Private Equity Operational Dashboards for Uncovering Trends and Making Data-Driven Decisions — Part 1: Sales Performance Dashboards
Earlier this year, we highlighted how interactive Power BI dashboards could help private equity companies track and measure the performance of their portfolio companies. This time, we’d like to explore how private equity operational dashboards can be used to track, measure, and inform decisions in two vital operational areas: sales and inventory management. In this first part, we’ll explore private equity dashboards for measuring sales performance.
Second only to measuring financial performance, the ability to track and measure sales performance, including product demand, pipeline, and revenue in near real-time, is a top priority when a private equity firm makes an acquisition.
Product Performance Dashboards
The dashboard below was initially developed for a private equity-backed machinery dealership chain. This dealership chain and the private equity company wanted to be able to understand at a glance:
- What products are most popular and which are least popular?
- What is the total revenue by day, month, quarter, and year?
- What is the revenue by product?
- Who are their biggest customers by revenue?
- What is each customer buying?
- How do all of these KPIs differ by region and/or branch?
The sales performance dashboard we created shows several key sales invoice amounts by day, month, quarter, and year. This further can be drilled down by item. Consequently, in a flash, the end-user has the ability to decide what are the most popular orders within a timeline and who are the most profitable customers.
This data alone can answer numerous business questions that can benefit the sales and marketing teams. The insights provided by this dashboard helped the sales, marketing, and product teams to understand the current state of their product demand, opportunities for growth, and areas for improvement. As a result, they can use this information to:
- Explore why products, locations, and customers were underperforming or outperforming others.
- Invest in sales and marketing for underperforming products or regions.
- Produce more high-demand and high-profit products.
- Understand seasonal trends to optimize sales and marketing efforts.
- Determine the viability of products and locations.
Sales Rep Performance Dashboards
Drilling down even further, the dashboard below was created to help identify performance at the individual sales rep level and answers questions like:
- Who are the top-performing sales reps? Who are the lowest-performing?
- What is the revenue by each sales rep?
- What is the performance by sales reps month-over-month?
- What are the products each rep is selling?
The dashboard above can quickly identify the most successful salespeople within the portfolio company based on how much revenue they brought in. Tracking their performance is as seamless as it looks. This gives the capacity to some managers to look at their employees’ performance from another perspective based on accurate and real-time data. It can also help drive decisions on hiring, training, coaching, and territory realignments.
Customer Profile Dashboards
Another type of sales performance dashboard we created for this client is a customer profile dashboard. This unique type of dashboard provides a snapshot of essential information about a customer, such as name, address, ID numbers, and interactive dashboards that provide information about their sales history and purchase trends.
The customer profile dashboard above can help sales and marketing teams personalize outreach at the customer level, resulting in better engagement, more sales, and higher profits.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this blog on private equity operational dashboards for sales performance. If you have any questions or want to see more dashboard examples, please contact us to connect with a data analytics dashboard specialist.
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Originally published at https://aptitive.com on September 9, 2021.
