Performative Dashboarding

"Dashboards are a great way to admire a problem, not solve it."
- Vinod Khosla 'venture assistant' 28 Oct 26

This deepism basically begins an ad for AI agents. Despite this, shorn of that context it works remarkably well in our solution sell space.

You kinda get two types of codified sales reporting theme. Those that live in the dashboard or constantly reference their forecast. Let's today home in solely on the former dwellers here.

Whether it be a global flavour of a Salesforce or Hubspot or something an 'analyst' has cobbled together from such data and others, the above quote certainly rings true.

A weekly call where all stare at the pipeline stages, red deals, and activity numbers. Everyone gives reasons excuses why stuff is stuck; 'waiting on legal', 'budget freeze', 'decision maker away'. Meetings end, "I’ll follow up this week". Then next week the same deals are still sitting there, a bit older.

It's as if the data capture 'automation' hasn't changed anything at all.

I once long ago sat on a group forecast session where the team boss had just come back from an HQ 'learning' day. After every deal status explanation he simply said, "ring the chief exec". Pure process theatre rather than telling insight.

The rub is well known. The dashboard makes the problem look managed. It gives the illusion of control. You can point at the board and say 'we can see it', but nothing actually moves.

Salespeople spend more time updating fields and colouring the pipeline than talking to customers. Classic 'Laptop Larrys'. Managers spend more time digging through the CRM and building shadow or parallel reports than listening to calls or role-playing the next conversation. Or, crucially, thinking on process.

This is when you stop measuring 'activities logged' and start understanding whether the right actions birthed the right conversations happening with the right people.

Dashboards are fine for a quick status check. The problem is when the whole operating rhythm becomes an exercise in looking at the board and explaining the number. That’s admiring the problem. Solving it is getting in the deals, forcing action, and removing the excuses.

It's where you have a handle on what happens on every deal that means you prevail.

That pattern of events that is unique to us leading to a deal.

The B2B salesteams that win aren’t the ones with the prettiest dashboard. They’re the ones who can tell you, deal by deal, whether the sequence of events that produces in their world is actually unfolding, and intervene when it isn’t.