Set out to build something sales managers and executives could actually use, not just a dashboard for the sake of having one. Ended up building two separate ones, because sales performance and customer behavior are really different questions, even though people often try to cram them into a single view.
The sales side needed a KPI overview first, total sales, profits, quantities, current year against previous, because nothing means anything without a comparison point. Broke that down into monthly trends too, so the highest and lowest months would actually stand out instead of getting lost in a line chart nobody looks at twice. Compared product subcategories against each other, current versus previous year, sales and profit both, since a subcategory doing well on revenue but poorly on profit is a very different story than one doing well on both. Added weekly sales and profit trends as well, with average lines so it's obvious at a glance which weeks were actually good and which just looked fine next to a bad one.
The customer side asked different questions entirely. Wanted total customers, sales per customer, and order counts, again year over year, plus monthly trends with the same highest and lowest highlighting. Built a distribution view showing how many orders customers were placing, because loyalty isn't really visible until you see how it's distributed across the base, not just averaged into one number. Added a Top 10 customers by profit list too, rank, order count, current sales and profit, last order date, the kind of thing an account manager actually opens before a client call.
Made both dashboards let you jump between years and navigate between the two views without friction, and made the charts themselves interactive, click a bar, filter the whole page, rather than making people dig through separate filter panels. Added filters for product category and subcategory, plus region, state, and city, because "sales are up" means very little until you know where.
By the end, had something that actually answered the questions a sales manager or a marketing lead would ask, not just numbers arranged to look impressive.
Made with Bullet