Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Sales Dashboard with an Example

Illustration from Popsy.co

Creating a sales dashboard is a powerful way to visualize and track your sales data, helping you make informed decisions that drive growth. In this step-by-step guide, we'll show you how to build a professional sales dashboard using Dashbreeze's sales dashboard template and its Google Sheets integration.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the entire process, from setting up your data source to customizing your dashboard for maximum impact.

By the end of this tutorial, this will be the result: a clear, interactive sales dashboard that provides insights into your sales performance, trends, and KPIs.

You can access the live dashboard through the link: https://tutorial-sales-dashboard.dashbreeze.com

What you'll need

Here's what you'll need to follow along and create your own sales dashboard:

1. A free account in Dashbreeze, a dashboard builder designed for users of all skill levels.
2. A free Google account to access Google Sheets.

Creating an account on Dashbreeze

Dashbreeze is a dashboard builder designed to help you create customizable, interactive dashboards without requiring extensive technical skills. It offers various templates and integrations, such as Google Sheets, enabling users to visualize and analyze their data effectively.

To create your account, visit dashbreeze.com and click on Create a dashboard. You can sign up using an email address or a Google account.

When you log in, there’s an onboarding process. You can hit Skip if you want since this tutorial will walk you through how the platform works.

Creating my sales dashboard

Dashbreeze allows you to create dashboards from scratch or start with a customizable template.

To create a dashboard, just click on the Create dashboard button.

For this tutorial, we'll begin with a sales template, specifically the Sales Report Overview. Just click on it, and your dashboard will be created.

Analyzing which data to choose

Dashbreeze dashboard templates provide valuable insights into key data points to monitor when it comes to sales.

If you analyze the dashboard, it monitors:

1. How close we’re to reaching our sales goal
2. The sales progression
3. Sales by salesperson
4. Sales by channel

While these templates offer a solid foundation, Dashbreeze allows for various customizations to meet your specific data needs.

For this tutorial, let's assume our business consists of two physical stores located in Boulder and Fort Collins. We want to monitor the sales performance of each store, each salesperson, and the product lines we sell, which include clothing, shoes, and accessories. So, in our template, we’ll need to change the "Sales per Channel" chart to "Sales by Store" and add a chart to track the sales levels of the product lines.

The templates provide a starting point in terms of layout and potential data to monitor, but you can completely customize them to fit your unique requirements and ensure you capture the information that matters most to your business.

Bringing in my data

Now that I know what we need to monitor, it’s time to bring this data into Dashbreeze.

Since we're talking about a sales dashboard, it's important that our data is always up to date. Dashbreeze has an automatic refresh feature for data sourced from its integrations. Therefore, we will choose Google Sheets as the data source for the charts in our dashboard.

Integrating your Google account

Integrating your Dashbreeze account with Google Sheets is quite simple.

Back on the homepage, you'll find an integration button on the left sidebar. Click on it. When you do, you will be directed to the integrations panel, where you can connect the Google account you want to use. Click on Create integration.

On the next screen, click the Connect button located on the Google Sheets card. Then, give a name to this integration.

A window will pop up asking you to connect a Google account. You can then either select one of the accounts shown or click on Use another account to sign in with a different Google account that you’re not currently logged into.

Remember to grant the necessary permissions for the account where the spreadsheet you want to use is located.

If everything goes smoothly, you will be automatically redirected to start creating a dataset with the connected account.

Selecting my data

If you want to use the same data we're using in this tutorial, simply copy the spreadsheet from the link below to your Google account:

Now that Dashbreeze has access to your Google Sheets spreadsheets, it's time to specify which spreadsheet we will use.

Within Dashbreeze, the process of selecting the data that will be used for the data blocks is called creating a dataset.

If you just connected your Google account, you will already be on the dataset creation screen. If you're not, simply click on Datasets located in the left sidebar, and then click on Create dataset.

Each sheet within a spreadsheet is a different dataset. Therefore, since our spreadsheet contains two sheets (salesperson-store-data and product-store-data), we’ll create two datasets.

Creating a dataset is quite simple:

1. Give it a name;
2. If you have more than one Google account connected to Dashbreeze, you need to select which account has the spreadsheet that you’ll use in the dataset;
3. Paste the link to the Google Sheets spreadsheet;
4. Select the sheet;
5. Our spreadsheet has headers, so we’ll leave the Headers checkbox checked;
6. IMPORTANT STEP: To ensure your data is updated automatically, enable the auto-refresh setting and configure the update frequency.

On the next screen, it's time to type the data. In other words, specify whether the data in each column is a date, number, or text.

Repeat this process for as many datasets as you want to create. In our case, we'll do this action one more time.

Customizing my template

Now let's customize our template. To do this, click on the home icon in the left sidebar, find the dashboard we created earlier, and open it.

Connecting my data to the block

The first thing we'll do is connect the data from the datasets we created in the previous step to our blocks. To do this, click on the block you want to edit, then click Edit. In the panel that opens on the right, click on Connect dataset.

In the table that opens, check the box next to the dataset you want to use for this block, and then click Select.

Next, it's time to configure our block, which simply means selecting which columns from the dataset we chose will be used in that block.

To do this, just scroll down the right panel and, in the appropriate fields, select the columns.

We'll repeat this process for all the blocks already rendered on the screen.

The cool thing about connecting the data to the block instead of the dashboard is that it gives us the flexibility to use different datasets—or even the same dataset—within the same dashboard.

Our final configuration is for the Sales per Channel chart. We won’t be tracking that metric in our dashboard, so this chart will change to Sales by Store. Follow the same steps to connect the data, and to change the chart title, go to the Design tab in the right panel and update the text in the Title field.

So far, our dashboard will look something like this:

Adding new blocks

If you've been following this tutorial from the beginning, you've noticed that our template only has 4 blocks, and we need 5. To add new blocks to your dashboard, click on the Blocks button in the left sidebar.

To track the performance of the product categories being sold, we’ll use a bar chart.

This new chart will be placed in the same row as the Sales by Seller and Sales by Store charts. To do this, resize the other charts and position the new chart where you want it. To get everything just right, you can use the positioning boxes that appear in the lower right corner after selecting a block on your dashboard.

Configuring the filter

Setting up the dashboard filter is a bit different from the other components. In this case, you don’t need to select a dataset. This component reads all the datasets present in the dashboard, and all you have to do is choose which columns from the datasets you want to use as filtering parameters.

So far, our dashboard will look something like this:

As you can see, we made just a few adjustments to get closer to our final version. In this process, we changed the dashboard title, added another filter, updated the first chart by changing its title, and added a footer. In the donut chart, we included a legend. Lastly, we modified the title in the bar chart.

Customizing the colors

Now it's time to change our colors. We'll use two methods:

1. We'll change the colors of the entire dashboard in the Themes panel, located in the left sidebar.
2. We'll change the colors of an individual chart to make it stand out on the dashboard.

As you can see, the first chart's colors don't quite match the theme. That's why we're going to make the second customization. To do this, click on the first chart and then hit Edit. In the right panel, switch to the Design tab and scroll down to the Block Theme section. This is where we’ll adjust the colors for the card and the text to make sure they fit the overall theme.

To keep things consistent, you can check the colors of the selected theme by clicking on Themes and then selecting the Create new theme button.

For this dashboard, we'll change the card background color to match the Primary color of the theme we selected, and set the primary text color to the theme's Primary Text color.

After these changes, our dashboard will be almost ready for sharing!

Customizing the mobile version

With Dashbreeze, you can customize the positioning and size of the blocks in the mobile version. Simply click on the mobile icon at the top of the screen. Arrange them in a way that’s most convenient for you.

Basically, we’ll place the title and filters at the top and arrange the remaining charts at the bottom.

Sharing your creation

You can share your dashboards via a link or embed them on your website. In both cases, you need to publish the dashboard first. Just click on Publish Dashboard and then on Share.

Optional: To make it easier for users to access our dashboard, we can customize our shareable link. To do this, go to Settings in the left sidebar of your dashboard.

Conclusion

And that's it! We have a sales dashboard that updates with new data from our Google Sheets every 24 hours. All of this was done in under 20 minutes. Pretty cool, right?

We hope this tutorial has shown you how easy it is to create and customize a sales dashboard using Dashbreeze. By starting with a template and tailoring it to fit your specific needs, you can gain valuable insights and keep your data up to date. The flexibility to adjust colors, layouts, and data sources means you can make each dashboard truly your own, while the auto-refresh feature ensures that your data is always current. Additionally, the sharing options allow you to effortlessly present your results to colleagues, stakeholders, or clients.

Now, it's your turn—jump in, explore the possibilities, and build a dashboard that perfectly aligns with your business goals.

Happy dashboarding!