Three Truths and a Dashboard: A Story of Professional Make-Believe

In a conference room somewhere, three versions of truth are having a fistfight: marketing's beautiful lies, dashboard's cold numbers, and whatever fiction keeps the peace.

"So, how much?" is a question every marketer dreads hearing. In the wild realm of B2B, it gets even worse, as you typically have little to no control over the answer when the question revolves around revenue. You're there to report, hoping today's meeting will end with a sigh of relief instead of an emergency appointment with your therapist.

Here's a confession: I used to fight against reporting revenue numbers like they were coming to steal my morning coffee. Then something weird happened - I got comfortable with it. Turns out every dashboard tells three stories: the fairy tale we pitch, the cold numbers we track, and the comfortable fiction we all agree to believe. The patterns are there if you stare at the bottom line long enough. Some are even real, not just the ones we wish were true.

On dashboards and politics

I blame Eminem for how I think about board meetings now. Palms sweaty, metrics looking like spaghetti, trying to explain why sometimes you have to wait for seeds to grow. The executives check their iphones while I choke on explanations about campaigns I should have fixed or emails I should have sent.

Marketing folks like me deal in fuzzy stuff - brand awareness, share of voice, thought leadership. Try explaining those to someone who just wants to know why the pipeline isn't bursting.

The attribution story is another favorite. Deal closes, and suddenly everyone's a historian. You pull up your neat CRM data while sales waves around LinkedIn messages from the stone age.

But here's what I really think: we need to fix this mess. Not with more meetings or fancier charts, but with actual solutions:

• Back to the basics: Plans, deadlines, accountability. 
• Level up: One goal everyone chases. 
• Lvl 9000 Paladin: Shared bonuses for collaboration. 
• A hybrid attribution model that admits maybe, just maybe, both that casual meeting and that LinkedIn sponsored post mattered.
• AI has the final say: No more office politics and hoping Sales Ops is on your side. Only cold-blooded patterns.

The catch? Everyone has to at least try to trust this system. That's the part that keeps me up at night. But hey, at least I'm not the only one pretending to understand what the numbers mean anymore.

But do you really have the full picture?

What defines growth? New logos pinned to your wall like dead butterflies? Or old customers feeding the machine with bigger checks, hypnotized by your stellar service? Truth is, success probably came from that post the intern accidentally published before your morning coffee.

Nobody sees the whole picture. All those whispered recommendations at bars, the slow brand recognition, the years of marketing teams sacrificing their sanity - none of that fits in a pie chart. The dark matter of marketing floats silently, uncounted.

The metrics that make it to the boardroom are just the visible spectrum - there's a whole universe pulsing beneath. We're all playing pretend with our graphs pointing skyward, while marketing departments implode and executives nod at their partial truths. Mind the gap between reality and reporting.

For those of you still running empires from Excel sheets, "sophisticated tracking" means that green loading bar hasn't frozen in the last hour. But maybe that's fitting - the most important stuff never makes it to any spreadsheet anyway. 

Where all our stories meet

"Make them the hero," my favorite sales person told me once. Simple advice that made more sense than any business playbook I'd read. We're all chasing that role, aren't we? Every department writing their own epic, every spreadsheet a potential origin story.

Truth is messier than our narratives. It lives in the gaps between what we measure and what we miss, between the stories we tell in boardrooms and the chaos that actually drives success.

Three stories dance around every dashboard: the fairy tale we pitch, the cold numbers we track, and the comfortable fiction we all agree to believe. None of them quite capture the whole truth. Funny how that works. Funnier still how it all comes together anyway.