By Tina Munro, Client Engagement Manager at Heinz Marketing
Introducing Ollie Munro, the Marketing Performance Mutt. (OK, he is a fancy mutt, an Australian Labradoodle to be exact)
You may have learned about Ollie from a recent post by our summer intern, Chase. Ollie is a data driven dog. He lets his human, Tina, come up with all that marketing fluff (HA! Get it!), but he wants to see it turn into sales. His mantra – “Show me the Money!” He holds her accountable to show measurable ROI from all that marketing stuff she does, so that she can earn a pay check to buy him more marrow bones and his fancy dog food which is imported from Italy (no joke). Ollie, the MPM, will be a regular contributor to the Heinz Marketing blog. Here’s his first one:
You have an Executive Quarterly Business Review on Friday. You are collecting data from sales, your social and web teams, field marketing, etc. You have data, lots of data. But what do you put in your presentation? There will be some basic KPIs you will need to report on (revenue, % to goal, month over month sales), but beyond that with all the other data you have, what makes sense to put in the slides? What story do you want to tell that will set you up to get the most value out of that QBR? What can facilitate a productive, meaningful dialog with the Executive Team?
The best tip I have found is to focus on the Why and How. Your execs will be impressed with that amazing PowerBI dashboard with drilldowns you pulled together (which took you a million and a half hours to do and Susan still doesn’t like the colors used in the chart), but immediately they will want to know Why a number is what it is, Why that line is trending upward or downward and then they will ask How are you going to maintain it or fix it.
So, why not build your presentation from the Why and How perspective from the beginning?
Starting from Why and How, you will be able to identify the most important data you need to put into your dashboard and presentation. By narrowing down that information, you will help cut down on the mayhem that QBR’s create for your teams as they collect the right data from the right systems, QA it and report on it. By opening up more time for your team, they can then focus on helping develop the narrative that will give you more time with the execs to discuss what can be done to make things better and make more money for the company. To quickly move the discussion from the lower value descriptive narrative of “What happened last quarter?” to the higher value diagnostic “Why did this happen?” to the highest value discussion around “What can we do to make it better?”
I will have more best practices and tips to share with you next month!
Cheers,
Ollie, the Marketing Performance Mutt
