Dashboards fail a lot more than businesses intend. Here’s why: most of them are data dumps, not decision-making tools. When you add dashboards to your company, it may feel like you’re opening a portal to a world of possibility. But without proper structure and filters, it just becomes a complicated, overwhelming mess of metrics. This stops you from growing, hinders your team, and even leads to data being ignored.
More than 80% of business data goes unused, yet companies still pay hefty subscription fees and lose profits by investing in convoluted software.
To get value out of business intelligence dashboards, you need a way to create interfaces that are smart, intuitive, and valuable to your organization. Let’s talk about how to do it.
First, Define What 'Decision-Driving' Means for You
How does your company make key decisions? Is it based on numbers or gut feelings? Too often, the focus is on broad, generalized answers and not targeted questions you can answer with meaningful data.
You need to identify your core business questions before you can implement the right data solutions.Move beyond generic goals. List specific, answerable questions that a business leader needs to address.
- Instead of: "How are sales?"
- Ask: "Which sales representatives are struggling to meet their quota on high-margin products this quarter?"
- Instead of: "Is marketing working?"
- Ask: "What is the conversion rate and cost per acquisition for our latest Google Ads campaign compared to our LinkedIn campaign?"
Encourage leadership in your company to submit 3-5 actionable questions that data could help them solve. This exercise promotes strategic problem-solving and makes it easier to determine relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) that directly answer those questions.
Know Your KPIs – And Why
A cluttered dashboard is a useless one. Information gets overlooked sheerly due to overstimulation and even choice paralysis. Rather than try to extract meaning from every piece of data, you need to select a handful of KPIs that directly answer your questions.
- For the sales question: Track "Individual Sales Volume by Product Category" and "Quota Attainment %".
- For the marketing question: Track "Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)" by channel and "Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate".
Map KPIs to Specific User Roles
One-size-fits-all BI technology usually fits no one. A dashboard for a CEO should look different from the one of the marketing VP, director, or team lead.
The CEO view should showcase high-level KPIs like Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), and overall company profitability. Meanwhile, a sales or marketing manager’s dashboard should show more granular KPIs like “Team Quota Attainment,” “Average Deal Size,” “Cost Per Conversion,” and “Return on Ad Spend.”
The right software makes it easy to link data to different accounts, increasing efficiency and ensuring confidentiality when necessary.
Sharing Data the Old Way vs. With Smart Dashboards
In the traditional method of business intelligence reporting, manual dashboard creation involves exploring data from various sources, such as a CRM and accounting tool, into spreadsheets like Excel. Then, it needs to be cleaned, converted into charts, and uploaded to a PowerPoint or Google Slide to share.
This process is extremely time-consuming and must be repeated for every update. It’s also highly prone to human error during data entry, and the static data is outdated the moment it’s presented.
Never forget that your business exists in real time. Your data should, too.
Another downside of this method is the risk of security breaches. Sharing data by email or on open-access accounts can ultimately lead to vulnerability and even theft. It’s crucial that companies understand exactly who sees their data, who can edit it, and where it’s stored.
The Smarter Alternative: A Dedicated BI Platform
Now, imagine a dedicated business intelligence platform that hosts all your metrics, updated for seconds or minutes. You see real-time inventory changes, can track marketing, sales, operations, or accounting with a click, and always have a secure environment for fast analysis.
This is the power of modern BI platforms. They centralize your most important data sources, unify them, and align them with KPIs, so you never have to question whether you have the right information or what to do with it.
Building Your Dashboard Step-by-Step with Yurbi
Yurbi is your golden ticket to unlock BI data that means something to your business. It’s a smart alternative to manual dashboards and reporting that makes data visualization and management fast, easy, and intuitive. Here’s how to incorporate it into your business — no IT degree required.
Step 1: Connect Your Disparate Data Sources
Yurbi can easily connect data from multiple sources in one place without wasting weeks or even months manually uploading information. You can pull metrics from multiple sources, such as cloud applications, spreadsheets, and SQL databases, without worrying about inadvertent silos or tech holdups.
Step 2: Design Your Layout with No-Code Simplicity
Yurbi’s drag-and-drop report builder lets anyone from a business analyst to a department head create, modify, and share a data dashboard without writing code or waiting for IT. This saves development time and empowers non-technical users to become data-oriented problem solvers.
Step 3: Configure Visuals That Tell a Clear Story
Yurbi makes it easy to choose the right visualization to highlight data’s value briefly. For example:
- Use a line chart to illustrate the trend of your website’s traffic over the past 12 months.
- Use a bar chart to compare the performance of different marketing campaigns.
- Use a gauge to show real-time progress toward a quarterly revenue target.
- Use a map chart to visualize sales distribution by geographic region.
It’s easy to try out different visualizations and find the right one for your specific needs.
Step 4: Embed Your Dashboard for Seamless, Branded Access
Yurbi may be easy for non-technical users, but it holds just as much value for a more experienced audience. With embedded analytics functionality, you can implement a fully interactive, white-label dashboard directly within your own application. This helps maintain brand consistency and provide real value to end-users without drastically expanding your budget.
What a Truly Useful Data Dashboard Looks Like
There are many ways data dashboards help professionals like you do business smarter. Here are a few examples:
A software vendor uses a customer-facing dashboard in their app to show clients’ data usage, performance statistics, and ROI metrics. Thanks to Yurbi’s multi-tenant security, every client’s data is protected and hidden from one another.
An internal sales team uses a leadership dashboard to highlight reps by sales, along with a pipeline view that illustrates deals by stage, and a chart tracking activity goal (calls, demos, and emails).
A marketing department uses a marketing dashboard that unifies data from their company’s CRM, Google Analytics, and their email host provider. It shows key metrics like campaign ROI, lead sources, and MQL-to-SQL conversion rates.
Ready to Stop Guessing and Start Deciding?
An effective data dashboard is not just a collection of charts, but a purpose-built tool designed to answer specific business questions and drive action. While manual methods exist, they’re not capable of powering a modern business the way it needs to be.
When it comes to smart, easy, reliable dashboards, Yurbi is the practical, affordable, and secure option. Build dashboards your company will use and turn raw data into a decision-making engine.
Schedule a personalized demo, and our team will help you build a prototype dashboard using your own data.