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. Rather than flagging specific metrics or integrations, customers talk about how people respond; how fired up their sales team is, how proactive their support team is, how product have a full picture of why a certain problem is such an issue. 

The shared visibility of key data encourages a company's culture to shift. Visibility creates accountability and action, and in turn that improves team performance. Conversations about what’s happening create opportunities for growth and improvement.

And ultimately, everyone’s on the same page.

So what do high-performing sales and customer support teams have in common?

It's not the tools they use, the size of the team, or the sector they're in. It's the conditions those teams work in. And those conditions turn out to be the same whether you're running a sales floor or a support operation.

Why team composition isn't the main issue

When a team underperforms, the instinct is usually to look at the people. Wrong hires, skill gaps, someone not pulling their weight. It's an understandable place to go because people are visible and tangible.

But research consistently points somewhere else.

Deloitte's January 2026 study of 1,394 employees across industries found that what separates high-performing teams (defined as those that consistently meet or exceed expectations over time) isn't who's on the team. High performers were distinguished by "connected teaming": shared behaviours that emerge from working in an environment where everyone has access to the same picture of performance. The research found that structure alone doesn't create high-performing teams, and that success requires leaders to create the right conditions rather than simply assembling the right people.

Other recent research by Gallup reinforces this from a different angle. Their meta-analysis across more than 183,000 business units found that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement scores, and that team engagement consistently predicts performance outcomes including customer satisfaction, productivity, and profitability. That's a significant finding: it means the conditions a leader creates matter far more than most other variables in determining how well a team performs.

The implication isn't that people don't matter. It’s that leaders and the environment they create make a huge impact on individual and team performance through culture. 

What those conditions look like in practice

Across the customer conversations I've had at Geckoboard, three things come up repeatedly. They're not complicated. But they're also not the things most leaders reach for first.

Everyone knows what good looks like. Not just the manager.

Most teams have targets. That's different from everyone on the team having a shared, live picture of what hitting those targets requires: what it looks like in the data right now, for the person doing the work today.

When that picture lives only in a manager's head, or arrives in a Friday afternoon report, something slips. People don't know where they stand without asking. Managers spend time chasing updates instead of having more useful conversations.

Matt Dubois, Director of SDRs at Pearl, described what changed when that picture became visible to everyone: "The dashboards make performance super visible. Everyone knows exactly where they're at."

That visibility doesn't just motivate people. It removes an entire category of management overhead, because people can manage themselves against what they can see.

Their data isn't just accessible, it's shared.

There's a meaningful difference between being able to pull a report and a team being able to see the same live view at the same time. The first is accessible, the second is shared and they produce very different cultures.

Kelli Grinter joined MTD Training as COO and found a business with plenty of data, all of it in Salesforce, visible to a small group, often inconsistent between reports. She didn't change the team, or even the data. She made consistent live data available to everyone.

The simple act of putting a live view of their Salesforce data on a TV shifted the team culture. "People are used to checking the dashboards while making a cup of tea. You hear conversations across the office about what is happening and how they can help." 

Nobody asked them to do that. The conversations started because the information was there, and people started caring about information that felt like theirs to care about.

The same shift happens in fully remote teams too, just through different channels. Chris Brogan is VP of Customer Operations at Token, a fintech running an entirely remote support operation. His team don't wait for him to surface data. They’re given access to view and interrogate what they need in Geckoboard as well as scheduled snapshots going out in Slack. "Having dashboards in Slack regularly is really vital to be able to tell stories about what's happening for each of the teams."

The data isn't sitting in a system waiting for someone with access to run a report. It's where the team already is, showing up when they need it. Chris isn't the bottleneck. That's the whole point.

This maps directly to what Deloitte's research describes as "connected teaming": the shared behaviours that come from a team working with a common view of performance. It's not a skill you hire for, it's a condition you create.

They find out quickly when something's going wrong

In a lot of teams, problems surface in the weekly review, the monthly report, the quarterly retrospective. By then the window to do something useful has usually closed.

The teams that perform consistently have a much tighter loop. When something shifts, a queue spiking, activity dropping, a metric moving the wrong way, people know quickly enough to respond rather than just account for it later.

Hayden Gutteridge at Octopus Legacy described what that feels like day to day: "It allows us to make a series of business decisions in very quick succession. We can move people around, add capacity, or spot when we need to push more into marketing, all without waiting for a report."

For customer support teams, the same principle applies. Courtney Blocker, Director of Global Support at Trackforce, was direct about what changed for his team: "Being reactive is one thing, but being proactive is really where we need to lie." His team ended the following year at 92.5% CSAT. Not because the team changed, because the conditions did.

What this means if performance is on your mind

All three of these conditions share something important: none of them require a restructure, a new hire, or a difficult conversation about someone's future on the team.

They require a decision about what your team can see and how quickly they can see it.

It's worth asking honestly: does everyone on your team have a clear, shared view of what good performance looks like right now? Can they see how you're tracking without asking for it? And when something goes wrong, how quickly does the right person know?

If any of those questions give you pause, the performance problem you're dealing with might not be a people problem at all.

Geckoboard helps sales and customer support teams build these conditions, pulling live data from Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, Aircall, and 90+ other sources into a shared view everyone can see as performance changes. Start a free trial and see what shifts.

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