In the world of marketing reporting, there’s a balance between providing comprehensive insights and overwhelming your audience with an avalanche of data. After helping multiple marketing organizations build a reporting structure and speaking with experts like Virginia Chere Lucett, we’ve gained invaluable insights into what Boards truly seek from marketing reports.
Revenue Marketing Report Interview: How to Identify and Double-Down on High ROI Marketing Efforts
The primary expectations in the boardroom center around a clear understanding of marketing’s influence, including its effectiveness, efficiency, velocity, and overarching trends. The board’s primary concern is simple: How does marketing translate into revenue and pipeline growth? They want tangible outcomes, a clear indication of whether business objectives are being met. The Board has a limited amount of time and your presentation must make the most of it.
“What about our branding update?” you ask. “The Board recommended a change!”
While branding updates and awareness campaigns hold significance in marketing, their direct linkage to revenue can be elusive. The savviest CMOs speak the C-Suite language and know how to present their data objectively, focusing instead on the bottom-line impact.
Join us as we build a dashboard presentation that not only meets but exceeds the board’s expectations.
How to Showcase Your Marketing Reporting Dashboard
The Measures
Just because executive summaries are focused on data, doesn’t mean you aren’t telling a story. Your metrics and analysis should be framed in a way that shows what your team has done, how this activity impacted the business, how fast you can scale, and what you’re doing now to optimize for better results.
This outline tells the story of what happened, what it means, and what you’re doing next.
A Word of Warning
There is a quick way to gain the respect of the Board, CFO, and CEO. Anchor your talking points with objective data. Don’t tell a story that conflicts with your actual results. They may not like what you’re telling them, but they won’t question your grasp of the situation.
On the flip side, the fastest way to lose credibility is to change historical results or data definitions. Gain cross-functional buy-in to ensure data definitions are consistent across the business and stick to them. This will help you avoid data battles and keep the conversation focused on what matters.
Effectiveness
Effectiveness measures how your team performed against pre-established goals. We suspect you’ll be asked for early indicators such as marketing-qualified leads and marketing-sourced opportunities. Ideally, you also have goals established for pipeline and revenue contribution. This helps differentiate your team from a cost center and emphasizes your value as revenue generators to financially minded executives.
Effectiveness measures should be high-level. We don’t recommend diving into specific campaign performance in an executive summary. Save the details for weekly team meetings.
Be cautious when you speak to campaign-type effectiveness. We all know content is critical for feeding the top of your funnel, but Boards that only look at sourcing metrics will wonder why people bother. Be sure to include attribution model metrics (preferably Chain-Based) in addition to source data to show the true value of your early-stage and late-funnel activities.
Navigating Objections
Sourced reporting such as marketing-sourced pipeline and marketing-sourced revenue can be sources of contention if your executive team doesn’t buy into your sourcing model. Be prepared to speak to the volume of deals in addition to revenue to quell naysayers who will presume a disproportionately large deal is stacking the deck in your favor.
Don’t let early indicator volume detract from pipeline and revenue performance. We’ve all heard sales want more “at-bats,” but fewer leads that convert into high-value sales should be viewed more favorably than a bulk lead source that doesn’t convert into qualified opportunities. This is often a natural segue into your efficiency metrics.
Efficiency
This is the part of your presentation where you’ll notice the CFO, CEO, and Board members on the edge of their seats. Ultimately, Boards want to know how an investment made in your department will translate to revenue.
As a CEO often says, “I want to know for every dollar I put in, what I am getting out.”
The ability to report on return on marketing investment is key, and slicing it a few different ways is even better. Including only campaign costs to show campaign-type returns is great. Up-leveling to show overall marketing output vs. total marketing spend is very valuable.
There are various ways to slice cost data, and we see value in each of them.
Recent Stat from our 2020 State of Revenue Marketing Report
CAC is the average cost of acquiring a customer. It doesn’t hurt to also display the LTV (average lifetime customer value), next to the CAC metric.
CPL (cost per lead), CPO (cost per opportunity), and CPD (cost per deal) all provide value when determining how efficiently the business is running.
Navigating Objections
Make sure your CFO signs off on your ROI model before sharing your numbers. This will prevent a methodology debate and keep the focus on your results.
LTV, CAC, CPL, CPO, and CPD are all metrics that should be shared by leadership so all departments calculate the value the same way.
Velocity
Your section on velocity should answer how fast the business can scale. In addition to helping people understand how long your buying cycle takes, these metrics should help you understand what works when.
While most businesses consider the average time to sale (time from opportunity qualified to close), we also recommend looking at the timeline for each section of the account-based marketing funnel in addition to the traditional demand generation funnel.
The traditional demand generation funnel looks at an individual’s buying process and can identify faulty hand-offs between departments. Lags in time between marketing qualification and sales acceptance may mean your high-quality leads aren’t visible enough to your SDRs. A lag between opportunity creation and qualification can indicate problems with the hand-off between SDRs and field sales.
Account-based marketing funnels provide a view into how effective the company is at engaging accounts. This can be particularly useful when pivoting the data by target account designation or industry. Add in a layer for campaign type, and you can see which campaigns make the most impact at each stage of the funnel.
