If I could ask revenue operators to change one behavior, it would be this:
Stop sending out reports that cover specific requirements or metrics just because someone asked for them!
Why?
To deliver a truly effective dashboard or report, you must understand what the requester is trying to achieve. Otherwise, there's a good chance that the answers they're looking for don't exist in the data that they've requested.
Marketing and sales data can be very detailed and contextual. For certain people, that level of nuance is critical. For others, they don't need to know more than high-level insights. When it comes to creating reports, remember that your audience is everything.
At the top of the organization, your board or investors don't need or want to hear about specific marketing campaigns or the success of a recent SDR SPIFF. They need general revenue figures.
As you move down the levels of management, people will start to care more and more about specific data. There are thousands of activities that must happen across the company in order to move the business forward.
It's important to understand these activities when you're personally responsible for taking actions that deliver results.
If you're leading an organization, it's not reasonable or possible to know every detail – which is why dialing in what they DO need to know is so critical for ops professionals.
We're generalizing! Some executives have a knack for and need detailed information beyond what we've recommended. That's ok! Please get to know the people you work with and ask them questions.
RevOps is no stranger to quarterly board meetings and slide decks. We're usually tapped the week before to help our executive team tell their story with data. But what data is the most relevant to investors?
In short, they want to know:
These individuals care about growth and the profitability of the business. They'll ask about what went right in the past quarter and want to see the trend over the past year and a half. Perhaps more importantly, they'll ask what went wrong and what your company will do differently to improve results.
They aren't concerned with how many calls your SDRs make. They don't care about how specific campaigns are performing. They're not thinking about whether customers are happy with their onboarding experience. They care about topline revenue growth and sustainability.
If you build a slide deck for the board, focus on revenue, profitability, and efficiency. We also recommend showing five quarters' worth of data to show a year-over-year comparison for the current quarter and provide a reasonable timeframe to spot trends.
Let's look at the typical must-have metrics in B2B SaaS:
Marketing metrics should include:
You'll need to speak to conversion rates as well. You can even mention some tactics your team has deployed that positively impacted and improved your forecast. But there's no need for more details.
Sales focuses on quota attainment, forecast accuracy, and pipeline build. Be prepared to speak to win rates, average sales cycles, and deal or stage velocity.
Customer success should focus on expansion sales, customer retention, and customer engagement data.
Your board has limited time to ingest and process your data. Many have trained themselves to spot and ask questions about anomalies (data on a chart that's different from the rest) or data that's trending in a direction they don't like. You'll get a lot of questions when your team or company misses a core goal or if there's a spike in activity that looks abnormal.
Anticipating questions is the only way to save time on fact-finding missions after the board meeting. Determining what's going wrong and researching why before the board meeting saves a ton of cycles answering random questions that may be wild guesses at what went wrong.
The next level down from investors is your executive team. Each executive should be focused on answering the board's questions:
Unfortunately, sometimes executives are too busy worrying about questions they anticipate receiving from the board due to underperformance. It's hyper-critical for operations professionals to ask what question or worry an executive is trying to solve when they ask for new metrics that feel random. As a data expert, you can suggest a more efficient way to solve their problem.
For example, a CMO needs to know:
For each of these, they'll want to understand how much of that number was sourced or influenced by marketing. These are the results that they'll report to the leadership team and board. They'll also need to speak to how specific channels and large initiatives are performing, but that data shouldn't be front and center. Initiative and channel data should be used as an explanation for why the numbers are the way they are.
If this all sounds easy, sadly, it's not. A lot of teams forget to collaborate cross-functionally to define metrics like what a qualified lead is or how marketing contribution should be calculated compared to sales contribution and partner contribution to bookings and pipeline.
Once you define and consistently report on core metrics, you've only cleared the first hurdle in a line of many.
It's an operations professional's job to review the results and anticipate questions from the board. As you practice this exercise, you'll be able to anticipate why these numbers are changing and help research the answer before the board meeting.
The wisest go-to-market leaders understand how their counterparts are performing. They need to know things like:
An executive spends most of their day putting out fires with other executives and direct reports. They want to focus on topline metrics and trust their teams to handle the details.
For example, a CMO oversees a team of specialists across several disciplines. They want to trust that the people they hire are familiar with the metrics, systems, and data relevant to their responsibilities. The executive's job is to inform the team of the strategy, develop goals to keep the team aligned with the overall company objective and ensure that the team focuses on the correct activities. They only want to dig into the details if they suspect a problem.
Unless they're a micro-manager. Which happens 😂
Time is the limiting factor in presentations to the executive team. As an operations professional, it's essential to focus on what the executive cares about the most. Put any supporting data in the appendix. If your presentation is structured well and you anticipate obvious questions, you will save time in reporting cycles after key meetings on fact-finding missions.
Management levels need the level of detail appropriate for their role and the diversity of roles reporting to them. A digital marketing manager may oversee the website, content marketing, paid advertising, and social media. They'll need some details about each channel but not the level of detail each team member will need in each discipline. On the other hand, an inside sales manager will require more detailed information about how each person on their team is performing since their team is doing the same (or similar) job(s).
Generally speaking, an executive or director will want high-level metrics and rely on their management team to report specific issues that need their attention. The management team will need more details about how particular individuals and functions are performing.
Not all individual contributors are data-savvy, but it's essential that teams get the support necessary for them to understand how to effectively do their jobs.
A content specialist in marketing will need to know everything about content consumption on the website. This data should be segmented by audience so they can understand what's attracting the correct ICP instead of a flashy ad that gets clicks but no meaningful engagement. This helps them know what resonates and what doesn't.
A salesperson needs to know which accounts are engaged in their territory, which accounts are due follow up, and how their opportunities are progressing.
Customer success needs to understand who may be at risk of churning (remember, most don't give anyone a warning or complain first), who's a good target for expansion, and which needs more support.
Individual dashboards should focus very little on topline aggregate metrics and have everything to do with what an individual needs to know to do their job well on any given day.
RevOps teams have a lot of visibility into data. Pulling the reports that your leadership team or managers ask for may seem easier, but ultimately, you're doing them a disservice.
Be bold and ask a lot of questions.
Do ask for more details if you suspect there's a problem.
Do anticipate questions if you spot something odd in the data.
Don't assume your executive knows which metrics will answer their questions.
The more questions you ask, the more you'll learn, and the better equipped you'll be to make better recommendations next time.
