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Lead generation is messy, period.
It takes a lot of work. And a lot of tracking to understand how many leads a channel and/or campaign is driving, what the lead’s status is, who’s engaging it, and so on.
Thankfully, a leads dashboard can save the day.
How, you ask?
By giving you all the intel on your leads including your lead generation strategy’s performance on one screen.
Ready to learn how to create a lead dashboard?
We’ve got the step-by-step process for you including insights from 36 experts out of which 47.22% come from the B2C services/products industry, 44.44% from B2B services/products field, and the remaining 8.33% are from the agency field.
Altogether, here’s what you’ll learn today:
Dive in.
A leads dashboard is a central dashboard showing all the essential metrics related to lead generation and nurturing.
To clarify:
So what’s the role of the lead gen dashboard here? It gives a full overview of how many leads you’re driving, how much that’s costing you, how well they’re converting, and so on.
Put simply, a lead generation dashboard gives you a high-level view of how well your lead generation and nurturing processes are delivering results. In fact, 67% of our respondents think that lead gen dashboards are very important for their businesses.
Related: 16 Ways to Use Facebook Ads for Lead Generation
To measure lead generation, count the total number of inbound or outbound leads or individuals who show interest in your product/service.
You can go as in-depth into measuring lead generation as you like though.
For example, you can calculate the lead generation rate channel to learn the effectiveness of a channel in terms of driving leads. To this end, take the total number of leads and divide it by the total number of visitors coming through a specific channel. Multiply the resulting number with 100 to get a percentage value.
Truth be told, measuring leads isn’t very technical for small, service-based businesses. Oftentimes, these businesses can simply add the total number of leads generated on their fingertips.
As the business size and complexity grows though, calculating leads becomes challenging. 1 in 3 of our respondents agree that the biggest barriers to lead gen measurement are the lack of a lead gen strategy and audience insights.
In fact, 36.1% struggle with the lack of a defined lead generation strategy. What’s more, 33.3% grapple with a lack of audience insights.
Related: B2C Lead Generation Strategy: Key Differences and Best Approaches
With the basics and barriers out of the way, let’s start chipping at designing a leads dashboard. To begin with, our respondents say that the top metrics to add to a lead gen dashboard are:
Let’s discuss each of these lead generation metrics briefly:
Like most marketers and marketing managers, you want to know how well your efforts are translating into results each month. Which sources generate the most traffic and leads? Creating a comprehensive report takes time and a lot of data combining, but with our free dashboard, you can have it ready in just a few clicks.
Our HubSpot Leads by Source Dashboard includes data from HubSpot Marketing with key performance metrics like:
New Contacts by Source – identify your most effective lead generation channels by digging into the number of new contacts acquired from various sources within a defined period of time with this plug-and-play free HubSpot Leads by Source Dashboard.
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your HubSpot account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
On to the meaty bit next. Here’s a list followed by the details:
To start off, it’s important you have a clear focus on who your target lead is and how you plan to attract and nurture prospects.
“As a business gifting platform that serves several distinct client personas, we needed to examine our performance against revenue impact,” shares Alyce’s Joe Manna.
“The marketing and sales dashboard we use displays data based on account size. We can serve smaller organizations, but we discovered that our sweet spot is mid-market and above — and we’d only know this by drilling deeper into these segments into our performance reporting.” Talk about clarity of focus!
It’s because of this learned-with-time lesson that Manna advises, “When creating a lead-gen dashboard, the one recommendation is to promote focus. Try not to report on anything with a number. Instead, stick to the measurements that you control and can influence.”
This begins with having clarity on where your data resides and then collating it into one place so you can plug the source into your dashboard building tool.
Sharing their data dashboard creating process, Keith Miccio from Spacelift comments, “One of the most important factors for us was identifying where all the available data resided. We had collected many leads before establishing a proper sales team with their functions and proper practices and most of our data was scattered all over the place.”
Their next step? “We gathered all the available leads at the moment that were mostly in excel sheets! And put them into Salesforce. We’ve heard many great reviews about Salesforce, especially for small to medium-sized businesses, and also due to its edge when it comes to advanced features and customization.”
Related: 24 Best B2B Lead Generation Tools for Getting More Targeted Leads
“First, we identified our KPIs,” points out Isaiah Henry from Seabreeze Management Company.
“We looked at the number of leads we have, where our leads come from, current leads by stage, total lead value, and our conversion rate. Once we had our KPIs, we were able to develop our lead generation dashboard.”
“We pulled our data from our data source and then implemented it into Google Sheets. From there we created lead generation KPIs chart. Then we were able to effectively build our dashboard,” Henry says.
“I’d also recommend keeping your data live with a tool such as Coefficient or a similar app. This will keep you up-to-date and able to analyze your leads in real-time.”
Henry isn’t alone in suggesting identifying metrics to add to your dashboard though. Eliana Levine of FindPeopleEasy stresses its importance too — sharing the exact metrics their team adds to their lead dashboard. “I have been using Databox, (Ed. marketing reporting software) for a while now, and my team feels extremely helpful with the metrics and tools for convenient usage.”
“Here are some of the essential lead-generating metrics that I keep a watch on my business dashboard.
PRO TIP: Interested in learning more about how Databox can help improve lead generation for your business? Check out how Impulse Creative increased client lead generation by 15% with real-time reporting in Databox.
But where Levine and Henry suggest it’s important to know your lead gen metrics, VEM Group’s David Reid recommends also knowing the one key metric that is important to you.
“Once one understands the important facets of a company, then the right thing to do is to choose a lead generation metric that can be the best for your business,” Reid shares.
“After years of practicing it, I have found out that the click-through rate is the most needed metric to develop a successful lead generation software for my business,” points out Reid.
“Here’s how I have learned to measure this metric and find out the appropriate results accordingly: The Click-through Rate is based on the Call to Action (CTA) and measures the number of people who have clicked the CTA link regardless of the placement. Usually, it has more CTAs.”
“To measure this, one has to determine the number of CTA clicks and the click-through rate,” Reid explains.
“For instance, I have created a campaign where the ads put your audience through a landing page. The three CTRs to be considered are for the PPCs, landing page, and verification emails. Here, the visitor would be delivering the details, and a confirmation email has to be sent to them. A certain user will be considered a leader if and only if he/she approves the mail.”
On the surface, it seems that lead generation is the marketing department’s job. The key to a winning lead generation strategy, however, is ensuring the marketing and sales teams work together.
For example, when creating your lead gen strategy, it’s essential the sales team shares notes on the buyer persona (it’s refined over time so it’s essential to collaborate on this regularly) and gives feedback on how well previous MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) converted.
All this helps the marketing team understand who to target, what interests them, which marketing campaigns drive the best results in terms of lead generation, and more.
It’s also important that you bring data from sales to your leads generation dashboard. Notta’s Richard Notta makes a case for this.
Sharing their example, Notta writes, “As a startup, our environment is constantly evolving so we want to keep an eye on everything. We created a custom dashboard having all our leading generating efforts.”
“We bring everything together to see the big picture. Unlike raw data, our dashboard makes it easier for us to make sense of the bulk data and make decisions accordingly,” Notta continues.
“How did it become the most important factor? With all the data around us, it got hard to make sense of it. We could see the average age or geographical location of our website visitors, the channel they came from, or the pages they visited on the website, but we couldn’t find a link between them. So we developed a custom dashboard that contains both high-level info and all the details of our marketing performance. It also has the sales data to calculate our ROI.”
Doing so helped the Notta team grow. “This particularly helped when we started to expand Notta to different countries,” in Notta’s words. “The ROI in European countries and the USA was around 30%. However, it fell below 5% in India. With our dashboard, we quickly picked up this variation in the regional ROI of our marketing campaigns and adjusted our strategy for the South Asian countries accordingly.”
Related: We asked marketers which channel they rely on most for B2B lead generation. The margin between the top-voted channel and all of the others was remarkable.
And finally, before you bring together all the collated metrics, take the time to choose a dashboard-building tool that meets your needs.
Ideally, look for a tool that’s easy to use, provides templates to get you started easily, and offers an active support team to solve any roadblocks you hit when creating dashboards.
You’ll also want to select a tool that offers several integrations. This is important for importing data from different sources.
One final thing that Brandon Walsh from Golf Clubs Guru points out is scalability.
“The most important factor to consider while developing a successful lead generation dashboard for my business was scalability,” Walsh explains. “This is because the main goal of the lead generation dashboard is to improve sales, which in turn will grow my business. It’s why it is important to know if the lead generation dashboard will grow with my business or would I have to change the software at some later stage.”
“Most dashboards charge per user, so it is essential for us to understand how much our monthly invoice would increase if our sales team expands,” adds Walsh. “This is why I value scalability as an important factor because a dashboard should have the capabilities to grow with a business.”
Ready to build your leads dashboard? We recommend using Databox (yep, that’s us ?).
Creating a dashboard in Databox is pretty easy. In fact, you can set up your lead dashboard in just a few clicks.
Melanie Musson from InsuranceBlogByChris.com agrees. “It is so easy to use, that you can make an amazing-looking dashboard while you’re perfecting your skills. Also, it’s customizable so when you have an idea, you can usually tweak the dashboard to fit what you’re thinking.”
You can build a dashboard in Databox in just 3 simple steps:
From here, you can customize the dashboard as you see fit – move blocks around, resize them — even change the dashboard’s color and add your logo to customize it as per your brand guidelines.
You can find out more about building dashboards in Databox in this video.
If you still hit a snag when creating your lead gen dashboard with Databox, our CS team can help build your first dashboard for free.
According to our respondents, the most popular data source for a lead dashboard is Google Analytics.
More than 86% of our respondents opted for it. Other top data sources include HubSpot, Salesforce, and marketing automation tool — all ranked the same.
Let’s break these important tools down:
And before we wrap this up, let’s leave you with free lead generation dashboard templates.
Using these makes it super easy to build a leads dashboard. To add, all templates are customizable so you can easily add or remove metrics that you want to see in your dashboard.
Here are our top lead generation templates:
This lead gen dashboard template gives you a detailed view of your leads in Salesforce and allows you to accurately track your sales progress without hassle.
Some of the metrics included in this template are new leads, leads by source, converted leads, and leads status.
Use this HubSpot lead generation dashboard template to identify your most effective lead sources, your landing page conversion rates, and the volume of MQLs and SQLs generated.
Some metrics on this dashboard include new MQLs, new SQLs, new sessions, lead sources, etc.
Use this GA lead gen dashboard for tracking your website performance and dig deeper into the specific pages on your website that drive traffic and conversions.
Some noteworthy metrics that you can track with this dashboard template include bounce rate, goal completion, average session duration, sessions by source, and more.
Here is another great example of a Hubspot lead gen dashboard. It provides insights on which specific sources drive the most visits to your website and the highest quality leads for your business.
Some of the metrics included in this template are leads by source, sessions by source, visitor to lead conversion rate, and new contacts by referrals.
This Salesforce lead dashboard template gives you an overview of your leads in Salesforce so you can accurately track your sales progress.
Some of the metrics included in this template are leads source, leads status, leads owner, converted leads, and new leads.
Use it to track how many leads are coming in, from where, who’s handling them, and how many of them are converting.
Convinced you need a leads dashboard for tracking all your lead gen and conversion efforts?
Start with identifying which metrics are important to you and their data sources. Then simply plug in those sources in Databox and you’ll have your lead gen dashboard ready within minutes.
And, yes, in case you’re still wondering, creating dashboards with Databox is truly easy.
If nothing, grab a relevant template from our library and customize it to create a personalized dashboard. Or ping our CS team to help you design your first dashboard.
So what are you waiting for? Sign up for Databox today and start building your leads dashboard — all without any design or coding chops.
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Masooma is a freelance writer for SaaS and a lover to-do lists. When she's not writing, she usually has her head buried in a business book or fantasy novel.
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