How To… Build Dashboards That Tell the Whole Funnel Story – A Quick Guide

When reporting is spread across different dashboards, with different teams using their own definitions and metrics, it becomes difficult to get a clear picture of the funnel. 

That makes it harder to plan ahead, understand what's driving revenue and spot problems early enough to act on them. Got any hair left to tear out?  😅

But luckily, there is a way to get everyone working from the same view of the funnel. Joe and Nat covered exactly how to do it in our webinar on building dashboards that tell the whole funnel story.

If you missed it, you can watch the webinar on demand. We've also pulled the main points together below.

Start with one Commercial Dashboard

We recommend creating a central Commercial Dashboard that Sales, Marketing and your wider GTM team can use as a shared view of funnel performance.

You can still have separate Sales and Marketing dashboards for the day-to-day detail each team needs. Your Commercial Dashboard should be more focused, bringing together the pre-agreed reports that help everyone understand how the business is performing.

That could include your North Star metric, top-of-funnel performance, deal stages, Closed Won and Lost deals, forecasting, conversion and pipeline velocity.

Before building those reports, think about what you actually need to learn from them. In the webinar, we grouped this into three areas:

• Are we going to hit target?

• What's working well?

• Where are we losing business?

  
  

Starting here gives you a reason for every report you add to the dashboard.

Are we going to hit target?

A good forecast gives you an early indication of the revenue you're likely to bring in over a future period. If you're heading towards a shortfall, you have time to look at pipeline generation, marketing activity or sales capacity before you reach the end of the quarter.

There are a few ways to build that view.

Weighted forecasting

A weighted forecast takes the value of each deal and adjusts it according to the probability of that deal closing.

If you have a £10,000 opportunity sitting at a stage with a 40% probability of reaching Closed Won, it contributes £4,000 to your weighted forecast.

You can then roll those deals up by expected close date to estimate how much revenue is likely to land during a particular period.

A couple of things need to be in place for this to be useful. You need to capture deal amounts and close dates and keep them up to date as opportunities move through the pipeline. Your stage probabilities also need to reflect the likelihood of a deal progressing from that stage to Closed Won.

Once you've got that data in place, you can compare the weighted forecast with another useful view.

Forecast categories

Forecast categories bring the salesperson's judgement into your reporting.

Deals can be grouped into categories such as Pipeline, Best Case and Commit, based on how confident the rep is that they'll close.

It's worth agreeing exactly what those categories mean before you start reporting on them. They also need to be reviewed regularly so that the confidence attached to a deal reflects what's actually happening with the opportunity.

Looking at forecast categories alongside your weighted forecast gives you two different signals. You can see what the historical data suggests is likely to close and compare that with what your reps expect to close. One more number is worth adding to that picture.

Pipeline coverage

Pipeline coverage looks at how much pipeline you have available compared with the revenue you're trying to generate:

Total Pipeline Value ÷ Target Revenue = Pipeline Coverage

If your pipeline isn't large enough to support your target, this report gives you an early indication that you need to create more pipeline.

The right forecasting setup will depend on your sales motion and deal volume. In the webinar, we recommended using forecast categories and weighted forecasting where they're useful for your business, then looking at them alongside pipeline coverage to understand the wider health of your pipeline.

Once you can see what's likely to happen, you can start looking backwards at what's creating those opportunities in the first place.

What's working well?

Most Marketing teams already have some form of attribution reporting at the top of the funnel.

You might know where leads came from or which campaigns generated MQLs.

To understand which activity contributes to revenue, that reporting needs to continue through SQLs, SALs, and Closed Won deals.

One way we recommend structuring this is by capturing Deal Source and Deal Channel separately.

Deal Source records the action that resulted in the deal conversion. That might be requesting a demo or registering for a webinar.

Deal Channel records how that person reached you, such as Paid LinkedIn, Google Paid or Organic.

Say webinars are creating a healthy number of opportunities. Looking at Deal Source tells you that the webinar converted those people into deals. Deal Channel could then show that a significant proportion of those registrations were originally driven by Paid LinkedIn.

You can now see more of the relationship between the activity you're investing in and the revenue eventually coming through the funnel.

Look beyond the conversion point

A Deal Source tells you where someone converted. Their journey before that point may have been much longer.

Someone could download an ebook, subscribe to your newsletter, attend a webinar and later request a demo. If the demo gets all the credit, the earlier activity disappears from your reporting.

That's why the webinar also looked at the importance of capturing the touchpoints that happen before conversion.

This gives you more context when you're reviewing marketing performance and deciding where to put future budget.

By this stage, your dashboard can show you where revenue is likely to land and some of the activity contributing to it. The next area to add is conversion.

Where are we losing business?

There are plenty of places where someone can drop out of your funnel.

At the top, they could abandon a form or click an ad without converting. Once they're in the CRM, a lead might sit untouched, get routed incorrectly or wait too long for a response.

Further down the funnel, opportunities can stall after a demo, prospects can go quiet, or procurement and technical blockers can slow a deal down. Leakage can continue after the sale too if poor onboarding eventually contributes to churn. You don't need a separate dashboard report for every possible scenario.

Start by measuring conversion between the main stages of your funnel:

New Lead → MQL → SQL → Opportunity → Closed Won

That gives you a high-level view of where people drop off.

If MQL-to-SQL conversion starts falling, for example, you know which part of the funnel needs investigating. You can then look at lead quality, response times, routing or whatever else might be contributing to the change.

For those conversion rates to mean anything, though, your funnel stages need to be consistent.

Define your anchor stages

Choose the key stages every relevant lead or deal should pass through and make sure Sales and Marketing agree on the definition of each one.

If deals regularly skip those stages, your conversion reporting becomes skewed. If Marketing and Sales have different definitions of an SQL, you'll have a similar problem even if the report itself has been built correctly.

Agreeing on those anchor stages gives you the structure you need to measure movement through the funnel consistently.

At this point, you've got the foundations of your Commercial Dashboard. You can see how you're tracking against target, understand what's contributing to pipeline and revenue, and identify where conversion is falling away.

Now you need people to actually use it.

Put the dashboard at the centre of your TOFU meeting

We recommend running a weekly TOFU meeting with GTM leads.

Despite the name, this goes beyond Marketing. It's a cross-functional meeting focused on top-of-funnel growth, with the Commercial Dashboard providing the shared data for the discussion.

Your agenda could cover:

1. Key data from the Commercial Dashboard

2. Any areas that need a deeper look

3. Key team initiatives

4. Actions from the previous week

5. Upcoming events and AOB

This gives you a regular point to review changes in the numbers and agree on what happens next.

A drop in pipeline coverage might lead to a discussion around pipeline generation. A change in conversion could prompt a closer look at one stage of the funnel. Strong Closed Won performance from a particular channel could influence where Marketing invests next.

You can then come back the following week, review the actions and see what's changed.

How to get started

You probably won't have every piece of data you need on day one, and that's fine.

Start with the reporting you can build from the data you already have.

This week, we'd recommend:

1. Agree which reports your Commercial Dashboard needs.

2. Work out which of those reports you can build with your existing data.

3. Identify the data you're currently missing.

4. Build the reports you can now.

5. Get your weekly TOFU meeting in the diary.

From there, you can work through the gaps. That might mean changing how information is stored, introducing new processes to collect it or building the remaining reports once enough reliable data is available.

Doing it in that order also means you can start using your Commercial Dashboard while the rest of the reporting develops, rather than waiting for the entire setup to be finished.

And that's a wrap!

A Commercial Dashboard should give your GTM team a shared view of the funnel and enough information to make better decisions.

Start with the areas covered above. Build a view of your forecast and pipeline coverage, follow attribution through to revenue, then measure conversion between your agreed funnel stages.

Once those reports are in place, use your weekly TOFU meeting to watch what's changing and decide where the team needs to focus next.

Missed the session? You can watch Joe and Nat walk through the full dashboard setup on demand.