The truth about martech reporting — Darrell Alfonso // Amazon Web Services

Quotes

• “I think for me, a lot of what is going on, unfortunately, is vendor-driven when it comes to what tools should we be using and what metric should we be reporting on and honestly it has become complicated and a lot of the signal is lost amongst the noise.” -Darrell “There are two main things that you need to be planning for. One is, you need to produce reports that help you make better decisions. Second, you need to produce a report that helps tell a story to leadership.” -Darrell “There’s a difference between your boss coming up with metrics or metrics that are filtering down from the business. A lot of this starts with finance and the way I like to think about this is starting with the end in mind or working backward from the business goals.” -Darrell “I have a simple framework of working backward from the business goals and it’s taking a look at what the revenue target for the business new sales then splitting it out to what is marketing’s contribution going to be for the year in terms of percentage and then averaging out how many deals are going to be required to make up that marketing contribution, and then following the funnel all the way down from there.” -Darrell “You have to breakdown what your boss is thinking about and what’s being fed to youto make sure you’re hitting the mark. On the flip side, there are specific channels that are designed for specific marketing activities that are designed for specific marketing KPIs.” -Ben “I think that data science, drilling down, and analyzing all ofthese numbers are extremely important but it’s important not to get lost. For many marketers, it’s going to take up 20 -25% of their job. The best way that I like to think about is, coming back to that making better decisions, like how are we going to improve upon what we are doing and what numbers are important to the business.” -Darrell “Why I like to start from the end and go backward is to start to see the areas where the data doesn’t make sense and where there are big gaps in the data. That is where that comes from and building things like the marketing funnel report for one, report on the database, the quality, and integrity of the data within the database are big parts of figuring out if you have data problems or not.” -Darrell “The credibility of the report comes down to making sure you have buy-in from the different stakeholders and that’s not just leadership. It’s actually your co-workers, your colleagues in different departments that can undermine everything that you are doing.” -Darrell “It’s important to know that there is more to reporting than just digging into the data. To make a better decision is to foresee what is working and what is not. This is channel reporting, campaign reporting, lead source reporting. These give you a strongindicator of where you are strong, where you are weak, taking the different elements of learnings or commonalities that you have from your strong sources, and seeing if you can bolster the weak sources.” -Darrell“At the end of the day, what matters inyour martech reporting is the ability to get access to the data that you are using but to be able to report it to make sure that you are making a business impact.” -Ben “There is a myriad of different data sources we are getting and ways that you can look at your business and honestly, as much as we want to call reporting a science, in some form it is an art.” -Ben