Let Radical Data Visibility Set You Free 

This article was originally published on LinkedIn

Most of the marketers I know are on the verge of burnout. With constant regulatory and data privacy changes, shifting email deliverability requirements, and cookie depreciation, whatever strategy we were using six months ago to generate revenue, likely does not work anymore. If you’re not innovating, iterating, and adapting, you’ve already fallen behind

In times of economic turmoil, marketing departments are often the first to face cuts– almost half of marketing teams (46.5%) restructured in the last 12 months, according to Marketing Week’s 2024 Career & Salary Survey. That explains why 39% of marketers said they worried about layoffs in the recent LinkedIn survey.  

Marketing is a unique role. Much of our work is highly visible, which invites critique from nearly everyone in an organization. This leads to a lot of suggestions and unsolicited advice. For example, a developer may reach out and recommend you do a webinar with the people from their favorite app so they can get a discount, or an executive will recommend you start a company TikTok because his “nephew works in social media and says everyone is doing it.” Then a consultant will vehemently disagree with the name of your last webinar and call it unprofessional, and a program director will insist you share a QR code on your Instagram account (all these are real examples, not all from the same company). 

We may be seen, but we’re certainly not understood. Most C-suites and Board Rooms lack marketing experience. Only 2.6% of board members have marketing experience and 10% of Fortune 250 CEOs have any marketing experience. So we find ourselves constantly justifying our decisions to people who don’t understand our process or craft. 

So what happens when you combine rising pressure, chronic job insecurity, and a barrage of unsolicited feedback? Exhaustion and the temptation to acquiesce to higher-ups in your company despite your better judgment.

It’s hard to innovate when you feel obligated to say yes to everything. 

The Solution? Find Your Big Dashboard Energy

So how do you protect your team’s precious time, leave space for creative experimentation, and continuous improvement, and stop saying yes to projects that you don’t want to do and know won’t help the bottom line? You find yourself some Big Dashboard Energy and start showing up to conversations with receipts. 

The Power of Transparency 

Over the course of the last year, my team and I created dashboards that are visible to the entire organization. So anyone from the finance team to sales and delivery can see what we are doing, and dig into our wins and losses. This means airing our dirty laundry – sharing low-performing campaign data – with the very same people who behave as if they could do our job better than we can. But here is the thing: there is so much power in absolute transparency that when we started really digging into how decisions are made, the unsolicited feedback all but stopped. 

Use Data to Tell Your Stories and Gain Trust

Our dashboards gave us the ability to reframe our losses as lessons learned and create space to talk about what comes next. It also created a more open dialog with our sales team so we were able to get timely feedback on our targeting efforts and create a smoother handoff from sales to marketing, resulting in better close rates.

When you let the data do the talking, your peers can celebrate your wins with you while gaining an understanding of how your decisions are made when you pivot from your losses. 

This, like most things, comes down to communication. When you are talking with executives and others who don’t understand what it is that you do, you have to meet them where they are and speak a language they will understand – talk about the numbers. 

A Deeper Look Into Our Project

Background

My company, a B2B services organization, uses Salesforce on the sales side while the marketing team relies on Hubspot. Salesforce is our source of truth, meaning all reports for executive leadership and the Board come from Salesforce. 

Before this project, we used out-of-the-box integration between the two systems but struggled to address multi-touch attribution.

The Problem

Marketing ran a very successful multi-channel campaign that generated 60 new opportunities in just one quarter. Initially, attribution was working smoothly, then one day, the number of opportunities attributed to the campaign dropped from 60 to 40. We learned that the sales team was tasked with reaching out to their contacts to promote the new service area and using the campaign field to track their efforts. 

Since Salesforce only allows one opportunity to be attributed to one campaign, marketing attribution was overwritten by the sales team’s Cross-Sell-Upsell campaign. Sales and Marketing leadership agreed that both initiatives influenced these opportunities, but there was no way to report this without fixing our data foundation. 

The Solution

This project took almost a full year to complete and a ton of late nights to verify the data and address additional reporting needs, proper attribution, and integration issues. We worked with outside vendors and an internal FP&A and BI expert to generate the final dashboards and aggregate some of the data. 

Step One: Align with Sales

The first and most important step is to align with sales. Do not fall into the trap of sales vs. marketing, instead work together to define what is a marketing-originated opportunity and what constitutes marketing influence. Remember no deal exists in a vacuum and you both have the same goal in mind – grow the business– and to do that, collaboration is vital. 

Step Two: Define your Parameters   

Remember, you are reporting to executives who do not understand marketing, keep it simple so their eyes don’t glaze over. Executives just want to know that you are doing more of what is working, and changing what is not working. 

For us, this meant using an equal-weight attribution model. We wanted to know which marketing activities influenced purchases, we didn’t want to waste too much time trying to guess which action had the most influence. 

Step Three: Fix Your Data Foundation  

When your data is spread out into several disparate systems, pulling reports can take hours. To fix your data foundation, you need to leverage automated data collection, choose a single source of truth, and then make sure all the relevant data is in that system.

Our source of truth, Salesforce, did not have all the data we needed to paint the full picture of marketing impact, so we went beyond the basic HubSpot/Salesforce integration to map more marketing activities to Salesforce.

For us, this was email clicks, page views, form fills, and webinar registrations. We used Zapier and a Salesforce-specialized consulting company, ShadowRock , to build out our custom integration.  

Then we had to fix our biggest data issue – figure out how to attribute multiple campaigns to a single opportunity. Our solution for that was Align.ly , a Salesforce Marketing Attribution plugin. 

Step Four: Assess and Reassess Your Data to Ensure You’re Telling an Accurate Story

Throughout this process, we discovered three major pitfalls in our ability to accurately report on marketing impact. 

1. We weren’t reflecting the full buying committee– In B2B marketing, you’ll find that the person doing the research isn’t always the one with the company card or signing power. Our biggest breakthrough was figuring out how to connect Contacts from HubSpot to Opportunities in Salesforce when they weren’t our main sales contact. 
2. Our dashboarding software was over-attributing marketing influence–  We have a complex business model with multiple solutions and different target personas for each offering. Out-of-the-box attribution was tagging any marketing interaction to any and all opportunities in Salesforce. We needed to ensure that only relevant marketing campaign interactions were attributed to an opportunity. Our fix for this was matching campaign activity in Hubspot to service area fields in Salesforce – a complicated and somewhat manual process at first. That way we didn’t overstate marketing influence by attributing irrelevant content to a closed-won deal.
3. Marketing wasn’t getting credit for the full scope and revenue generated from marketing-sourced opportunities– Many new customers start out with a low-cost assessment followed by additional service work and then licensing deals. In our old reporting model, we were only measuring the very first deal and not the two subsequent opportunities that stemmed from the same campaign. Our fix was to add second and third deals that happen within a certain time parameter to our reporting. 

Step Five: Build a Big, Beautiful Dashboard (or two)

Executives and the Board don’t want to have to log in to Salesforce to track progress, so we built dashboards in PowerBI and generated automatic reports that are emailed at the end of each month. This also allowed us to customize the reports even further and ensure the graphs matched our brand. 

Big Dashboard Energy In Action 

By tapping into my Big Dashboard Energy, I’ve gained trust and authority – I now have the ability to assert myself in rooms full of people whose titles are much bigger than my own. More importantly, I’ve been able to protect my team from spreading themselves too thin by prioritizing the work that matters and gaining the ability to say no to projects that won’t move the needle. 

And that’s exactly what Big Dashboard Energy is about. I no longer have to justify our decisions or read a dissertation that explains our team’s work. When armed with powerful dashboards, I have the confidence–and the receipts–to let our data do all the talking.