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Poor communication, unclear metrics, scope creep, and the team being pulled in too many directions are just a few of the things that can derail your team’s performance and tank employee morale.Fortunately, there is a fix. Enter team performance dashboards.While it won’t be easy, you can use team performance dashboards to bring focus, direction, and consistency to your team, so they can execute at a high level.In this post, we’re going to share the five most popular types of team performance dashboards along with the metrics you should include.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t effectively manage it. From sales and marketing to customer support, product, and engineering, having metrics for each team allows you to measure overall productivity and performance.This allows you to make informed, data-driven decisions based on the progress each team is making.Some general examples of team metrics include employee satisfaction, cost efficiency, project scope / requirements, project quality, team velocity, burndown, project cycle time, tasks completed, and number of work in progress tasks.
A team dashboard is like a map where you can get a holistic view of all of your team metrics in one place.Since team dashboards can vary based on the specific team and metrics, we reached out to 30 respondents from the B2C industry (43.33%), B2B industry (33.33%), and agencies (23.33%) to find out about the team dashboards they are using.
Before we dive in, here is more context on the types of teams we surveyed. For example, 50% of our respondents stated that their teams have 10 people or more.
And over 40% of our respondents belong to marketing teams.
According to the people we surveyed, here are the 5 most popular types of team performance dashboards.
Project management is all about juggling: resources, expectations, people, data, and much more. And as a project manager, you not only have to know where your projects are at any given moment, but you also have to be aware of where they’re going and where they need to be in the future. To do that using a project management system, you need an actionable dashboard that allows you to monitor metrics like:
Now you can benefit from the experience of our project managers, who have put together great plug-and-play Databox templates showing the most important KPIs for tracking your team’s performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in management reports, and best of all, it’s free!
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 project management tool with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
While the five data dashboard types we shared above are fairly standard, the metrics you include in these dashboards will vary based on your specific department or team. After all, measuring team performance and productivity for a marketing team would be very different than how you’d measure sales or support team performance.
Some of the key metrics included in a marketing team performance dashboard are:
For instance, Michael Kim of Evcharger Reviews considers the first four metrics mentioned – leads generated, cost per lead, brand impressions and traffic – essential metrics to include in their dashboard. However, Jacob Villa of Authority tracks website traffic, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction levels.
Villa explains in detail how these metrics are helpful: “I always track web traffic numbers. This helps me to see how many people are coming to our site and where they are coming from. It also allows me to identify potential issues, such as if we suddenly lose traffic from a particular source. For example, if we see a drop in web traffic numbers from Google, we can investigate to check if there has been a change in how Google ranks our site.
Second, I track conversion rates. This helps me to see how effective our marketing campaigns are and whether we need to make any changes or adjustments. This metric shows us our return on investment for each marketing campaign and helps us to view which campaigns are working well and which ones need improvement.
Finally, I track customer satisfaction levels. This metric is important because it helps me gauge how well we meet customer needs and expectations. One great example of this is when we launched our new website. We track customer satisfaction levels regularly to ensure that our website is easy to use and navigate and that our customers can find what they need. By tracking these essential metrics, I can get a clear picture of our team’s performance in marketing and identify areas that may need some attention.”
Some marketing teams might choose more specific metrics based on the specific strategies they are using. For instance, a brand that is focused primarily on content marketing and SEO might also include team metrics tied to new content and backlinks in addition to revenue and leads.
Here are the metrics you should track if your marketing is particularly focused on content and SEO:
According to Mariusz Michalowski of Spacelift, tracking output metrics such as these is important if you “want to see the work done, not the work in progress.”
“The results that determine the website growth is more important to track than what every team member is working on. If the goals are achieved reasonably, there is no need to track an individual’s work performance and projects.”
You can also determine your north star metric – one that is an indicator of your team’s success. For Simon Bacher of Ling App, that metric is app sales: “Because our product is a gamified language learning app, I want to ensure consistently increasing sales monthly. Content marketing is our main driver to attaining our sales goal. My marketing team generates at least three blog articles daily and includes them in their language-specific categories. I lead our sales metric monitoring and sales marketing coaching. With my team members’ collaborative effort, we have attained more than 10 million downloads.”
The north star team metric for sales teams is revenue. However, there are a lot of things that go into this, from sales rep productivity to lead conversion rate. Here are the top metrics you should include in a sales team dashboard:
Allen McNabb of Image Building Media explains how they tie the metrics they track to goals, “For example, if our goal is to increase sales by 10% this quarter, I would want a metric on the dashboard that shows sales figures for the current quarter. I would also want a metric that shows how many new customers we’ve acquired this quarter. These two metrics would give me a good idea of whether or not my team is on track to reach our goal.”
Michael Bell of Manukora explains that the sales team performance metrics they track point their focus on customers. “We want to know how many potential customers we’re converting, how much it costs to acquire each new customer, how many customers we’re losing, and how long we plan to retain each of our customers. All of these metrics go hand-in-hand. They help guide our sales team’s overall strategy.”
The north star metric for customer support teams is customer satisfaction. After all, if all of your customers are unhappy, you won’t be in business for very long.
A key element of customer satisfaction is response time. And the companies we surveyed gave us a unified answer here.
Alex Hamilton of e-Solar explains how they find this metric helpful: “We work in a very competitive local solar market where customer service and quick responses are of highest importance to customers. We track when an email or inquiry is received, and how long it takes our admin/sales staff to respond to or follow up the inquiry. This is benchmarked across the entire team, and we know where and who to focus our resources on to get them more efficient.”
Georgi Todorov of ThriveMyWay agrees and adds, ”We take special note of First Response Time, which is the metric that measures the time between receiving a question from a customer and responding to it for the first time. Responding to customers as soon as possible is always at the top of our list. Customers hate feeling ignored, so it’s crucial that we let them know we have received their feedback and we are working to solve their issues. This metric helps us determine ways in which we can speed up our response time and make sure the customer knows we are always listening to them a,d and ready to answer their questions.
Other customer support metrics you should include in your performance dashboard are:
The two north star metrics for an operations or project management team are burndown and team velocity.
“Burndown is a helpful metric for our team, measuring the average rate it takes our team to complete their work,” says Ruben Gamez of SignWell. “Since many of our projects are similar in structure and nature, we use burndown rates to create highly-accurate project timelines that help us meet client-facing and internal deadlines at a rate of almost 100%. We continually measure burndown, noting any changes in averages over time that we can use to adjust new deadlines and project workflows. Our goal is always to maintain a steady pace and optimize our time without compromising on our final product, and measuring burndown helps maintain both quality and speed.”
Fernando Lopez of Circuit adds, “Team velocity, the measure of how many tasks our team can handle within a given time, is critical in our marketing department. Since we’re focused on creating a significant amount of high-quality content and running several projects simultaneously, we use these measures to monitor how quickly we get through backlogged tasks to better plan future project phases. If our velocity starts to lag, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and lean out our strategy, streamline our creation processes, or add more members to our team.”
In addition, measuring work in progress tasks can be helpful for teams that struggle with focus, scope creep, or gold-plating.
“The most important metric to measure team performance is WIP or work in progress,” says Peter Robert of Expert Computer Solutions. “When a team’s WIP is too high, the team is unfocused and not swarming where possible. This means work is at risk of not being complete. When a team has a lot of work in progress, a minor issue can cause all of that work to fail. This also means that, if the team shifts directions, none of those work items can quickly shift to another team without updates on the work that has begun. WIP should be managed and kept low so that risk is minimized and teams can be as efficient as possible.”
Other operations or project management KPIs and metrics you should keep an eye on are:
With Databox, you can create a custom team dashboard in minutes using our drag-and-drop interface.
If you are not sure what metrics to include or simply don’t have the time or desire to build it yourself, our team can build your first dashboard for free.
Ready to create your team performance dashboard? Check out our free dashboard setup service or reach out to our support team in chat now.
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Jessica Malnik is a content strategist and copywriter for SaaS and productized service businesses. Her writing has appeared on The Next Web, Social Media Examiner, SEMRush, CMX, Help Scout, Convince & Convert, and many other sites.
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