Outbound produces a lot of numbers, and most of them are the wrong ones to put in front of a board. Emails sent, open rates, replies: these describe activity. A board wants to know whether marketing is producing pipeline, what it costs, and whether that is getting better or worse.
This is the short version of what we report to clients each month, and what we deliberately leave out.
What to report
Meetings held. Not booked, held. Against a written definition of a qualified meeting, so the number means the same thing every month. If the definition changes, say so on the slide.
Pipeline created. The value of opportunities opened in the CRM that came from those meetings. This is the number that connects marketing to revenue, and it should come straight from the CRM, not from a spreadsheet someone maintains on the side.
Conversion by stage. Of the meetings held, how many became opportunities; of those, how many progressed; and eventually, how many closed. Stage conversion tells a board where the engine is working and where it is leaking. A strong meeting rate with weak conversion to opportunity is a targeting or qualification problem, not a volume problem.
Cost per held meeting. Everything outbound costs in a month, divided by held meetings. On a results-based plan this is easy to compute, because the invoice already lists each meeting. Track the trend, not just the level.
What changed and why. One or two sentences on what was adjusted this month, in targeting, messaging or channels, and what you expect it to do. A board trusts a number more when it can see the decisions behind it.
What to leave out
Sends, opens and clicks. Open tracking has become unreliable as mailbox providers pre-load images, and send volume is an input, not an output. They are useful to the people running the campaigns. They are noise in a board pack.
Replies without context. A reply count mixes interest, objections, out of office notices and unsubscribes. If you report replies at all, report positive replies, and only alongside the meetings they became.
Anything you cannot trace in the CRM. If a number cannot be followed back to records, it will eventually be questioned, and the answer will be awkward.
Attribution, without fooling yourself
B2B deals rarely have one cause. A prospect might receive a cold email, read an article a month later, see an ad, and then reply. Each channel would like the credit.
Keep it simple and consistent:
- Source is the channel that created the first meeting. That is what a results-based plan bills against, so it is already recorded.
- Influence is every channel the account touched before the deal closed. Report it, but do not add it up as if each channel caused the whole deal.
Report both, label them clearly, and do not change the rules between months. A boring, consistent attribution model is worth far more to a board than a clever one that moves.
Where this comes from
On our Growth and Full-Funnel plans the CRM nurture and reporting line builds this dashboard in your own CRM, so the numbers are yours and stay with you. If you are setting it up yourself, the structure above is enough to start: four numbers, one paragraph, and the same definitions every month.