What is every CMO’s biggest challenge? Proving that the marketing team has an impact on the business. Today’s organizations are data-led, and leadership teams want to see the numbers that justify marketing’s budget and spend. Unfortunately for most marketers, their data is a dumpster fire.
The Challenges of Messy Data
Marketers have it tough. While other departments, like sales, typically have cleaner data that’s easy to understand and connect to revenue, marketing has very messy data that’s often incomplete and inconsistent.
When CMOs don’t have confidence in the reliability of their data because of discrepancies between various reports, they struggle to present a compelling narrative about how marketing activities influence revenue growth.
A compounding challenge is that, historically, marketers measured their success using engagement metrics—which have their place, but don’t speak to senior leadership. Instead, metrics should be tied to business outcomes, like pipeline generation, so marketers can connect their campaigns to revenue.
So what’s the first step in rectifying disjointed, messy data? You have to tame the data dumpster fire. It’s the only way to gain the trust of your wider GTM team and communicate the value that marketing activities bring to the bottom line.
Understanding the “Why”
Building trust involves managing expectations surrounding your data quality. You’ll never have perfect data, so don’t try to fix all of your data issues before you begin building reports. This isn’t effective or realistic; it’s okay to start reporting with imperfect data. In fact, this strategy can help you pinpoint problems and identify exactly where you need to enrich and enhance underlying data.
The goal of your marketing data is to answer leadership and GTM teams’ most important question: Why? Why are we seeing these pipeline and revenue numbers? So come prepared to meetings with an explanation of your results, including outliers and anomalies. You should also be able to explain data limitations, like why data from different sources are coming to different conclusions.
The power of AI in communicating value
AI tools, especially LLMs, can bridge the gap between complex, messy data and powerful narratives. While not designed to handle complex calculations like attribution modeling—you need CaliberMind for that—AI is great at summarizing and contextualizing large data sets.
CaliberMind’s Ask Cal uses AI to take all of your marketing data and visualize your buyer journey, including marketing touchpoints, into summaries that your sales team can access directly in Salesforce. Applying the power of AI to marketing data can elevate your marketing reports to clearly demonstrate the impact of marketing activities.
CaliberMind: Tackle Messy Data
CaliberMind helps CMOs tackle messy data using an ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) approach with rules engines and data tools that tackle data normalization. Everyone has data quality issues, but CaliberMind can help you deliver consistent, actionable reporting using attribution modeling. Start building the right narrative that showcases how your marketing efforts drive pipeline and revenue.
