Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

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?

Salesforce reports don’t fail because they’re wrong. They fail because they’re late. If your team coordinates in Microsoft Teams, but your metrics live in Salesforce, someone ends up having to do the same manual loop: refresh → export → screenshot → paste → explain. And once that loop gets even slightly inconsistent, people stop trusting and paying attention to the numbers.

When Courtney Blocker joined Trackforce as Director of Global Support in November 2024, he was hired to help scale support for growth. What he found was a familiar problem: plenty of data, but no clear, shared view of what was happening right now.

HubSpot can send record-level notifications into Microsoft Teams (like activity on a deal or company linked to a channel), and workflows can also post messages to Teams. If you want alerts based on KPI thresholds though - like deal aging spikes, pipeline coverage dropping, or first response time drifting - you can set up HubSpot KPIs in Geckoboard, and notify a Teams channel instantly when a metric crosses a threshold. Microsoft Teams is where a lot of sales and revenue teams coordinate work.