Data-rich but insight-poor
Understanding the altitude we should be operating at
Board: “Can you send me the CAC by channel?”
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve received a variation of this question over my career - well, I wouldn’t be a millionaire, but I bet I could treat the family to a nice steakhouse dinner.
Right intention. Wrong question.
It’s not seeing the forest for the trees. It’s not understanding how a GTM ecosystem operates.
Sponsor: HockeyStack
Your CEO just slacked you: "We have our board meeting in 2 days. Send me a slide with what's working + anything they need to know."
Did your palms get sweaty reading that?
Or is this an easy ask because you can easily get to this info already?
I'm neurotic about forecasting + tracking performance. I have reports upon reports and dashboards upon dashboards.
So when Emir over at HockeyStack asked me what my perfect dashboard would look like, I immediately started geeking out. And when they sent this dashboard mock-up back to me, I was in nerd heaven 🙌
Q1 just wrapped up. And it's also never too late to add some solid reports or views to your dashboard, so hopefully this provides some inspiration to any of you who are looking to level up your dashboarding game.
Refresh on what a GTM ecosystem is
Merriam-Webster defines an ecosystem as:
“something (such as a network of businesses) considered to resemble an ecological ecosystem especially because of its complex interdependent parts”
Stop and take a second to re-read the last 3 words of that definition. “complex interdependent parts"
If you’re reading this newsletter, I don’t have to explain what attribution is to you or review the good/bad of it that you already see in the LinkedIn feed ad nauseam. But I want to show a few screenshots of two attribution platforms to help paint a picture of where I’m heading with this newsletter.
What do you notice about the tables shown in these examples?
That it’s broken out by marketing channels? That it shows funnel performance based on where a lead came from? That it “ranks” which channels are good/bad?
Now, what don’t you notice about the tables shown in these examples?
How the channels interplay with one another
And this is exactly the point I want to meditate on today.
Example: Paid Search
What follows is going to be an over-simplification to get a point across
Let’s say you’re in the market for a sales CRM for your organization. You’ve been tasked with researching options, so you go to Google and type in “best sales CRM.”
At the top, you get two “sponsored” results - Company A and Company B.
Let’s say those two have been going back and forth between ranking in the first and second spots, so they’re spending the same amount over a given time period. Further, they have the same exact landing page - copy, testimonials, CTA, and more. All things considered, everything is in parity between them.
Which company nets out better here?
The company that leverages other variables outside of paid search to their benefit.
Let’s now give names to Company A and Company B above. Company A is Hubspot. Company B is Jobber (sorry Jobber, you were the first CRM company I came across and had never heard of).
Knowing these are the two companies, which ad are you clicking on? If I had to bet, I’d put my money on Hubspot. Why?
Because they have stronger brand awareness and you’ve probably heard of them before. They’re familiar + more trustworthy as a result (and feel less risky).
So back to looking at the CAC of paid search for each of those companies, despite having the same exact spend, same landing pages, same content, same offer, etc., that channel is going to be more effective for Hubspot.
They will have a lower CAC if you’re looking specifically at that channel, but it has absolutely nothing to do with that channel. It has everything to do with the interplay between that channel and the other channels they’re leveraging. It has everything to do with viewing your GTM ecosystem as a series of force multipliers upon one another.
Book quote of the week
Relevant to this week’s topic, I thought back to books where individuals confronted “normal” expectations. Things “normally” done by many, despite knowing normal ≠ ideal. This led me to the below book and, interestingly enough, ties in perfectly with the opening paragraph about missing the forest for the trees.
“Some ponder things backward, paying much attention to what matters little, and little to what matters much.”
- The Art of Worldly Wisdom, Baltasar Gracian
In case you missed these this week
See you next Saturday,
Sam