Every company wants a Marketing dashboard and almost every company experiences conflict over it. What should it include? How do we know the numbers are accurate? What does it tell us?

This is an example of a dashboard I put together while working at Return Path. From the top left, clockwise, there are elements that show the number of Leads created by region and channel compared to last year, the value created from Marketing Leads in those periods, the close rate of those Leads, the percent of total bookings which can be allocated to Marketing, and two ways of looking at the current status of the company’s marketing waterfall.

Building the dashboard from Salesforce data alone and making it easy to refresh each month was only a small part of the work. The most important piece was working with the heads of Marketing and Sales to make sure they understood and agreed with how the numbers were being calculated and what they meant.