Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

There are few things more frustrating for RevOps and sales leaders than poor-quality CRM data and deals that haven’t been updated properly. What makes it especially annoying is that it’s not a problem you can fix once. It needs active maintenance. Without it, standards slip. There’s an entropy to it. It’s also extremely common. We’ve had it in our own small sales team. There are countless Reddit threads on the subject.

Most sales leaders I've spoken to manage their teams on a one-week lag. The Monday meeting reviews last Friday's numbers. The pipeline review on Thursday looks at data that was entered into the CRM sometime earlier in the week, by reps who were also trying to hit their calls target at the time. By the time a problem becomes visible, it is already several days old. This is not a people problem. It is an infrastructure problem.

When a senior executive asks for an ROI number, they don't always understand the complexity behind it. They just want the answer. For Eduardo Umaña, Business Operations Manager at TechChoice, getting to that answer used to mean hours of work stitching together data from different tools. Geckoboard changed that.

A data-driven performance culture. It’s something that leaders strive for but often don’t realise can be created just by sharing data openly with everyone. “Data-driven culture” is a phrase that's been around long enough to feel like a cliché, but the underlying problem of a team without one hasn't gone away. It’s one of the first things that comes up in new customer conversations at Geckoboard.

In 2024, MIT's Centre for Information Systems Research surveyed 259 companies, each averaging $10 billion in revenue, and asked a simple question: does being a real-time business actually matter? The answer: yes, 62% higher revenue growth and 97% higher profit margins for top-quartile companies. They were also 20% better at innovation and 22% better at operational efficiency.

Ask any sales leader whether marketing leads are any good (and I’ve had a lot of those conversations), then ask marketing whether sales follows up quickly enough. You will get two very different answers - and both teams will be right. According to HubSpot's 2024 State of Sales Report, sales professionals at aligned companies are 103% more likely to beat their goals than those at misaligned ones. Yet only 30% of sales professionals say their teams are strongly aligned.

At a startup, performance moves quickly, but many teams still struggle to see what’s really driving performance across marketing and sales, which leads to slower decisions and missed opportunities. That’s the challenge Christopher Ford is solving at HappyDoc. As Director of Growth, he’s responsible for generating demand, converting opportunities, and giving leadership a clear view of how the business is performing. HappyDoc builds AI software for veterinary clinics.

When building a TV dashboard, it’s tempting to focus on making something eye-catching. Getting people to look at it feels like half the battle. But if a dashboard is noisy or hard to read, people might glance once and then ignore it. On a TV screen, clarity matters more than novelty. A TV dashboard isn’t something people interact with. It’s something they glance at. Often from across a room, in passing, while doing something else. That changes the job of the dashboard.

I love data visualization and have spent a lot of time looking at charts across different vendors, BI tools, and libraries. One thing that keeps coming up for me is how animations are handled. There’s a wide range of approaches. Some charts don’t animate at all, some do it poorly, and a few get it right. The difference isn’t just aesthetic. It has a direct impact on how easy it is to understand what’s happening in the data.

This may be a popular, or an unpopular opinion. I wouldn’t know as I’ve never shared it in my near 7 years at Geckoboard. But I think light themed dashboards are a bit rubbish. It might just be one of those things where you’re a light theme person, or a dark theme person. Strangely though, I have my phone in dark mode and Mac in light… So why do I have such an aversion to a light themed dashboard?