Sales teams today are under more pressure than ever: markets are becoming more dynamic, customers expect personalized support across all channels, and increasing competition is putting margins under pressure. At the same time, data, digital processes, and automation are becoming more important to enable faster and more precise decision-making.

Sales managers and account managers therefore need a clear overview at all times of customer potential, pipeline, forecasts, performance, and budgets. Many of these data points are already maintained in Salesforce and enriched through automated processes.

However, a crucial piece of the puzzle is often missing: a consolidated overview of these building blocks that drives successful sales. Instead, numerous individual reports are created, each showing only partial aspects. This causes significant manual effort in the sales organization and results in a multitude of reports and dashboards with differing definitions and logic.

A sales cockpit based on CRM Analytics provides the solution. As an interactive dashboard within Salesforce, it brings together all relevant data and can also be supplemented with external sources. This creates a central hub for the sales organization with direct links to individual data points such as opportunities, tasks, or orders.

The sales cockpit thus becomes the central control instrument for sales: it consolidates all relevant key figures and enables leaders and sales teams to make timely decisions and derive actions – without the effort of decentralized individual analyses.

Core Elements of an Interactive Sales Cockpit

With its interactive, action-driven approach, a sales cockpit provides clear insights into the central management dimensions of sales:

  • Pipeline – Overview of all opportunities by stage, volume, and probability of closing to identify bottlenecks early and plan actions strategically.
  • Forecast – Revenue forecasts based on historical data: deviations become visible, enabling timely adjustments in resources or strategy.
  • Performance & Budget Tracking – Transparency over performance compared to agreed budgets.
  • Activity Tracking – Overview of planned activities such as customer visits, calls, or follow-ups for targeted management of sales activities.
  • Share-of-Wallet Analysis – Determination of realized revenue share compared to total customer potential, with insights for cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
  • Pricing – Analysis of prices, discounts, and margins in the context of won and lost deals to optimize pricing strategies and margin management.

Why CRM Analytics?

CRM Analytics offers key advantages for building a sales cockpit:

  • Seamless CRM Integration – All data comes from a central source, avoiding inconsistencies and reducing maintenance effort.
  • Interactive Dashboards & Drill-Downs – Metrics can be filtered, segmented, and analyzed in detail. Data sets for opportunities, tasks, or other items can be created, updated, or opened directly from the dashboard, enabling fast, targeted actions.
  • AI-Powered Functions – Forecasts, opportunity scoring, and next-best-action recommendations support prioritizing deals, identifying risks, and leveraging potential.
  • Scalability – The dashboard is suitable for single teams as well as global organizations and can easily be adapted to regions, products, or hierarchy levels.
  • Data-Driven Decision Basis – On a centralized reporting platform with unified definitions, resource, budget, and strategy decisions can be made based on reliable data, reducing uncertainty and enabling well-founded actions.

Concrete Benefits for Sales

A sales cockpit based on CRM Analytics delivers the following value:

  • Increased Efficiency – Manual reporting is eliminated, leaving more time for customer interactions and closing activities.
  • Faster Decision-Making – Deviations, bottlenecks, and short-term trends are immediately visible, enabling sales teams to take timely action.
  • Improved Forecast Quality – Historical data and AI-driven predictions increase revenue forecast accuracy and strengthen planning reliability.
  • Transparency and Comparability – Teams, regions, and products can be clearly compared, making results understandable and management actions targeted.
  • Strategic Planning – Budget gaps, untapped customer potential, and pricing effects can be analyzed to enable long-term optimization of the sales strategy.

Practical Example

The sales cockpit indicates to the sales manager that a forecast for the next quarter will only reach 60% of the expected target. The open pipeline does not close this gap. Drilling down by product and region reveals that new customer business in certain regions is behind expectations, while existing customer relationships remain stable. Targeted actions can then be implemented directly from the dashboard, such as sales campaigns for a product segment, follow-up activities for open leads, or adjustments in resource planning.

Reporting thus becomes an operational management tool that significantly improves both efficiency and the quality of sales decisions.

Conclusion

A sales cockpit based on CRM Analytics is the central control instrument for sales – far more than just a dashboard. It consolidates data, analyses and action recommendations to enable:

  • Proactive management of pipeline and forecasts
  • Optimal utilization of customer potential
  • Transparent control of budgets and pricing
  • Well-founded decisions based on reliable data

Companies that want to make their sales processes efficient, transparent, and scalable benefit in the long term from a data-driven sales cockpit.