Alex Ball: Growth Marketing Reporting, Analysis, and ROI webinar

Alex Ball:
All right. Well, thank you for having me today and I want to thank everybody for joining us. I'm really excited to go through this conversation.

My name is Alex Ball. I've spent the past more years than I want to admit working my way through the marketing ranks, and spent a lot of that time in demand and helping companies drive revenue and measure the effectiveness of the revenue they're driving and the impact they're making to the business. So I was really excited when my friends at Lead2Pipeline reached out and said, "Hey, we'd like to have this conversation today."

And what we started with was we kind of had this just reality that today's marketers are struggling. And we're struggling for a weird reason and maybe one that we haven't always struggled with, right? And frankly, the problem is us, right? We love data. We're marketers, we're nerds and we want every possible edge we can have to be better at our job and data's going to help us do that.

But the reality is we have more tools, more inputs, more asks for numbers, more detail that we're expected to give, et cetera. And frankly, we're hitting a point of being overwhelmed and we're kind of getting back to the old habits of reporting for the sake of reporting. And we're looking at data. We're not looking at KPIs. We're not looking at insights. We're not driving decisions.

So we were saying, "Hey, how do we kind of take a step back and look at prioritization and making data useful again?" To your point of data shouldn't be our enemy. It should be our friend. And I want to have a conversation today specifically around how we get back to making data useful for us.

So what we want to talk about is a couple things today, and that's going from data to KPIs to reporting to decision. I want to set the tone a little bit today. I am not going to stand here and rattle off a bunch of stats that you should be looking at. If you want that information, go google the best KPIs to look at in 2024, all those things. You might get 16, 17. There's some really good articles out there.

Today's not about that. Today for me, I think I want to help us get back to the basics a little bit, and talk about how we can use this stuff. And I'm going to provide some stories and anecdotes that I've used along my career that I think have helped me and my teams improve what we're doing.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about establishing KPIs. I'm going to talk a little bit about how to take those KPIs, turn them into a story and a narrative that you can position for your marketing leadership, your sales leadership, your executives, your operating engine, whatever that is, so that you can then make decisions and demonstrate why you've made the decisions you've made.

So let's jump in to the starting point of what makes a good KPI, right? I try to simplify this a little bit in my brain and say, "Hey, they do a couple things." They provide clarity and direction. They make it really clear what everyone's marching towards, what they need to be looking for and where they need to go.

Next, they help you down the road in telling your story. Marketing's all about storytelling through data, right? Next, in my opinion, the best KPIs build. They move up towards your objectives and they help you find where your problem lies. And lastly, they're actionable. If they're not driving action, why are you wasting time tracking them frankly?

I'm going to oversimplify this for the sake of today. I know it's the last Thursday before Christmas and everybody's bogged down trying to close out the year, but if you're doing a webinar, your first KPI may be the open rates on the email promotion. Okay, those are crushing. Things are good. I don't need to worry about the emails. My next campaigns are good. My next messages are good. My conversion from email open to click, good. My click to registration, good.

Now my focus is making sure my presenters know how engaged and interested my audience really is and that we really have something. I'm also going to challenge my team now to go back and look at what's our follow-up activity. Is it strong enough? Is it aggressive enough? What's this data telling us to drive action?

And one of the most important things about driving action to me is that you can't do that with blanket things, right? They have to be specific, which is where I want to get into a little quick conversation of customizing your KPIs.

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Sourabh Kothari:
Just before you do that, Alex, sorry, jumping in, just before you do that, because I love this piece, can you give us an example and anyone you like of a bad KPI?

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Alex Ball:
A bad KPI. I mean, the short answer to that is one that maybe doesn't align with your objectives. So I don't know that I'm going to sit back and tell you x KPI is always good or always bad, but I like to look at, I worked in an environment where we did a lot of trade shows, and we had multiple different verticals that we were in and sometimes we were going into a new vertical. So booth visitors maybe wasn't necessarily, or a cost per booth visitor might not have been the perfect example for us because we were just trying to help people understand that we were out there and that this brand you knew really well and you were really familiar with was now in your space.

Year one that may not translate to pipeline, et cetera. So don't measure it the same way you measure the show that you're going to that is your tried and true I get a third of my pipelines from this conference every year show. Measure them based on your objective and adjust those by channel. Not all things are created equal and not all things within that channel are the same.

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Sourabh Kothari:
Love it. I'm going to get out of your way, man. Wonderful example. Thank you.

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Alex Ball:
Well, you're golden. And within that, I'm a big believer. I think this comes back to the last point really well, which is don't force a KPI, right? Establish why are you doing this.

This was something, one of the best marketing leaders I ever worked for. Everything started with why are we doing it? When do we want to get out of it? Let's build from there. And that created those KPIs that built so that we could just continue to watch down the line where we needed to make adjustments that grew as the program continued to grow and also gave us the license to look at things the way they needed to be looked at. If you're just taking it for, is my open rate good? Okay, fine, everything's good. Now it needs to be tied to what are you trying to do and how can you even improve? If it's good, could it be better?

So the number one thing is don't force it. And I think this is one of the areas that I see happening a lot in marketing today, is people have the same five questions for every campaign. I didn't do the sponsorship for the same reason that I did this webinar. I didn't do this top of the funnel exercise for the same reason I did this bottom of the funnel exercise. You need to tell your story based on what it is, which I think gets into the act of using your KPIs. And I think this gets into the simplest take of how are you doing? Are you on track? Are you progressing? What is standing out? What do you need to dive into and what adjustments do you need to make?

These adjustments could be in-game things, right? Coming back to my painfully simple example of your webinar. If your open rate is good, your click rate is good, but your conversion from click to registration is poor, you need to spend some time here on the landing page and figure out why is it. Is that people just don't understand how to register, where to register? Did you not dive in deep enough into the next content? Make those in-game adjustments.

I look back. One of the campaigns that I think tells this story really well in my career was at this point in my life I was working in an operational capacity and I was working alongside marketing. And we had identified this problem which was we had a churn issue, and we couldn't necessarily always sell our way out of churn. So we had looked at a lot of data, looked at a bunch of numbers and said, "Hey, what we need to do," looking at our competitors, all of these things, "we need to get our customers to call us, reach out, evaluate their services."

So we've made this campaign that was designed around, let us help you be better. Let's sit down, let's have a conversation of look at what you're doing. And as we went through the KPIs for that campaign, they were engagement with the content. Great. Call volumes skyrocketed. Average sales price was looking really good. But we discovered a problem as you continued to go through that build, and that was that our close rates were not good.

So you hear all these things, "I've got great ASP, but a terrible close rate? What's happening?" That became the methodology for us to say, where do we drill down? And what that ended up doing was then also creating an amazing story for us to tell our leadership down the line. I promise I'm going to put a little pin in what we did and how we did it because I want to talk about the practice of converting this information from just data and reporting it into an insight as you take it to your leadership. So I think the other challenge we're having, we have so much information and we don't know how to boil it down into a presentation.

So essentially what you want to do with all of this is as a marketer, you want to look at the whole and work its way down. So when you're sitting down and presenting this to your leadership, whether that's the marketing leadership, the sales leadership, executives, you need to turn your data into a story. And that's creating that narrative that gets really simple, right?

We talked at the beginning that marketers are overwhelmed. Too much information, tough economy, it's tough sledding out there, all those things. Everybody you're talking to is as well. So you need to boil this down to a few consistent points that make it very simple. That is, what someone needs to know, why they need to know it, what it means for them, what is happening next and what the result was or the result is expected to be. And you need to lead that with data.

So you need to start the conversation. One universal talk track across every department in my opinion is data. Here are the numbers we sent out to reach. Here are the results we got because of the activity. Here are the key findings and the reasons we think it'll happen, supported by your layer down data points and then the actions you took as a result, right?

So coming back to the campaign that I was talking about a minute ago where we had this incredible response, we were finding some traction to solve a big problem that we had as a business, but we weren't quite capitalizing on it. We started asking the most important question I think in all of business, which is why. I had somebody really smart one time say, "Just ask why five times, you'll eventually find the answer." And what we did was we started diving into the numbers, and we started looking actually at what was happening within the calls themselves. And we noticed a very clear line of demarcation.

We had half of our call centers, were brushing it, taking these calls exactly the way they were supposed to. And we had half that were making no sales from calls from those toll-free numbers. And what we discovered was the reps didn't view these as sales opportunities. They viewed them as care opportunities. And their mindset was, "I'm dumping this call. I'm going to hand it to support billing, I'm going to move on."

So the problem wasn't the campaign. The problem wasn't the message. The problem was the execution. So we started out. We worked with our sales leaders and our center leaders and we said, "Hey, here's the problem. Here's the data that supports the problem." And we went with the carrot approach and that was, "Hey, here's what your peers are doing. Here's the results they're seeing." That fixed about 25% of it. But what it really opened up was a whole other conversation of we have a bigger problem, and that is we need to drive the right behavior. That opened data from just a marketing and sales issues to an entire operational thing of saying, "Hey, we have an opportunity to solve a big problem by making close rates part of our comp plan."

And we worked across our leadership and we implemented that. It benefited the reps that were doing everything and it drove the right behavior from the reps that were doing it wrong. All of this happened and did a couple of key things. One, we helped our chair problem. Two, we handled our marketing campaigns better. Three, we clearly, concisely demonstrated to our leadership that A) we were measuring, tracking, following the numbers, making decisions that were going to have an impact on the business, and that they could also trust that marketing, operations and sales were in direct alignment. This created all sorts of benefits later on down the road.

So as we kind of break this down, in my opinion, we're getting into why are you doing reporting, analytics, presenting the findings, et cetera. And it's simply, in my opinion, to get to an educated stance to ask yourself a couple of questions. What will you keep doing? What will you stop doing? And what will you do differently? And I think differently is maybe the most important part in this.

I think one of the challenges I think a lot of people have is this is working and just keep doing what we always did. You're probably leaving opportunity on the table.

What are we going to stop doing? This is sometimes where I see a lot of businesses make a mistake. And one of the reasons I see that is they look too much at the surface level. And this comes back to what I was talking about a few minutes ago, of locketing your KPIs into the same thing for everything. I think people think that's simplifying, but really what that's doing is stopping you from getting to the measurable objectives you want to get to, right?

So as you start thinking about what you want to do differently, you start asking the question of why did something happen and what could have been the reason this worked, didn't work, et cetera. Which gets me into, I think kind of talking a little bit more about reporting for decision-making, right?

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Sourabh Kothari:
If you wouldn't mind, there's an example that you and I have discussed. Would you mind sharing, because this really comes down to the level of detail in reporting, especially around revenue? Would you mind sharing the example of the programs we ran together, initial sales fared, but it didn't uncover the issue that ...

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Alex Ball:
Absolutely. I think the point I want to make here is we need to be spending time analyzing data and reacting to data. And what you're alluding to is exactly that. We ran some campaigns and we found a couple of things happening. We were looking at the numbers, our conversion rates, the number of leads, the people we were getting, the titles we were getting, all crushing. Everything was exactly what we wanted to have happen.

As we look downstream, we were not seeing necessarily the conversion from SQL to opportunity and pipeline. And as a business we sat back and said, "Well, this tactic doesn't work," because the asset was working and the other tactics within it. And the quick decision was the problem is the campaign, the problem is this. And frankly because of the reasons I outlined, I couldn't quite accept that. There had to be more to it because of all the things I just said. The assets converting elsewhere. We've proven we can sell to these companies. We've proven we can sell to these titles. So what we did was a couple of different things.

The bias was to react to the issue. The analysis proved that we were actually a little bit of the problem. And when I say that, I used an example a few weeks ago where the sales team was the problem. Sometimes the sales team was the problem. Maybe we didn't prepare the sales team. Maybe we didn't train them well enough. But in this instance we were actually the issue, and we made some assumptions and we made the wrongest. Remarkably, every campaign had this happen. We fixed it.

And what we did was we realized because we dove into the later end things, we saw that one, we were giving up too soon on our follow-Up. Two, some of our tried and true nurture series were not seeing the same returns that we saw with other groups because we really didn't have the same level of credibility with this audience that we had with the ones that had come to us inbound. And we kind of noticed just a behavior of we were so accustomed to selling to people who came to us versus people we went to. We didn't adjust to those as well as we could or should have. So instead of the abandoning channel, we made those tweaks. We tested some things, we tried some things, and the end result was we started seeing the results we needed to see.

And my point of going through that story is I think it's a great example of analyzing what happened versus just reacting to it. We've all heard the old adage, "Numbers never lie," and I don't buy that. Numbers lie all the time. I had a conversation recently of I'm not going back to this channel. And the response was, your average deal is double what our normal one is. Well, but out of thousands of leads, we got two. And frankly, if you really pull those two up, they were dumb luck and we probably would've gotten them otherwise. We've done five other things with this particular group. It's not working. It was more of like if you just look at that one number and you bucketed it of the ROI and the average deal price, you're looking at the wrong thing.

So I think one of the biggest things we need to remember is look at what matters most and be okay telling people why this number matters, why this number is lying, and why you need to look here. And then I think also not getting stuck in waiting for lagging indicators. We talked about this as well. We went through that first example I gave of we weren't going to know if it weren't enough revenue before we had to decide do we keep the lights on with this. You have to be willing to look at the data you have and make a decision at the time.

And what we were seeing in my opinion was we were getting the right people, the right leads, the right conversion rates on the front end. We've made the right changes. We're seeing good results in the early stages of things. And we mostly see our conversion at the 10th, 11th, 12th touch point afterwards. So the fact that we are already doing pretty well at touch point five, six, seven, we turn the lights on and keep the lights on, and here's why. We also have an SDR team that we need to fill. This is the volume tech. All those things came into play.

If I waited for the closed revenue for example, that's a great metric. Obviously, I would always like to know what the end result is. Sometimes you have to make a decision for that. And I think sometimes as marketers, we make this mistake, and some of it it's expectation. Sales always ask, "Well, what did you win because of it?"

We're talking about a world where sometimes our sales cycles are 18, 24 months. We're not winning a deal because of the marketing tactic. We're winning a deal because of the sales process. The job is to get the lead in, get the lead engaged, attract, delight them, engage them throughout. So you have to be willing to not just look at the end, but look at building it and trust your process as you go through.

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Sourabh Kothari:
And I think as you go into the last slide here, Alex, that's another piece I wanted to bring up, is that as marketers, you and I combined, gosh, we've been doing it half a century. That sounds crazy, right? But yeah.

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Alex Ball:
We're old.

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Sourabh Kothari:
Yeah. But one of the things as marketers and that we train our directors, we train our managers, we train our new marketers, is that you're going to get very comfortable with your marketing data and you've got to remind yourself that that's not your world. It's just the first step.

I think this is a problem I'm seeing repeatedly with marketers that I know and I've known for a long time. They're always looking to the fix or the issue or the iteration or the innovation in the marketing data and in the marketing tactic. Whereas you just gave two great examples of how you had to translate what you knew over to collaborate with a team outside yours. And that's being vulnerable, that's being honest, and that's being willing to say, "I can be part of the solution even if it's not a marketing fix."

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Alex Ball:
Yeah, absolutely. I think societally, we're always so afraid to point the finger at ourselves. I think marketers always want to go out and prove the data. The point I've set was this, it's okay to be wrong. What you want to do is adjust to what you got wrong and make the end game changes or the next planning cycle changes to take those learnings and turn them into something great and just don't accept things at that surface level. There's always more to it.

So as I kind of wrap this up before we take questions, I kind of want to leave this group with a couple of what I think are simple actionable things. And frankly, when we set out to do this, we talked about, hey, we want to do a couple things in this presentation. One, let people know you're not alone. We're all facing the same challenge. Two, to just get back to basics and trust yourself, trust the process.

And one of the things I want to recommend is take a minute to look back. You are at the end of the year. I use that example of a campaign that we had kind of abandoned, we were going to abandon because we just looked at the surface level. I guarantee every single person on this call has a pit in their stomach right now about a campaign or a channel or whatever that you've done that with.

Use the next 24, 36 hours or your downtime next week to go and look at that. See where you made a mistake, recognize it. Throw out a proposal to say, "I want to take a sliver at my budget to test this. Here's what I'm going to test. Here's why I'm going to test it. Here's how I'm going to measure it, and these are the adjustments that we think will get us there." It's worth your time because frankly, we're all smart people. We usually find the right spots. Sometimes just a little bit in how you did it and a small change can make a big impact.

Next, allow yourself to customize. Push back sometimes on your leadership that's maybe trying to bucket everything into one spot or your sales team always saying, "Well, what was the ROI? What was this?" Every campaign is different. You and I talked a little bit about paid search. Sometimes paid search is about getting leads you weren't going to get otherwise. Sometimes paid search is you have a massive organic search problem and you're trying to compensate for that. So you're not as concerned with one, the cost per lead metric as you are filling your website traffic, those kind of things. It changes every time. Come back to why you are doing it.

And then lastly, give yourself permission to simplify. Everything is about trying to create priorities. Decide where you need to dive in. Use those 20 new tools you have at your disposal or the 20 different insights, whatever that is. But give yourself permission to simplify it and do it on the front end so that you save time on the back end. Right?

I think it probably sounds daunting when I kind of talked at the beginning around customizing your KPIs and getting very specific and very particular. That sounds like a lot of work, but if you do it on Monday, your Friday is easy. Just don't do it at the very end. I think those were a couple of key things I'd like to leave this group with as you look towards 2024.

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Sourabh Kothari:
Thank you, Alex. This is superb. And as you stop sharing and I bring you back on camera here, I want to reiterate the point you made with something that's very personal. Over the years I have got to work with and got to know a lot of CMOs. And as most of us know in marketing, the running joke is, if you want to last, take the SVP, but don't take the CMO title because you'll be gone in three years. Right? Whereas if you stay a VP, you'll be there for 15 years and you'll be just fine.

But in all seriousness, I've worked with a lot of CMOs and I've got to work with some who are just exceptional. They're at the point of writing books and they're really getting celebrated for what they've done. And they've gone from one Fortune 100 to a Fortune 50 to now one of the top 10 companies in the world, right?

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Alex Ball:
Yeah.

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Sourabh Kothari:
And how does someone do that? Two things that they do that you sort of summarize at the end there, what you mentioned. The first thing is, the CMO, they always come out and explain what they tried and it didn't work. That's this culture. It's a wonderful culture that it sets not just amongst the C level where everyone else is willing to talk about that, but within their own team. They realize that their leader is willing to say, "We tried something, didn't work, we learned from it, and here's what does work and here's what we're going to try again."

They're not asking for permission. They're declaring. That's one of the things I've seen about great CMOs, CMOs I've worked with is they do this repeatedly.

The second thing is what you mentioned there, is they go outside marketing. And oftentimes a good CMO or a great CMO is able to tell you one thing that no one else in your group or even some of your sales team will tell you because they're too close to the deal. They're able to look at what you're doing and say, "Stop. It's too complicated."

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Alex Ball:
Yeah.

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Sourabh Kothari:
It's too complicated. I hear you. I know what you're saying, and I get it for this particular audience that you're trying to address. But I'm telling you at the human level, this is too complicated. We need to simplify.

So I just wanted to validate where you're ending there on simplification. This is something that at the top most marketing, good marketing leaders do, and I think it's something you should expect from your management.

I'm going to go right into our first question, which is, what if I agree with what you are showing here with the levels that you want me to get into and the problem solving approach back with data, but my CMO doesn't? What am I supposed to do? And I know one of the answers, and we've heard this with other experts, is find another job.

Like seriously, we've heard that. Life's too short, right? And great opportunities.

But outside of that answer, Alex, what have you done when you've seen that there is an approach, there's something that will work, but at the top level, your marketing leadership doesn't expose that or address it?

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Alex Ball:
It's a great question, and obviously I think the simple answer is the first one that you threw out, but that's not always easy, practical or something you want to go through.

I think one of the things that is most important throughout all of anybody's career is relationship building, right? You talked about that CMO example of they knew. They worked with their sales leadership, they talked through things. It starts with sitting down and having more of a one-to-one conversation, right? Because if you do it in a one-to-many environment, you're going to create a conflict. It's a back and forth. It's proving people wrong.

And you need to walk into that conversation in the approach of how do we meet somewhere in the middle and help to build credibility and trust. And you need to be comfortable saying, "Here is why I'm not as focused on this metric. I am going to watch it. I am going to monitor it, but I'm not going to abandon these ones. And here it's why," because it does two things.

One, sometimes I have to sit back and say, "My boss is my boss for a reason. Been around, they know some things. Maybe there's a corner I'm not looking at."

So it starts with understanding each other. It also starts with coming back to the question I said at the beginning, ask why five times and you'll get to the answer. Be curious, understand where and there are coming from, and have that one-to-one dialogue so that you can work forward together. That will then translate into better results later.

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Sourabh Kothari:
And then, for those who don't know the five whys, and I mean, I think at some point in your career you get old enough and you learn it. So someone teaches it to you. But I mean, Toyota as a company, the motor company, the leader, the golden leader, they credit their success to this method. It was sort of established by Toyoda, Sakichi Toyoda many, many years ago. And they use it relentlessly to figure out what's wrong. And we stop everything else we're doing until we know what's wrong.

So I'm going to double down on this. When you realize something isn't working, and as you know, there's some political implications to that of like, well, we invested in this, and it's become clear that it's not working, it's become clear to you, Alex, the person with the data, the person on the program. But how do you package and message and rationalize that to your larger audience, to the product team, the sales team, and your marketing leadership? How do you get them to understand, we are not going to do this anymore and that's a decision?

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Alex Ball:
Yeah. There's probably a couple of answers to give you, and I'll try to package that up into a simple analogy or a simple point to start with is depending on the format of which you're going is you start with each group's why, right? So if you need to have that conversation with the product team, you need to go through the why as it relates to them, what's in it for them and what it means for them. And you need to support all of it with data.

Sometimes you will go to your sales team, I saw this a lot, and say, "Hey, we're not going to go to this conference anymore and here it is why. There's this massive change. They're targeting a different group. They're doing all of this." That show's got some near and dear to their hearts, and it's also near and dear to your product marketing, your product teams because of the learnings they've had.

But you have to get down to the why for the business, understanding their pain, demonstrate it with data, and show the end metric to get there. And that's really how simple it boils down. And I think when you also lead and demonstrate with data, you create a commonality for that group to then get to the personal thing and the relationship building side of it.

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Sourabh Kothari:
I love it. And I'll add one other thing to that that you made me think of because we're both that, and that's probably the thing we're most focused on is our children. Careers come and go, right? And the last piece is, and I'm going to just add to what Alex said there, is if you can do that, if you can find the why, if you can address that with each of your stakeholders, the last thing to end with that normally seals the deal is here's what we're doing instead. Give it a chance and I'll meet you there. Don't leave them just with a no when you as a marketer, you can almost always provide an alternative that'll still achieve the business goal.

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Alex Ball:
Well, and I think I love how you phrased that. I'm going to add one more thing to that, is not just tell them what you're doing instead, but invite them to be part of it and take their learning and their knowledge. Because marketing is not just a siloed thing. You have to be aligned with your sales team, your product teams, your support teams. You have to be part of the global business, and you need to bring that combined learning around. You used the example of, "Hey, they're too complicated. The sale needs to be simpler." Product may know that better than anybody. Product does it better than sales.

Bring them along with you and say, "Hey, I'm not abandoning you. I'm abandoning the [inaudible 00:31:51], and we're making a different decision."

Sourabh Kothari:

For now.

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Alex Ball:
For now. Yeah. For now is a term as well.

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Sourabh Kothari:
Last question, and it's such an unfair question to end on. I know you were taking it, but if you wouldn't mind explaining it. So all of this data that we use at the different levels for different channels of different audiences, sometimes different geos and different products, is all of this data, is there one place I should be looking at all of this data? Should all of this be somehow coming into Salesforce and managed in dashboards? Where am I supposed to be trusting my data for this?

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Alex Ball:
That is a great question. And you are right. That's a tough one to end on.

I think the most important thing is more so making sure everybody knows where to find it versus where it is. The reality is, some tools have limitations. Sometimes you have to say, "I have to export the information from Salesforce to a more powerful engine that can do more things." And the more important thing is that you documented and made it easy for people to find it, right? Because I think one of the challenges you have is people are like, "I don't know where to go. I want to know how this is doing, and I don't know where it is."

So I think for me, more than anything, it's making sure people know where to go and what it means within the report. Because sometimes you look at. I could look at the same chart that you look at and see it two totally different ways. That could be two really good things, right? Two brains coming together, seeing different spots. Or it could also mean the chart's not very good and we're interpreting it wrong. So then have those conversations out.

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