Top Ten Demand Generation FAILS (Part 9) Ex Post Facto Reporting!

Here’s the situation. Your Demand Gen team has been asked to create an email campaign for a new product announcement, Product X. This campaign includes several emails, product data sheets and a complete microsite with multiple links to assets. Being the great demand gen professional you are, you provide a checklist of metrics for reporting and ask your product manager stakeholder if these campaign reports are required and if any other reports might be needed.

Clicks from emails to microsite? Check.

Clicks from microsite to form? Check.

Form completion and abandonment? Check.

Campaign-generated MQLs? Check.

Anything else? No, that will do it.

Geography, named account clicks, other segmentation reports? No, what you said is perfect.

So you create, receive approval, launch and complete your campaign exactly as requested. Two months after the campaign concludes, the very same product manger fires off an excited email proclaiming the VP of Sales needs a report on the number of Product X named account respondents from Vermont for a meeting in 30 minutes. After wasting 10 minutes digging the document out of the archives, you send back the written campaign brief indicating the report requirements, which specifically excluded both geography and named accounts.

But the VP of SALES needs it NOW!

I don’t’ care if the Masters of the Universe and Elvis Presley want it, the data doesn’t exist and that report can’t be generated.

Well, you already know the rest of the story. The product manager fires off angry emails to the VP of Sales, CC-ing the VP of Marketing, the COO and Oprah, for good measure, indicating what a buffoon you are and how you could not produce a “simple” report. This is a classic example of Demand Gen Fail number 9: The Ex Post Facto Report (reporting retroactively).

You will be vindicated in the end, but damage has been done and a massive amount of your valuable time has been wasted defending your perfectly executed campaign. How can you prevent these situations? Three steps will dramatically help.

Review the written process
In a previous edition of {Demand Gen Brief}, Top Ten Demand Generation FAILS (Part 4) Where is the Menu?, we talked about formal process. IN that edition, our “menu” was the analog to the various parts of our process, including the order in which those tasks should be completed. Reporting is a key consideration for every campaign, and the metrics of success must be captured if success is to be measured. As a part of the campaign brief (or whatever you call the campaign design document), the elements of campaign success should be clearly outlined. Having the key stakeholder answer these three questions can capture those:

1.     What will determine the success or failure of this campaign? This should be an open-ended question. The stakeholder needs to document, in his or her own words, what those elements are. It should be in the form of X units of Y by when.

2.     What are the subdivisions of those success metrics? These categories will be the ways you can subdivide the whole of Y in the success equation. For example, if Y is expressed as MQLs, are those MQLs of a specific size, location, vertical or product line? How many ways does this need to be sliced and diced so that all stakeholders are represented?

3.     Are these report formats sufficient? This is a yes or no question. You should present examples of the reports representing the success metrics, and make sure the stakeholder understands what reports will look like. Never ask an open-ended question around report format, because you won’t be able to produce the magic dashboard that transforms mashups into clickable charts that perform “deep dives” into the thought patterns motivating buyers in Croatia, sorted by three levels of stakeholders breakfast cereal preference. This yes or no also allows you to respond to such requests before the fact (pre factum), eliminating surprises.

Get a signature
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? You have reached an agreement to deliver a specific product at a specific time, just like any other contract. So, get a signature, indicating agreement between the two parties – in this case, the Demand Center and the requesting stakeholder – defining the terms of the agreement. Reporting is one of those terms. No, signature? No campaign. If this were a contract to sell your house, would you proceed without the buyer’s signature? A signature indicates a commitment to the terms of the campaign. Ambiguity hurts both parties, so eliminate it as much as possible.

Broadcast your methodology

Let everyone know how your Demand Center operates. You act as an internal agency, so run your operations in the same way. In the example above, the VP of Sales would have known that there was a previous commitment to deliver specific reporting, so the questions would have been directed at the Product Manager instead of you. (VP to Product Manger, “You asked for reporting by geography and named accounts, right?”) It becomes very clear very quickly where the broken link was.

Don’t let your lack of project management certification of experience inhibit you from instituting basic project management in your demand center organization. Even basic management will reduce inconsistency, improve timeliness and reduce errors. Any of these improvements will likely reduce the #1 complaint!

Notes:

The right time to determine necessary campaign reporting before the campaign is designed.

Review the process with requesting stakeholders every time. It will get shorter and easier as stakeholders get familiar with the process, but the review is necessary to proper understanding.

Treat the process like an external agreement – complete with all the details necessary to understand that a campaign – including reporting - has been completed according to the agreed-upon specifications.

We now understand what reports are going to be required before we’ve designed the campaign. Fantastic! We’re going to report on MQLs generated by territory for our new Wombat preventer SaaS software. We’ll need to consider both outbound sources and inbound sources from media, such as Wombat Weekly and The Wombat Report. Just one problem: We don’t have Australian contacts in our database, not to mention critical opt-in data. And there’s no market for Wombat preventers in North America. Missing data? This leads to Demand Gen FAIL number 10: The Missing Link!