Create Marketing Reports That Will Thrill Your CEO

Yes, you read that headline correctly. Thrill your CEO. In order to meet that expectation, you will first have to understand what kinds of things get your C-Suite excited. Those are called executive strategic drivers. Some examples of those drivers are Growth Strategy, Competitive Pressures, Regulatory Changes, Risk Management, Shareholder Value, Profitability and Technological Market Disruptions.

                                                                               

Let’s look at what was not in that list of strategic drivers. Unaided Brand Awareness, Total Impressions, Number of Leads, Funnel Metrics… that tactical list of things you are probably reporting on right now. I am not at all saying your current reports are not important. In fact, they are critical to building and maintaining a revenue pipeline. They just don’t address strategic challenges from an executive perspective. And you can change that!

                                                               

Putting Some Perspective on Reporting

If we simply change perspective from Demand Gen Success to Organizational Success, it is very straightforward to realign your reporting. We’ve already established that tying your Demand Gen metrics to revenue is critical to determining success. That never goes away. You are in a business and that business has a key objective (if not the key objective) of generating revenue, which provides livelihoods for employees and products and services for customers. Your executives are charged with not only keeping, but building that revenue stream and the profits it generates. Your owners (or shareholders) want to see a positive return on their investment and your company is but one of a myriad of investment options. How does Demand Gen contribute to success from that perspective? Let’s just look at Demand Gen performance from the perspective of three of the executive drivers:

• Growth Strategy
• Profitability
• Risk Management

Growth Strategy

First, let’s look at the strategy options for growth, which fall into three broad categories: organic growth, partnerships and acquisition. Demand Gen falls into the organic growth category, which means growing the organization by driving increased revenue. This is pretty straightforward, as demand gen is the primary driver of revenue growth. We don’t need to spend a lot of time expounding on the advantages of revenue growth, but we’ll come back to this issue.

Your reporting should reflect both retrospective performance and predictive future performance (for internal consumption only, of course). Your executives want to know how well you performed, but also what to expect in the future. The entire purpose of building a demand gen machine (we’ve often called it a “Marketing Factory”) is to drive efficient, predictable and scalable revenue generation. That includes growth. And growth thrills your CEO.

Profitability

Part of the equation for effective demand generation is how efficiently you can do it. Looking at this graph, we want the best possible combination of demand and the cost required to obtain those results, creating an Effective and Efficient demand gen machine.

As the graph indicates, you can spend more to generate more leads, or you can spend less and generate fewer leads, but neither is an ideal state. You are seeking the best combination of generating demand and reducing the cost of acquiring leads, thereby reducing overall customer acquisition costs.

Creating reports that show your trend over time – and the resultant reduction in cost for acquiring more leads for less cost per lead indicates increased profits. Profit thrills your CEO.

Risk Management

Since we’ve pared down our set of executive drivers, let’s now look at the associated risks. At the highest level, your CEO must balance the risks associated with growth: grow too fast and it is difficult to maintain the organizational infrastructure required to manage the additional business. How will manufacturing produce enough product to satisfy demand? How will the additional burden on staff affect customer satisfaction? Can our supply chain keep up with demand? Can we deliver the additional product through our distribution channels?

On the other hand, if growth is too slow the organization may be too big to maintain its margins and keep up with competition. Will we need to downsize the organization to keep costs in line with revenue? How will the market react to slow growth and potential layoffs? What will we need to do to correct the revenue outlook?

From the profitability standpoint, many of these same questions apply, with some additional flavor. Where can we cut costs with the least impact on product quality and delivery? Where can we consolidate functions or increase efficiencies? Where can we benefit from economies of scale?

To manage risk in each of these categories, your CEO really needs to see the roadmap because changing course before something bad happens is always preferable to changing course afterwards. Fortunately, you are on a course to build a predictable and scalable Demand Gen machine that will help your CEO chart the correct course. By providing your executives with a predictable course, you are helping them avoid risks associated with proceeding blindly on a course into the future. Your predictability reduces risk. Reduced risk thrills your CEO.

Change the conversation.

Your reporting needs to combine retrospective performance with a predictable performance forecast. Looking backwards and projecting forward provides your executives with the information needed to make smart course corrections. Your CEO wants to ramp production, supply chain and distribution that same 15% you have predicted an increase in demand. With that understanding, your reporting becomes a critical information source for business decisions with weighty consequences. Reporting with that perspective makes your Demand Gen team an extremely important part of your organizational success. And you CEO will be thrilled!

Notes:

Align your reports with executive strategic drivers.

Don’t just look backwards, look forward.

Be Predictable.

                                    

Thank You!

I want to thank the thousands of demand gen professionals who have spent the past 40 weeks on this journey with me. I am often surprised at what Google tells me about the number of readers of this humble blog post. We’ve traveled together down a long road to learn about building, organizing and managing our Demand Gen teams and I hope you’ve learned something that will make you a better marketer.

What’s next?

I’m going to take some time off from posting through the holiday season and the remainder of the year to regroup and refuel. I will be taking the fundamental ideas from this post and organize and compile them into an e-book that I will publish early next year. I hope you will be as excited to read it as I am to publish it. I’ll also be looking for new and exciting topics to cover in next year’s blog posts. In the meantime, I wish you much success and ever-increasing demand!

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!