Nobody wants another 47 slide marketing report
Here’s something marketing and BD teams probably don’t want to hear. Senior leadership doesn’t need to know everything you did last month. And they almost certainly don’t need 47 slides.
How many LinkedIn posts went out. How many emails were sent. How many events you delivered, how many website visitors you had, how many pieces of content you published, how many pitches went in, how many awards and directory submissions you worked on.
All of that might be useful somewhere. But there’s a real danger that marketing and BD reporting becomes a detailed account of how busy the team has been, rather than an explanation of what difference any of it is making. Those are two very different documents.
How reporting turns into an activity log
It’s easy to see why this happens. Marketing and BD teams do a lot, and much of that work isn’t visible to anyone else.
Senior leaders see the event, but not the weeks of work behind it. They see the campaign, but not the research, the planning, the content and the stakeholder wrangling that got it there. They see the pitch go out, but not what it took to pull it together.
So when reporting time comes round, there’s a natural pull towards showing everything. Look at what we’ve delivered. Look at how much we’ve done. Look at how busy we are.
The problem is that being busy isn’t the same as being effective, and leadership can usually tell the difference.
What does leadership actually need to know?
Reporting gets much more useful when you start with your audience rather than your activity.
If you’re presenting to a managing partner, CEO, COO or board, what do they actually need from you? It probably isn’t a list of every social post you published. They want to know whether you’re making progress against the firm’s priorities, what’s working, what isn’t, what you’re learning, where the opportunities and risks are, and whether there’s anything they need to decide.
That calls for a different kind of report.
Start with the objectives, not the activity
The simplest change you can make is to structure your reporting around what the organisation is trying to achieve.
Say one of your priorities is growing a particular sector. Your report could say:
“We published four articles, ran a webinar, sent three emails and generated 6,000 impressions on LinkedIn.”
Or it could say:
“We’re building visibility and relationships in this sector. This quarter we engaged 14 of our 30 priority organisations, generated five follow up conversations and created two opportunities. Engagement is strongest around this issue, so we recommend focusing the next phase of activity there.”
Same activity, completely different conversation. One tells leadership what marketing did. The other tells them what’s happening in the business.
Don’t hide the things that aren’t working
Nobody enjoys putting a red number in front of the board. But not everything you do is going to work.
An event underperforms. A campaign fails to gain traction. A target market doesn’t respond. An expensive sponsorship generates very little. That’s all useful information, and if your report quietly features the good numbers and skirts round the difficult ones, you’re wasting it.
Being able to say “this isn’t performing as we expected, here’s why we think that is, and here’s what we recommend doing about it” demonstrates far more value than making every activity look like a success. It also builds the kind of credibility that makes people believe you when you say something is working.
Context matters more than the number
“We had 25,000 website visits.” Is that good? Possibly.
“We gained 400 LinkedIn followers.” Great. Probably.
“Our event had 120 attendees.” Excellent, or was it?
Numbers on their own don’t tell anyone very much. Were those visitors from the audiences you’re actually trying to reach? Are the right people following you? Did the clients and prospects you wanted at that event turn up, and did anything happen afterwards? Is performance improving or slipping?
A useful report helps people understand what the numbers mean. It doesn’t just present them and hope.
Tell people what you’re learning
This is the bit I think marketing and BD teams could do far more of, because you’re sitting on a lot of information other people don’t have.
You know which topics are generating interest and which events attract the right audiences. You know which sectors are engaging with campaigns, what clients are saying, which pitches you’re winning and losing, what competitors are doing, and what’s coming back from BD conversations.
That’s business intelligence. So instead of only reporting what marketing did, tell leadership what marketing and BD is seeing.
Perhaps one service is suddenly attracting far more interest than expected. Maybe the same client issue keeps surfacing in conversations. Perhaps one target sector is engaging much more strongly than another, or a competitor is visibly gaining ground. Those insights can shape a lot more than the marketing plan.
Your report should occasionally ask for something
Good reporting doesn’t always end with “any questions?”
Sometimes you need a decision. You recommend stopping an activity. You want to move budget from one area to another. You need senior sponsorship for an initiative, or a view on which of two priorities matters more. You need five relationship owners to actually pick up the phone.
Asking for those things turns your report into part of how the organisation makes decisions, rather than a monthly history lesson.
Try the one page test
I’m not suggesting every report has to fit on a single page. But it’s a useful exercise.
If you only had one page to update your CEO, managing partner or board, what would go on it? Mine would cover what you’re trying to achieve, whether you’re on track, what’s working, what isn’t, what you’ve learnt, what happens next, and what you need from them.
The supporting detail can still exist. If somebody wants to dig into website performance, event attendance or campaign metrics, have it ready. It just doesn’t all need to be on slide 36.
Reporting should help people make better decisions
Your reporting doesn’t exist to prove the team has been busy, and it shouldn’t just be a collection of everything that happens to be easy to measure. Its job is to help the organisation understand whether its marketing and BD investment is moving things in the right direction.
What’s changing? What are you learning? Where should the firm invest more, what should it stop, and where does it need to act?
If your reporting helps leadership answer those questions, they’ll get far more from it, and so will you. And you might finally get to retire the 47 slide deck.
Need help?
If you would like help with your marketing and business development, bringing on a marketing consultant with a fresh pair of eyes can make all the difference. I work with B2B businesses and professional service firms in London, Kent, the UK, and Europe, specialising as a professional services marketing and bd consultant. Please get in touch or book a free 30-minute consultation.
