Your "All Green" Dashboard is Lying to You: A CEO's Guide to Revenue Truth with Taylor Kessel-Salomonsson
# CEO Strategy
# 1st-party data
# Data
# Data monetization
# Executive Metrics
# Leadership
Why the best revenue leaders look past the "hockey stick" to find the real story.
Heather Holst-Knudsen
There is a specific anxiety that every CEO knows. It happens when you are sitting in a board meeting or a Monday morning revenue review, and the dashboard in front of you is "all green."
Leads are up. MQLs are hitting targets. The charts show the coveted "hockey stick" trajectory.
But your gut tells you something is wrong. You know the revenue isn’t landing the way the charts say it should.
According to Taylor Kessel-Salomonsson, Chief Growth Officer at Naylor Association Solutions and a veteran of Salesforce, DocuSign, and VC-backed startups, that anxiety is valid. In fact, she argues that a dashboard showing "all green" is often the most dangerous thing in a business if you don't know how to interrogate it.
In the latest episode of The Revenue Room™, Taylor deconstructs why data should never be a "crutch" for leadership, and how top operators apply SaaS rigor to complex media and association models.
WATCH FULL EPISODE ON YOUTUBE
The Danger of "Operating on a Pile of Assumptions"
It is tempting for executives to treat data as the final word. If the report says we are growing, we are growing. But Taylor warns that data is easily manipulated to tell a specific story.
"It’s incredibly easy to back up whatever you’re saying with a data story," Taylor notes. "But when you rely solely on what you're seeing in the data, you're operating on a pile of assumptions."
For the C-Suite, the dashboard should not be the conclusion of the meeting; it should be the agenda.
True revenue leadership isn't about celebrating the green lights; it's about investigating the why. Is the conversion rate up because the sales team is crushing it, or because they stopped logging unqualified leads? Is the "hockey stick" growth sustainable, or is it a false positive driven by low-quality "looky-loos"?
The Bow Tie Effect: Fixing the "Gap Index"
To move past vanity metrics, Taylor advocates for shifting the organization’s focus from a linear funnel to the Bow Tie Model.
In many media and event companies, there is an obsession with the Left Side of the bow tie: Lead → Opportunity → Sale. Once the contract is signed, the organizational focus drifts.
However, in the SaaS world, and increasingly in modern media models, the Right Side of the bow tie is where the actual enterprise value is created: Sale → Onboarding → Value Realization → Renewal → Expansion.
Taylor points out a massive opportunity she calls the "Gap Index." Media and association businesses often sit on richer audience data than even the biggest tech companies. They know what their audience reads, attends, and buys. Yet, they often lag behind SaaS companies in operationalizing that data to drive the "Right Side" of the bow tie.
By applying SaaS unit economics, specifically tracking volume, velocity, and conversion leakage across the entire customer lifecycle, leaders can stop guessing where revenue is hiding.
Stop Treating Content Like a Vending Machine
One of the most common places C-Suite leaders get data wrong is in measuring marketing output. There is a pervasive belief that content operates like a vending machine: you insert a blog post, and a lead falls out.
"That's not how it actually works," Taylor says. "If you do that, you end up creating a lot of fluff."
Instead of measuring content solely by immediate lead generation, Taylor suggests aligning marketing and sales around "storytelling and swagger." The data needs to measure influence and authority, not just clicks. When the sales team adopts the "art" of storytelling combined with the "science" of the Bow Tie model, the organization moves from transactional selling to true revenue consulting.
3 Questions Every CEO Should Ask Today
If you suspect your dashboard is hiding the real story, Taylor recommends asking your revenue leaders three specific questions immediately. These aren't about activity; they are about unit economics:
1. "What is our fully loaded cost to generate a dollar of revenue?" (Don't just look at ad spend; look at P&L level, sales comp, and marketing headcount).
2. "Once we have that revenue, how much can we expect it to grow by product line?" (Understanding expansion revenue is critical for valuation).
3. "How long do we retain that revenue, and what is the churn timeline?"
The Bottom Line
Data is not a substitute for instinct. The best Chief Growth Officers and CEOs use metrics to challenge their teams, not to comfort them.
"I’m willing to look past a perfect, beautiful dashboard that shows me things are all green and say, 'Why?'" says Taylor.
If you are ready to look past the vanity metrics and build a revenue engine that withstands scrutiny, this episode is your blueprint.
You can listen to the full episode of The Revenue Room™ with Taylor Kessel-Salomonsson here.
Where the Conversation Continues
The difference between a dashboard that comforts you and a dashboard that challenges you is the difference between stagnation and scale. But as Taylor notes, you cannot build a sophisticated revenue engine in a vacuum.
That is why these conversations do not end on the podcast.
They continue inside Revenue Room™ CXO and live at RevvedUP 2026, March 23–24 at The Vinoy in St. Pete, FL. This is where the future of revenue leadership takes center stage—not for those who want to admire the problem, but for CEOs and senior executives ready to fix it. These are working sessions for leaders who want sharper strategy, stronger operating models, and peers who challenge their thinking.
If this conversation changed how you view your own "hockey stick" growth or the hidden leakage in your funnel, you belong in a room designed for leaders who understand where value is really headed.
