Why Sales Data is Crucial for Marketing Reports

We were missing too many pieces of the marketing picture. Analytics and call tracking gave us a big chunk of the marketing picture, but we needed our marketing tied to real business value.

Marketers are blindfolded to sales data

Every month our agency would send marketing reports to show the results we were generating for our clients. Our reports included website traffic, visitors, page views and where the traffic originated. Clients were unimpressed, they were spending money and all we could give them was website traffic, they needed more to justify their marketing spend.

We gave them more, by tracking leads and telephone calls, and we could show the client what leads came from what marketing. Now we could even calculate the Cost Per Lead (CPL). Lead reporting does get you closer to sales reporting, but if the client is not tracking lead conversion on their side, even leads become just another number that loses its shine.

Ultimately, many marketers are blindfolded to actual sales figures. There is a data wall we hit, we simply have no idea of the actual business value we are creating with our marketing.

How is Company Success Measured?

The bottom line is that a company measures its success in sales, revenue, profit and loss. There is a huge chasm between marketing spend and actual sales. This problem affects the business owner and marketer. A business owner needs to know that if he spends $10,000 on a campaign, that he will receive sales with enough profit to cover the marketing costs and make a healthy profit.

On the marketing side, we need to know if a campaign performed well, learn from it and improve. If a campaign doesn't generate the sales our client needs to make a profit, we need to cut it as quickly as possible. Even better, if we find a campaign that is generating healthy sales, we need to capitalize on an effective strategy.

Both the client and marketer need better information that ties marketing spend to leads, quotes, and actual sales.

Focus on What Doesn't Change

Marketing reports lose their shine over time, but business value never gets old. With the report above it's easy to identify profitable campaigns.

Marketing campaigns, social media, search, platforms, and mediums are important, but they are in constant flux. Focus your reporting and your business on what doesn't change. What was valuable to businesses 100 years ago and what will still be valuable 5, 10 and 100 years from now. Sales, revenue, profit and loss are still as important now as they were 100 years ago, and these metrics will still be important in the future.

That's Why We Built WhatConverts

By design, WhatConverts tracks all marketing through phone calls, web forms and e-commerce transactions. Adding business value to each lead, we tie it all together to give you and your client a complete marketing picture.

Now companies and agencies can see what marketing converts to leads, quotes and sales. Find out for yourself, get started now.