Dashboards don’t win games, coaching does

We put a lot of faith in systems — dashboards, tools, processes — hoping they’ll deliver performance. But real results often come down to something simpler: real-time coaching.

Beating a full team with half a roster

I love baseball. My kids play in the city rec league every year, and this season, I coached my daughter’s softball team for the first time. I’ll admit, I was a little intimidated — the other team had a full roster. We had six girls. Not even enough to field a team, but we played anyway.

The league uses pitching machines, and they’re rarely perfect. But this one was a mess. Balls were going everywhere — high, low, inside, outside. Two girls got hit. The poor kid running it kept tweaking the settings and trying to dial it in. We burned 15 minutes of game time just fiddling with the thing.

We won, and what made the difference was coaching. As each girl stepped up to bat, I worked with her one-on-one.

“Scoot toward the plate.”

“Elbow up.”

“You’ve got this.”

And they delivered — hit after hit. We more than doubled the other team’s score, with fewer players.

Dashboards give data, not insight

Lately, I’ve been thinking about dashboards — and how often demand gen leaders treat them like that pitching machine. They tweak metrics, fund rebuilds and chase that perfect Goldilocks zone where data finally delivers insight and performance. They believe that if you get the setup just right, the results will follow.

But customers aren’t machines, and markets don’t throw perfect pitches. The dashboard is never done. It’s reactive by nature. You dial it in, the game changes, and you’re back to tweaking. Meanwhile, you’re missing what actually wins the game as it happens in real time in the calls, friction points and missed signals. That’s because dashboards are designed to feed you data, not insights. 

Dig deeper: What your dashboards reveal about channel performance — and what they miss

The dashboard illusion

In a past life, I helped executives create dashboards. They were consistently impressed by how much data we could fit onto one screen. Executives like dashboards for three reasons: 

• They make us feel more in control.
• They’re consistent.
• They reduce complex situations to simple cause and effect. 

But for all their benefit, they’re creating a dangerous illusion. They may give us a false sense of control. It only seems consistent because definitions don’t change, and they keep coming. And the simplicity they portray misses the nuances that matter. 

Markets are constantly moving, and it’s hard to get clarity on what they’re doing from a dashboard, at least not the clarity that can improve decisions. Reps change. Buyer behavior changes. May’s messaging doesn’t hit the same in June. And while your team is tweaking lead scoring models, a startup with better positioning is stealing your pipeline.

Coaching is the real leverage

I’m not anti-dashboard. They are extremely useful. But they only tell you what happened, not why it happened or what to do next. 

If executives and teams want to improve their performance, they must set aside dashboards and look for clarity in the field. That’s where the patterns are hiding, where the friction lives and where the game of business is won or lost. It’s in the nuance of how deals unfold, the incentives and information reps get that affect how they show up and ultimately — how customers respond. 

The settings on the pitching machine did impact my team, but the real magic was the real-time coaching. A subtle cue, a shift in stance, a supportive word to change a player’s mental frame — that’s what unlocked performance. And it’s the same in business. 

Your team likely doesn’t need better metrics. What they need is better insights — better observation and interpretation—a human who can see what’s happening and say, “Scoot closer to the plate, and I’m confident you’ll knock it out of the park.” 

As the great New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot, just by watching.”

Dig deeper: 3 ways data can steer you wrong — and how to glean better insights

What insights look like

Milkshakes and a Harvard professor

A fast‑food chain watched dashboards showing milkshakes selling out in the morning and evening. They brought in Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen, who spent time observing customers. He discovered that morning commuters bought shakes to stay alert and kill boredom during early morning commutes, while evening drinkers used them to reward their kids. That simple insight is something no dashboard could deliver.

Groove’s conversion breakthrough

Groove’s dashboard data revealed thousands of blog visitors and only a 2.3% conversion rate. It couldn’t take them any further. They needed insight to guide their decisions, so they listened to customers, then adapted and pivoted messaging in real time, using their customers’ words on landing pages. It doubled their conversion rates. That’s the power of insight-driven, field-informed coaching.

From data to insight to advantage

Here’s where to focus if you want to increase your marketing effectiveness, build momentum and stay in sync with how your customers make decisions.

1. Don’t mistake dashboards for the field 

Dashboards matter. The best dashboards give you pieces of the puzzle. But they miss the tension and nuance that make or break real deals. Build your dashboards to track, not decide — and use them to ask better questions. But don’t assume you already have the answers.

2. Get closer to live deals or delegate to someone who can

You don’t need to be part of every sale. But you do need to be grounded in what buyers are hearing, resisting and asking for. Listen to recordings. Read CRM notes and interview closed-lost accounts. Ask people in and outside of your team what’s surprising them lately. These are some of your insight channels. 

3. Use insight to coach action, not just optimize reporting

What matters most isn’t refining your attribution models or funnel definitions. Those are tools to transform insight into action. But garbage in, garbage out. You’re looking for insight into how your team is showing up to each at-bat and how they need to adjust to earn more consistent hits.

• Are you equipping reps with the right stories? 
• Do buyers see themselves in your messaging? 
• Are you removing friction or adding to it?

Dashboards won’t tell you that, but coaching will. Coaching provides real-time, field-informed cues that shift how your team plays and how the market responds.

You can tweak the machine all you want. But you’re not changing the game if you’re not coaching your team.

Dig deeper: How to transform analytics data into actionable insights