If your sales team is drowning in spreadsheets, chasing down pipeline updates in Slack, and manually rebuilding forecasts every month, you’re wasting time and missing revenue. According to sales leaders managing thousands of reps, the biggest barrier to hitting quota isn’t effort or skill, it’s messy, inconsistent data. Bad data makes it impossible to know which deals are real, where reps are stuck and what actually moves the needle.
In a recent webinar hosted by Pavilion, Christopher Douglass (Senior Sales Manager at monday.com) and Nat Canestro (Sr. Program Manager – Employee Benefits at HUB International) walked through a framework for turning fragmented sales data into a strategic asset. Nat’s team onboards 60-80 new organizations annually and manages client data for 20,000+ employees across 35 decentralized hubs. Chris works with companies building scalable, data-driven sales processes from the ground up.
Here’s what they’ve learned about making data work for your team instead of the other way around.
1. Stop chasing perfect data. Start building consistent data.
When your data is a mess your instinct is to fix everything so you have a clean foundation. Cleanse the duplicates. Standardize the fields. Get every number right. Don’t. That approach keeps you stuck in analysis paralysis while your competitors keep moving forward.
Nat Canestro learned this the hard way. When HUB International brought on new clients, different departments would report wildly different revenue figures for the same account, sometimes varying by thousands of dollars depending on who was filling out the form and what numbers they were considering. The inconsistency made strategic planning impossible.
Her solution wasn’t to achieve perfect accuracy. It was to create a single client record that every team pulled from.
“If we have a single client record that the client team manages, and even if that number is wrong, if they send it out to all the other teams who are reporting on that number, the number is at least consistently wrong,” Nat explained.
My mantra is even if it’s wrong, I’d rather be wrong the same way everywhere rather than all different, and then we really don’t know what the true value is.
This shift from fragmented accuracy to unified consistency unlocked everything. Teams stopped wasting hours reconciling conflicting reports. Leaders could finally trust the data enough to make decisions. And when errors did surface, they could be corrected once and propagated everywhere instantly.
The Lesson: Consistency beats perfection every time. You can’t make strategic decisions with scattered data, even if each fragment is technically correct.
2. Give teams templates, not blank canvases. Then let them customize.
When you’re scaling operations across multiple teams or regions, you face a choice: force everyone into a rigid, one-size-fits-all system, or let each team build their own custom solution. Both approaches fail.
Total standardization kills adoption because it ignores how teams actually work. But total customization creates data chaos. You end up with different systems that can’t talk to each other.
HUB International found a middle ground. They created templates for onboarding new clients and managing active accounts, capturing the core data points every team needed regardless of geography or market nuances. Then they gave each hub the freedom to customize workflows, add fields and adapt processes to their reality.
“We created a template for some core data pieces that we need regardless of what market they’re in, and then we allow them to customize from that,” Nat said. “Whether you do complete benefits management in San Francisco, New York, Oklahoma City, doesn’t matter. You’re really doing mostly the same kind of work. You might call it something different. You might have a couple extra steps or a couple fewer steps, but in general, your work is the same.”
This approach addressed a key challenge. New hubs didn’t start from scratch. They started from a proven foundation and built on it. Teams felt ownership over their workflows without creating data silos. And HUB’s leadership could still aggregate data across all 35 offices because the core structure remained consistent.
For sales teams, the application is direct: create deal stages, qualification criteria, and activity tracking that work across your entire organization. Then let individual reps or teams customize how they work within that framework. You get the best of both worlds: strategic visibility and tactical flexibility.
3. If your data foundation is broken, AI can’t save you.
Every sales leader is being sold AI-powered tools right now. Sentiment analysis to detect at-risk customers. Predictive scoring to prioritize deals. Automated coaching based on call transcripts. The promise is compelling: work smarter, close faster, scale infinitely.
But the reality is that these tools are only as good as the data you feed them.
Christopher Douglass sees this constantly in his work with customers at monday.com. Organizations implement AI for forecasting or engagement tracking, then struggle to get value from those tools. The problem isn’t the AI. It’s the unreliable foundation of incomplete CRM records, inconsistent data formats and manual inputs.
The organizations winning with AI aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated models. They’re the ones who solved data capture and consistency. They automated data ingestion so reps aren’t manually updating fields. They standardized inputs so AI can actually spot patterns. They built visibility into engagement, usage and sentiment before they tried to predict it.
If your CRM is full of empty fields, stale information and conflicting records, adding AI on top won’t fix that. You’re just compounding the problem.
The Fix: standardize and automate data capture wherever possible. Try to limit manual input. Optimize your workflows, integrations and AI input tools to pull information into your system. Then, and only then, layer on the analytical and predictive tools that promise to make you smarter.
4. Stop managing tasks. Start managing processes.
Most sales teams are stuck in task management mode. Reps spend their days remembering what needs to be done, manually updating stakeholders and tracking down status updates. Managers spend their time asking “What’s the status on this deal?” and waiting for answers.
That’s exhausting, reactive and low-value work. It doesn’t scale.
Nat Canestro’s insight was to shift from task management to process management: building systems that do the remembering, updating and tracking automatically so teams can focus on strategic work.
“monday lifts that ‘gotta make my grocery list for my Thanksgiving meal’ off their plate because it’s already built for them,” Nat said.
We’re moving from task management to process management, strategic management.
Here’s what that shift looks like in practice:
Instead of reps manually logging every activity and update, automations capture that information and notify the right people at the right time. Instead of managers chasing down pipeline reviews, dashboards surface risks and opportunities in real time. Instead of teams losing track of what needs to happen next, workflows guide them through each stage automatically.
HUB International’s account teams went from drowning in email ping-pong and manual follow-ups to having real-time visibility into every client’s status. Their system reminds them what’s due, flags what’s overdue and keeps stakeholders updated automatically.
For sales teams, this means reps spend less time on administrative work and more time selling. Managers get the visibility they need without micromanaging. And nothing falls through the cracks because the system won’t let it.
monday.com’s automation and workflow features are built for exactly this shift: taking repetitive, manual processes off your team’s plate so they can focus on the work that actually drives revenue.
5. Make your data visible. It reveals your top performers and ones that need support.
When work happens in silos, buried in email, spreadsheets, or verbal updates, leaders can’t see who’s crushing it and who’s struggling until it’s too late. By the time a performance issue becomes obvious, you’ve already lost deals, frustrated clients, or burned out your best people.
Visible data changes that. It helps you recognize and reward top performers before they leave. And it reveals performance gaps early enough to address them with coaching instead of PIPs.
Nat Canestro experienced this firsthand. When HUB International started tracking work in monday.com, the data revealed something leadership hadn’t fully grasped: one team member was completing twice the workload of her closest colleague.
“We’ve got somebody who we’re able to give a really big bump to because she does twice as much work as her closest colleague,” Nat shared.
Now because she’s doing it and she’s recording it in monday, that’s half the battle. Now we have a visual way to see, oh, that person’s a high performer. We need to give them more opportunities to grow and learn.
That visibility led to a promotion, a pay raise and retaining a critical employee who might have left if her contributions had gone unnoticed.
On the flip side, the same visibility revealed team members who were consistently late on deliverables or struggling to keep pace. This isn’t about surveillance. It’s about giving leaders the information they need to provide targeted coaching, additional training, or process improvements before clients are impacted.
“If we keep coming in late on deliverables or late on task completion, late on meetings, everything’s always a rush, well, now we have a way to track that,” Nat explained. “monday’s a great way to not only make sure that our account teams don’t just have to remember everything they have to do. The system is going to set them up for success if they use it, but it’s also gonna tell managers, executives, fellow teammates, and colleagues where that client might be at risk.”
For sales teams, this kind of visibility transforms coaching. Instead of guessing why a rep is struggling or which deals need attention, you have objective data showing where the friction is. You can identify skill gaps, process bottlenecks, or at-risk deals early enough to intervene.
The teams that win are the ones working with the most clarity.
Parting thoughts
The teams that win are the ones who make their data work for them.
Data only creates value when it’s consistent, accessible and actionable. You can’t coach effectively with fragmented information. You can’t scale operations when every team builds their own system. And you can’t leverage AI or automation on a messy data foundation.
The organizations turning data into a competitive advantage are the ones that solved the fundamentals. They unified their records. They standardized their processes without killing flexibility. They automated the busywork so their teams could focus on strategy.
Ready to see how monday.com helps sales and operations teams build smarter frameworks? Watch the full webinar to hear Christopher and Nat walk through the tactical steps they took to move from fragmented systems to unified, data-driven operations.
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