Many leadership teams assume they’re data-driven—after all, they’ve invested in dashboards, reporting tools, and spent time on KPI reviews. But if your team isn't using what you already have or is struggling to keep data up to date—the cost adds up:
Delayed decisions
Inefficient budgets and headcount allocation
Missed revenue and retention opportunities
Eroded trust across teams
We’ve worked with organizations that had clean pipelines, automated reports, and beautifully designed metrics libraries but still couldn’t get on the same page about what was driving performance, or what to do next.
It’s about defining what matters, embedding it into your processes, and giving your teams outputs that are actually usable. That work doesn’t start in a BI tool. It starts with leadership.
Here are four common pitfalls that keep teams stuck and what you can do instead.
Symptom: Everyone’s tracking what matters to them, and no one agrees on what matters most.
In the absence of clear priorities, teams optimize for their function. Product watches feature adoption. Sales watches win rates. Finance watches cash. Everyone builds their own view of reality—and the dashboards balloon.
You end up with visibility into everything but no cohesive path to action.
Define 3–5 business-critical metrics at the leadership level
Align team KPIs to those drivers. Balance finding the "best" metrics with what can be tracked reliably.
Retire anything that doesn’t support a real decision
💡 More data isn’t the goal—clarity and alignment are. If everything is important, then nothing is.
Symptoms: You see different numbers for the same thing, depending on the team. You spend more time talking about the number itself than what to do with it.
Multiple systems, DIY reports, and homegrown logic create metric drift. When teams are working off different definitions, trust breaks down. Meetings become debates about the data instead of what to do about it.
Declare ownership for high-stakes metrics
Align on definitions in a shared glossary (even a simple doc works)
Standardize the source of truth for core reporting
📌 Your data isn’t credible until it’s consistent.
Symptom: You’ve got dashboards. No one uses them.
It’s not that your teams don’t care about data—but it might not be helpful to them. We often see the output is misaligned with workflows, overcomplicated, or not designed for your ICs' level of context.
Start with the use case, not the format. Dashboards aren’t always the answer—sometimes a PDF or Excel file is what your team actually needs.
Customize views by audience. Leaders need the big picture while ICs need the task-level detail that supports execution.
💡 A mediocre metric in the right place beats a perfect dashboard no one uses.
Symptom: It’s a struggle to get clean, timely data from your teams.
If teams don’t use the data, it won’t be a priority to maintain it. What looks like a tooling or discipline issue is actually a relevance issue. You’re asking people to input data that doesn’t help them do their job better.
Make data part of the workflow instead of an extra step:
Use existing tools to fuel data collection (CRM, forecast spreadsheets, task boards)
Embed key metrics directly into tools your team already uses (ex: show real-time quota progress inside your CRM)
📌 People don’t maintain what they don’t use or understand.
Most teams don’t need more dashboards or better charts. They need their data to actually help people do their jobs.
Becoming data-driven doesn’t mean doing everything at once. Take small, intentional steps:
Clarify a few key metrics that matter to everyone
Retire the reports no one uses
Lean into the tools and processes your team already use
Use data to drive decisions—and talk about it
Start by making the data you already have more useful. That’s what moves organizations forward.
We help organizations like yours turn scattered data efforts into clear, decision-driving systems.