pipeline: What to Track

When we think about the components of a dashboard, we’re talking about different pieces of data that we’re trying to turn into information. Data is the raw stuff sitting in a database somewhere. Information is something that can be utilized to make decisions.

That data has to come from your processes, because your processes are the things generating those inputs and outputs. We want to make sure those inputs and outputs go into a database.

For this customer, there are three different systems we’re going to start building dashboards around. The most logical place to start is the sales pipeline.

Different businesses have different levels of complexity. My sales cycle is typically longer than his. His is: get an inquiry, assess whether you can help, and turn them into a customer — that fast. So having many sales stages isn’t quite appropriate in his case.

Inquiry Response Time

The first thing we want to know: do we know what the time from first inquiry to inquiry answer is?

For that, we need two pieces of information. Do we know when the inquiry came in? Without a CRM, that’s going to be very difficult to track — very manual. But in a CRM with a form embedded on your website that’s attached to the CRM, it will know exactly the time and date that inquiry came in.

And then when you go to answer the inquiry, there’s another timestamp that needs to be managed. Is the timestamp for that answer going back captured within your system?

What the dashboard is going to do is take inquiry answer time minus inquiry time, and that gives you the average inquiry response time.

Something to think about here: do you want the average? The median? Do you want it tracked per inquiry? And you might also want a second dimension over that — date ranges. In Q1 was our inquiry answering time higher or lower than the previous quarter?

Sales Cycle and Cash Flow

Another example: when does a document come back from a client? In this customer’s case, forms go out and come back signed through something like DocuSign. That’s the moment they become a customer.

Tracking the overall sales cycle from first inquiry through to signing as a client is critical, because if you can get that number down, it can fundamentally change your cash flow — you get paid sooner. If you’ve got a large pipeline with a low sales cycle and your delivery processes are set up well, you get paid faster, you make more money.

The challenge here is that now we’ve got a date timestamp captured in DocuSign at the time of signing, and we need to be able to track that in the CRM. So we’re talking about how we get that from one place to another.

Connecting Systems: Manual First, Then Automate

My initial recommendation for anyone doing this sort of thing is: if your volumes are relatively low, do it manually first.

Why? Because starting manually, you really get to know the intricacies of what works and what doesn’t. What the rules of behaviour of the system are supposed to be. If we try to automate this from the first moment and it’s not something you’re actively doing right now, we’re going to be making assumptions about what you’re doing and what the systems are doing that may be incorrect. And it’s those assumptions that really kick you when you go to implement and things start to go wrong.

That’s frustrating for both parties. On my side, I have to deal with more inquiries and may not get paid the second part of my delivery fee until it’s fixed. On the client side, you’re thinking: I paid for this system, it’s not working, and now I’m spending more time trying to figure it out. Starting manually lets you pick up those types of requirements very early.

Now, once you’re ready to automate the connection between the two systems, there are multiple ways to do it.

The first thing I’d explore is whether the CRM and DocuSign can talk to each other directly through an API — basically the connector that lets you push data from one place to another. If the CRM has a field set up to track the form return date, you can pull that from DocuSign and put it in the CRM.

If that’s not available, DocuSign sends a notification email when a form is signed. You could have an AI agent sitting on top of the email server — through an MCP server — that punches the date and time of that email into the relevant record in the database to track that field.

There are many other options. You could even hire someone just to manage the information. But my point is: you can’t track that information if it’s not sitting in the database.

Keeping Your Ecosystem Simple

What I really like to recommend to smaller customers is to make your ecosystem as simple as possible. Large organizations have data lakes and really complex environments to manage all that data. What we want to make sure is that our databases sit within a simple ecosystem — easy to understand and easy to get the information out that we’re seeking.

If you’re a small player, I highly recommend trying to get your information managed in the same place, so you’re not dealing with a tangle of integrations. Remember: every document is a surface you need to maintain. The same is true for all your data and information. If you’re not maintaining it, things will break over time — just like anything in your house that you don’t keep on top of.

That’s why I bought a house without a big yard. It’s easy to maintain. The same applies to your business.

Once you’ve got that information in the right spots — date and timestamps, dollar amounts, case counts, whatever you’re tracking — that’s when you can start building the dashboard.

In terms of standard dashboard functionality: the types of charts, the colour scheme, all that is up to you to configure. The other thing you have is your typical date ranges. I use a time tracking tool called Clockify that has dashboards showing which projects I’ve spent time on, how much time, and over certain date ranges. It changes what’s in front of me based on the parameters I set.

So make sure you’re also noting what filters or parameters you need access to. Maybe you only want to track quarterly — put in a quarterly filter. Maybe you need daily tracking. Write those requirements down, because if you’re handing this off to a specialist in data reporting and dashboards, they need the specifications to go and build it. And the same applies if you’re implementing it yourself.

That’s going to do us for today. I really appreciate your time. You could have been doing a million things, but you decided to hang out with me and learn about putting together the data that needs to go on your dashboard and the types of things to think through for that.

Make sure to go and check out my website at lonewolfunleashed.com/resources. You can check out some of the resources there about building up business systems — one of the most popular at the moment is my presentation skill and the first AI agent. There’s some really useful resources over there.

You can also sign up for my newsletter. Right now I have a series going on setting up Claude and using it the way I’m using it. I’m saving weeks now and it’s really fundamentally changing my business model — charging by time is no longer feasible. It’s really changing the game for how service businesses can use AI to expedite the really heavy admin stuff. Thanks for joining me today, and I’ll see you next week.