When it comes to providing value to your CMO, data and reporting needs to tell a story. If you are in marketing operations, you should understand the data better than anyone. So you should help draw out the insights and write the narrative.

Just sending a few reports and dashboards with high-level numbers on them is not enough, even if it was a huge lift to get there.

Make sure the data can provide meaningful insight and a narrative the CMO can use with the C-suite: a trend, % to goal, year over year improvement, a new channel's impact on pipe/funnel/conversions/velocity.

Here’s what we mean 👇

Turn:

- "Marketing sourced $2m in pipe in Q1"

Into:

- "Marketing sourced $2m in pipe in Q1FY20 vs. a goal of $1.5m.

- This was 40% more than Q1FY19.

- 25% of the additional pipe was sourced by our new virtual event channel with an ROI better than any other channel

- Marketing sourced pipe win rate in FY20 has been trending higher with a win rate of 25% in Q1 and closing 2x times faster than FY19"

Note: it doesn't always have to be positive. Arguably a narrative showing where you need to improve is even more powerful.

How have you told a narrative with data?

*** Bonus: If you haven’t checked out the episode “5 Ways Marketing Operations Can Win Over The CMO,” we go further in depth on this very topic.