Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

It's a familiar scramble. "The investor needs X report!", "The CEO wants to see how Y is doing!" Some poor soul has to rush around to pull all the requested data and deliver it to senior leadership, pronto. This usually means dropping everything else and spending an afternoon gathering data. Often by the time the report is viewed, the data is stale and leadership is left with an outdated picture of performance. Alexandre Naudin, Service Manager at Spash, described this well.

More than a sales vibe. When sales leaders come to us early in their journey, they often mention wanting to create more of a “sales vibe” or build a stronger “sales culture”. The problem is, vibe and culture don’t cut through when you’re asking a hard-nosed CFO for budget. And rightly so. The good news, and slightly ironically, is that those sales leaders are usually massively underselling what they’re trying to achieve.

Picture this: it's Monday morning, town hall is at 2 pm, and someone has sent the usual calendar reminder: "Don't forget to update the weekly support deck!" You open the slide, look at last week's numbers still sitting there, and start the ritual. Open Zendesk. Find the right report. Check the date filter. Copy the number. Switch to Slides. Find the right text box. Paste. Repeat fifteen times. Silently wish you were somewhere else. You tried delegating it to an intern once.

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.