Step 1: write down the five questions
Before connecting anything, write the questions the head of sales asks every Monday. For most teams they are some version of:
- Are we going to hit the number this month and this quarter?
- Is there enough pipeline for next quarter?
- Where in the funnel are deals stalling?
- Which reps are ahead, and which need help?
- What did we close last week, and what slipped?
Each question becomes a region of the page. If a chart on the finished dashboard does not answer one of the five, it comes off. Ten minutes on this step saves an hour later.
Write the answers you expect, too: "we should be at 70% of quota by the 20th", "coverage should be 3× or better". Those expectations become the targets and thresholds on the tiles, and they are far easier to agree before anyone has seen the real numbers.
Step 2: connect the CRM and the billing system
The CRM — Salesforce, HubSpot or similar — holds deals, stages, owners, close dates and amounts. That is enough for pipeline and win rate. It is not enough for "what did we actually bill", because CRM amounts are what the rep expected, not what finance invoiced.
So connect billing too: Stripe, Xero, QuickBooks or your invoicing database. Relate the two once, by customer or by deal reference, and every chart can show CRM bookings next to invoiced revenue. The gap between them is itself a useful number — it is where discounting, delayed starts and cancelled deals hide.
Refresh the CRM hourly or nightly; billing nightly is enough. Connecting takes about 20 minutes for the two sources; relating them another 10.
Step 3: define the metrics, once
Use these definitions unless your business has a reason not to, and write whichever you choose next to the chart.
- Pipeline by stage — open deal value grouped by stage, weighted and unweighted. Coverage is open weighted pipeline closing next quarter divided by next quarter’s quota; below 3× is a warning for most B2B teams.
- Win rate — deals won divided by deals closed (won plus lost) in the period, by count and by value. Exclude deals still open; they distort both numbers.
- Sales velocity — (number of open opportunities × average deal value × win rate) ÷ average sales cycle in days. Example: 40 opportunities × $12,000 × 30% ÷ 45 days = $3,200 of revenue per day. Watch the trend, not the absolute figure.
- Quota attainment — closed-won value in the period divided by quota, per rep and for the team, with days remaining shown beside it.
- Average sales cycle — days from creation to close for won deals, median rather than mean, because one 400-day deal ruins an average.
- Slippage — deals whose close date moved out of the current period. Count and value.
Each of these is a calculated field defined once and reused; nobody should be re-deriving win rate in a different chart with a different exclusion.
Step 4: lay out the page
One screen, three bands, matching the five questions:
- Top band — the number. Four tiles: bookings month to date vs quota (with days left), bookings quarter to date vs quota, win rate this quarter vs last, pipeline coverage for next quarter. Colour the tile only when it is behind.
- Middle band — the funnel and the trend. Left: a horizontal bar chart of pipeline value by stage, with deal count labelled. Right: a line of weekly bookings for the last 13 weeks with the same weeks last year in grey.
- Bottom band — the people. A table of reps with quota attainment, open pipeline, win rate, average cycle and slipped deals, sorted by attainment. Next to it, a list of deals closed last week and deals that slipped.
Clicking a stage should filter the rep table to that stage; clicking a rep should filter the funnel to their deals. Test both before moving on. Keep the page to one screen on a laptop; if something does not fit, it belongs on a second page reached by clicking through, not at the bottom of this one. The sales overview template starts from this layout so you adjust rather than build.
Step 5: one dashboard, one view per rep
Do not build a dashboard per rep. Build one and apply a row rule: each rep sees deals where they are the owner; each manager sees their team; the head of sales sees everything. A second rule hides the margin column from everyone except finance and the sales director, if deal margin is on the page.
Check that the rule holds when a rep downloads the table, when the scheduled PDF arrives, and when someone asks the AI assistant "what is my pipeline?" — the answer must reflect only that person’s rows. In Klayara the rule attaches to the data, so all four paths respect it without separate setup. See security and permissions and row-level security explained.
Step 6: schedule the Monday report
The dashboard is done when it arrives without anyone opening it. Schedule the page as a PDF for 08:00 every Monday, to the sales meeting channel in Slack or WhatsApp and to the sales director by email. With the row rule in place, each rep can also receive their own version at the same time from the same schedule.
Run the meeting from the report for three weeks, then ask two questions: which chart did we never look at (remove it) and which question did we ask that the page could not answer (add it, and take something else off). After that, change the page no more than once a quarter. See Klayara for sales teams for what the finished result looks like.
Time budget for the afternoon: questions 10 min · connections 30 min · metrics 45 min · layout 60 min · permissions 20 min · schedule 10 min. Under three hours, with the rest of the afternoon for checking the numbers against the CRM.