Man Down
ExtraHop's very talented digital analyst had accepted a new job at a different company.
Their web analytics, Salesforce reporting as well as reporting rhythm was driven by this individual. And everything he did - all that institutional knowledge - was not documented prior to his departure. When he left, the knowledge left with him.
Besides his position, there was a lot of turnover in other key roles within the marketing department.
To top it off: the new marketing leads at ExtraHop wanted to adjust marketing reporting to focus more on business metrics (opportunities, pipeline create, revenue driven) to move beyond the reporting that had been used in years past.
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MKG to The Rescue
We had worked with ExtraHop for a few years at this point so we had built up a great deal of trust over that time.
Even though we had never taken on an analytics project this large, they trusted us to work through this with them to become the replacement to their in-house digital analyst.
See How We Work Together“ExtraHop wanted to look at different metrics than had been looked at in the past. We elped guide them through that and made sure that we got everything in a row for them to be able to look at what they were requesting. These changes were drastically different. Before they focused on MQL numbers. The new team wanted to look at pipeline create and how much business that the marketing team was actually driving.”
~ Spencer Mayes
The Right Measurement
As we dove into this project, we realized it really hinged on clean data being integrated through every step of the measurement funnel.
Data Cleansing
Bad data in equals bad data out in our marketing reports. This project started by cleansing data from first marketing touchpoint through to a sale.
- Data Cleansing
- Tagging taxonomies for all marketing channels to follow
- Google Sheets used to automate tagging and other tasks for all marketing channels (not just the ones we managed)
Data Quality
Now that we had clean data flowing into Salesforce, the next step of our work focused on ensuring the Data Quality from the integrations and processes we created was correct.
Again: bad data in equals bad data out in our reports.
Our team invested time test driving all the data integrations for systems or processes we integrated to guarantee that the data flowing into Salesforce was correct.
Report Outs
We had clean data flowing from first touchpoint to last touchpoint.
Now comes the fun part: creating report outs that actually tell us the business impact of specific marketing channels or efforts.
As the ExtraHop marketing team was pretty new to the company at this point, we had a clean slate to work with. We used this clean slate to build reports that worked well for marketing as well as executive stakeholders to provide a clear picture of channel or program performance.
From "OH NO!" To "OH YES!"
Over the course of this 12 month project we were able to take the new ExtraHop marketing team members from a state of distress (“oh no! We do not have what we need!”) to a place where they had all the correct data flowing from system to system.
This helped them with:
- Measuring ROI by marketing channel or program (a first!)
- Using ROI data they were able to fine tune their marketing mix to push more resources into programs or channels that delivered the best opportunity counts, pipeline create and revenue through Closed - Won deals
- The processes that we created are still in use to this day - nearly 3 years after the project was completed
- Last but not least: They were so confident in the work that we did together that instead of hiring another digital analyst they have left that position vacant while they continue to work with our team
