Inspired by a recent conversation on the podcast with six-time CMO and former boss Grant Johnson about his Marketing Performance Index (MPI) framework, in this article Jeff Clark asks if we now have a framework for what CMOs should report, how do you get to the point where this reporting strategy is accepted?
Recently, we have been having a pod-to-blog-to-pod conversation with former boss, six-time CMO and now CMO Mentor, Grant Johnson, who has taken the plunge into the “how to measure the value of marketing” controversy with his Marketing Performance Index (MPI). An objective framework for quantifying marketing’s impact of marketing by tracking the key metrics that assess the company’s relative brand, demand and market strength.
As he put it:
“Most of my peers agree: B2B Marketing is broken. While we have more technology, data, processes, and insights than ever before, yet we are always defending our decisions and endlessly proving the value of marketing.”
This reminded me of a tried-and-true process for CMOs to up their performance reporting game in five easy steps.
Of course, your marketing ops team may say, “Easy?” I’ll explain.
But wait! Before we get to the steps, you need to know your primary inputs for what you are reporting on – Your Goals! Out of your planning session, both with the exec team and your leadership team, you should focus your efforts on the small set of goals that really helps focus marketing’s contribution to business (e.g., demand, brand, market presence, enablement, etc.) or as Ian would say “ART” – Awareness, Revenue and Trust.
I once worked with a global energy analytics firm on their executive dashboard. Their marketing department had over two dozen goals. That’s an overload! You can’t possibly maintain focus on two dozen goals. So, their first task was to review which goals marketing could really impact and measure, and which goals were related to another more impactful goal. They took their straw-man to the exec team and got agreement.
So, here are the steps.
One: Executive Discover Session
Interview each member of the exec team to understand metrics they want to see that address your goals. Obviously, you’ll want to focus certain discussions on measures that are relevant to each exec. For example, the CRO wants to know about progress on demand, the CEO about brand, and so on. You want to uncover the business questions that they will be asking, and how you can best answer them.
However, reinforce that you are preparing to report on all the key ways marketing contributes. If an exec wants to focus on lower-level activity reporting, like web visitors or SEO ranking, push back. You want to be talking about business-level impacts, and those measures can be details on drill down reports. If your organization doesn’t have a solid culture of OKRs or there are no coherent business goals, this process could be the catalyst for developing that culture.
Also, discuss the expected timeframe for reporting, e.g., real-time, monthly, QBRs. And bring a marketing ops or analytics person with you, so you have a tech-savvy set of ears, who can help understand how to get and display what the exec is looking for.
Two: Create Your Reporting Plan
This is likely done with your marketing ops and marketing leadership teams. You will want to conduct a gap analysis that surfaces what you can deliver versus what the exec team wants to see. Are there metrics that are accessible for reporting? What have we been reporting historically? Are we analyzing long-range trends? Is there a request for vanity metrics that are really a component of another metric that’s more relevant to your story?
Prioritize what measures are most important to develop, particularly if you can’t get to everything. Your plan may reflect what information and analysis are readily attainable and what work your team needs to do to develop and accurately represent other metrics.
Three: Socialize Wireframes to Get Approval
A key output of your initial plan are sample reports. These could be wireframes in PowerPoint or Excel, or your analytics or Business Intelligence (BI) tool, if you’re so lucky. Don’t get fancy yet because you want to get first impressions from your audience before you do too much work.
Within the wireframe, you will want to display how you’re demonstrating success. Are you comparing results to the year-end goal, benchmarks, or year-to-date progress?
Review the wireframes with the exec team, and if necessary, with key individual members. If any rework is necessary on your wireframes, you may need to come back to get the OK. This exercise is good for helping executives understand the level of effort needed to create the reports.
While at Forrester, we worked with many teams to create dashboards that became award winners. Starting with a PowerPoint wireframe for review and then ultimately reproducing it in a BI tool worked well. One exercise that I did with an analyst at major technology company who was mapping marketing metrics to the company’s top 5 business goals. It took lots of cycles, but created a great dashboard.
Four: Build & Test the Reports:
Whether you are creating reports in a BI/analytics tool or PowerPoint, build and user-test them before going live. You may even need to train your audience on how to read the reports and access any detailed drilldowns, including understanding the data behind the results.
Speaking of data, the biggest challenge for analytics tools is often unifying the data in one data store for your dashboard to pull from. Some tools will pull data from different sources in real-time, but others will require that the data is housed in a data lake or other unified store. I worked with a global services firm that built a data lake that drew upon many sources for executive dashboard metrics (e.g., CRM, Marketing Automation Platform, Web Analytics, etc.), and then instructed other marketers or salespeople where to go for tracking items that were not in the executive dashboard.
Five: Document It
You must track the development of your reports metric so that you can pivot if anything changes, or if there are issues with your underlying sources of data. This is really the function of your marketing ops or our analytics team.
For every metric you need to define it, identify the source of data, how the metric is expressed (e.g., percentages, monetary values, counts, etc.), what are you comparing results to, and any dependencies on other data that may change over time.
This is an essential to being able to evolve reports and keep them accurate as the business changes. And it demonstrates that marketing is agile!
One More: Rinse & Repeat
It would be cheating to call it a step, but as the year unfolds and business dynamics change, you’ll need to monitor how the reports work and what needs to be updated. You want to show that you listen and are responsive to changing business demands.
To listen to Ian and I discuss this topic, check out “Jeff’s Five Things” and also listen to our blog conversation with Grant Johnson on the MPI.
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