Ever feel like your team is hitting their revenue targets but your profit margin is shrinking?
We’re seeing this more and more: sales teams selling hard, dashboards showing big numbers, but the business still feels off.
That disconnect usually comes down to one thing: nobody’s watching the margin.
One of our clients is changing that. We had an interesting conversation in the office this week.
We were speaking about some dashboards that a sales leader wanted built for their sales reps.
The dashboards for the reps show some of the things you’d expect:
But there was another interesting metric they were tracking: margin vs goal.
Not enough businesses openly talk about the importance of margin.
And as anyone running a business knows, "Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, but cash is reality."
So, having everyone in the company focused on the same goal, profit, is just plain smart.
Margin is a team sport. And when the team sees it, understands it, and feels ownership over it?
That’s when alignment starts to click.
For the reps, it created clarity. They knew what mattered.
For the sales leader, it meant real-time visibility into where to coach, where to double down, and where to dig in.
This kind of visibility does more than drive better decisions; it builds trust.
On a recent RevOps Champions episode, Torben Rytt shared something that hit home:
“One of the most important things about leadership is taking ownership. But that starts with curiosity: understanding what your team needs to do their best work.”
That’s exactly what this client was doing. She wasn’t just managing performance; she was designing systems to make margins make sense.
Because when your tools reinforce the right behaviors, alignment becomes easier. And when margin becomes a shared priority, not just a finance metric, it’s easier to scale with intention.
The ‘ownership’ Rytt refers to should start from a place of curiosity and seeking to understand.
What is a day in the life of one of our sales leaders’ reps like? What do they need to do their job well?
Putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes before we take action or make any comment is life wisdom (as I’ve learned through experience 😂).
Maybe the reps need tech that’s configured to enable them. That could be via their CRM or an AI tool, like Rytt’s product, Gainbox.
Maybe they need more time. Time that can be spent on the activities that will make a difference when they’re speaking to their customers.
Activities like research are needed to really get to know and understand their customers.
Or spending time thinking about a customer’s challenges so they can make thoughtful recommendations on how to help solve them.
We’re living in an exciting moment with endless possibilities. AI is changing how we work and live, and it can do things for sales reps and for all of us personally that literally put time and energy back into our lives.
When you zoom out, every feature in the dashboards our client designed serves one simple idea: protect the margin so the business can keep serving people.
Tech gives us data. AI buys back the minutes. And good leadership, rooted in curiosity, turns both into action. Margin is where those threads meet: it funds innovation, secures the next hire, and rewards the team that makes it all happen.
So, as you roll out the next workflow, AI plug-in, or coaching cadence, ask the question our client baked into their dashboards:
“Will this create more margin for the business and my people?”
If the answer is yes, you’re pointing your resources in the right direction. If not, get curious, dig deeper, and keep iterating until the tech, the team, and the bottom line all win together.
Here’s to profit with purpose, and a little more breathing room for everyone.
Kristin
Kristin Dennewill
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