How to Create a Sales Dashboard in Looker
Creating a sales dashboard in Looker is one of the best ways to get a clear, real-time view of your team's performance. Instead of juggling spreadsheets and static reports, you can build a dynamic dashboard that shows you exactly what's working and where your team needs to focus. This guide will walk you through the process step-by-step, from choosing the right metrics to building and customizing your visualizations.
First, What Is a Looker Sales Dashboard?
A Looker sales dashboard is a centralized, interactive collection of reports that visualize your most important sales data. It connects directly to your data sources, like a CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot) or a database, and automatically updates to show you the latest information. Think of it as the mission control for your sales team.
Why is this so valuable? Because manual reporting is slow and prone to errors. By the time you've downloaded CSVs from your CRM, cleaned them up in Excel, and built charts for a Monday morning meeting, the data is already out of date. A Looker dashboard solves this by giving everyone - from sales reps to VPs - access to the same live data, enabling faster, smarter decisions.
Planning Your Dashboard: Key Metrics to Track
Before you start building, you need a clear plan. A great dashboard tells a story, and the best stories are focused. Don't try to cram every single metric onto one screen. Instead, focus on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that directly impact your sales goals. Your audience matters here, a dashboard for a sales rep tracking their own quota will look different from one for an executive monitoring overall business health.
Here are some of the most critical sales metrics to consider including:
Sales Pipeline Metrics: These give you a forward-looking view of your sales funnel's health.
New Leads/Opportunities Created: Tracks the volume of new potential business entering your pipeline. *(Is your marketing and prospecting working?)
Pipeline Value by Stage: Shows the total dollar value of deals in each stage of your sales process. *(Where are deals getting stuck?)
Deal Stage Conversion Rate: Measures the percentage of deals that move from one stage to the next. *(How efficient is our sales process?)
Sales Velocity: Calculates how quickly deals move through your pipeline from creation to close. *(How long does it take us to make money?)
Performance & Outcome Metrics: These tell you how your team is performing against its goals.
Quota Attainment: Compares closed-won revenue to the sales target for a specific rep, team, or the entire company. *(Are we hitting our numbers?)
Win Rate: The percentage of all closed opportunities that were won. *(How effective are we at closing deals?)
Average Deal Size: The average value of a closed-won deal. *(Are we selling high-value solutions?)
Revenue by Product/Service: Breaks down which offerings are bringing in the most money. *(What are our bestsellers?)
Activity Metrics: These track the day-to-day efforts of your sales reps.
Calls and Emails Sent: A basic measure of outreach volume.
Meetings Booked: Tracks the number of sales appointments or demos scheduled.
Activities per Deal: Shows how many touchpoints are required to close an opportunity.
Understanding LookML: The Foundation of Your Dashboard
One of the things that makes Looker powerful (and sometimes challenging) is its data modeling layer, called LookML. Before you can build a dashboard, a developer or data analyst on your team needs to use LookML to define your business logic. They connect Looker to your data source (like a Salesforce database) and then define your "dimensions" and "measures."
Dimensions are the fields you use to group or categorize your data, like "Sales Rep Name," "Deal Stage," or "Region."
Measures are the numbers you want to calculate, like the "Sum of Revenue," "Count of Deals," or "Average Deal Value."
Think of LookML as the instruction manual that tells Looker how your data is organized and how different tables relate to each other. While setting this up requires some technical expertise, the payoff is huge. Once the model is built, anyone on your business team can explore the data and build reports without writing a single line of code. It ensures that everyone is using the same definitions for metrics like "revenue" or "active customer," creating a single source of truth across the company.
Step-by-Step Guide: How to Build Your Sales Dashboard in Looker
Once your LookML model is ready, building the actual dashboard is straightforward. You'll be using "Explores," which are the starting points for your reports defined in the LookML model.
Step 1: Create a New Dashboard
Navigate to the folder where you want to save your dashboard. In the top right corner, click the New button and select Dashboard from the dropdown menu. Give your dashboard a clear, descriptive name like "Q3 Sales Performance Dashboard" or "SDR Team Activity Tracker."
Step 2: Add Your First Tile
Your new dashboard will be blank. To add your first chart or report, click Add Tile. This will prompt you to choose an Explore. Your data team will have created Explores based on your data sources. For a sales dashboard, you'll likely use an Explore named something like "Opportunities," "Deals," or "Salesforce Data." Select the relevant one to start your query.
Step 3: Define Your Report
You're now in the Explore interface. On the left sidebar, you'll see a list of available dimensions and measures.
Select your dimensions: Click on the fields you want to group your data by. For a "Revenue by Sales Rep" report, you'd select the "Sales Rep Name" dimension.
Select your measures: Click on the metric you want to calculate. For this example, you would select the "Sum of Amount" or "Total Revenue" measure.
Add filters: Use the "Filters" section at the top to narrow down your data. A common filter is "Close Date" to look at deals closed in the current quarter or "Is Won" to only include closed-won deals.
As you add dimensions, measures, and filters, you'll see a data table building in the main window.
Step 4: Visualize Your Data
Above the data table, you'll see a Visualization tab. Click it to turn your data into a chart.
Looker provides a range of visualization types. For "Revenue by Sales Rep," a Bar Chart or a Column Chart is a good choice.
For tracking a metric over time (like "New Leads per Week"), a Line Chart is best.
For showing a single, important number (like "Total Quarterly Revenue"), use the Single Value visualization.
Use the Edit menu to customize colors, labels, and axes to make your chart clear and easy to read.
Step 5: Run and Save the Tile to Your Dashboard
Once you're happy with your visualization, click the Run button in the top right to refresh the query with your selections. Then, click the gear icon next to "Run" and select Save to Dashboard. Title your tile (e.g., "Revenue by Sales Rep") and choose the dashboard you created in Step 1.
Step 6: Build Out Your Dashboard and Add Filters
Repeat steps 2–5 for all the other KPIs you planned to include. As you add more tiles, you can drag and drop them to arrange the layout. A good practice is to put high-level, summary metrics (like cards showing total revenue) at the top, with more detailed breakdowns below.
To make your dashboard interactive, add dashboard-level filters. Click on Filters in the top menu and select the fields you want to use as filters - "Date Range," "Sales Team," and "Region" are common choices. This allows anyone viewing the dashboard to easily slice and dice the data to answer their specific questions without having to edit each individual tile.
Tips for an Effective and User-Friendly Dashboard
Prioritize Clarity Over Complexity: The goal is to provide quick, understandable insights. Avoid crammed dashboards with dozens of charts. If needed, create separate dashboards for different purposes (e.g., a Pipeline Dashboard vs. an Activity Dashboard).
Use the Right Chart for the Job: Don't just pick a chart because it looks cool. Use bar/column charts for comparisons, line charts for trends, and single value charts for headline KPIs.
Structure Your Layout Logically: Place your most important, high-level numbers at the top left, as this is where people naturally look first. Group related charts together.
Add Context with Text Tiles: Use Looker's text tiles to add a title, brief descriptions, or explain what the user is looking at. This helps frame the data and gives it meaning.
Final Thoughts
Building a sales dashboard in Looker turns your raw data into a powerful tool for driving strategy and performance. By focusing on the right metrics, carefully structuring your LookML foundation, and designing clear visualizations, you can create a single source of truth that empowers your entire sales organization to make data-driven decisions.
While Looker is extremely powerful, getting started can be a heavy lift, especially if you don't have a technical team to handle the initial LookML setup. We built Graphed because we believe getting a handle on your sales data shouldn't require a data engineering degree. You can connect your different data sources like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Google Analytics in minutes, and then just ask for the reports and dashboards you need in plain English. This automates the time-consuming process of building reports, letting you focus on the insights instead of the setup.