Reporting isn’t a box-ticking exercise — it’s the heartbeat of modern demand gen. When marketing owns a revenue number, reporting becomes how you align teams, spot revenue before it arrives, diagnose funnel issues, and defend the work that actually moves pipeline. This module teaches you how to turn scattered metrics into clear stories that drive action, investment, and growth.
Course Details:
4 lessons
55 minutes
Intermediate
Most marketers think of reporting as the thing you do at the end. End of month. End of quarter. End of campaign. A backwards-looking recap.
But in a modern demand gen motion, especially when marketing is accountable for a revenue number, reporting is the thing that sits in the middle of everything:
At Cognism, marketing is responsible for over 50% of total revenue. That changes how you report. It’s not enough to say, “We generated X MQLs” or “Our CTR improved 20%.” Reporting has to show:
This module is about building that kind of reporting muscle. You’ll learn how to:
If you want marketing to be treated as a core growth engine, not a line item, this is where it becomes real.
It’s easy to fill a deck with:
They might tell you that something is happening, e.g. people are seeing things, clicking things, signing up for things, but they don’t tell you whether those actions are turning into qualified pipeline, closed-won deals, or sustainable growth. You can have campaigns that look brilliant in-platform and still miss your revenue target.
This lesson is about building reporting that answers a more important question: “Is what we’re doing creating sustainable revenue momentum?”
To get there, you need three things:
Everyone - marketing, sales, RevOps, finance - has to agree that the primary measure of success is revenue and pipeline contribution, not leads for the sake of leads.
You can’t stop at form fills. You need visibility from first touch, to MQL, to meeting booked, to opportunity, to closed-won, and you need to know what “good” looks like at each stage for your business.
Data alone doesn’t change behaviour. You need simple, repeatable ways of turning metrics into meaning: what happened, why it happened, and what you’re going to do about it.
By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to look at a set of metrics and tell a coherent story: where you’re winning, where you’re leaking revenue, and which levers to pull next.
The goal of reporting isn’t to justify activity (“we ran X campaigns”), but to demonstrate impact.
Good reporting proves that marketing is an investment with measurable return - driving qualified pipeline, accelerating deal velocity, and improving efficiency over time.
When you show that marketing consistently contributes a defined percentage of revenue, and can explain how, you move the conversation from “what did we spend?” to “how do we scale this impact?”
In traditional lead-gen reporting, success is measured by the number of leads or MQLs generated. But in a modern demand gen motion, those are simply inputs, not outcomes.
Marketing’s true performance is judged on:
When those become your core metrics, everything else - engagement rates, CPLs, CTRs - becomes supporting evidence, not the main story.
Marketing, Sales, RevOps, and Finance must all be able to look at the same data and tell the same story. That means:
When everyone’s operating from the same “truth,” reporting moves from debate (“whose numbers are right?”) to diagnosis (“what’s really driving the outcome?”).
Good reporting works backwards from business outcomes to activity:
1. Start with the target:
2. Work backwards through the funnel:
3. Use in-platform metrics as proof points, not the story:
1. Are we pacing to target?
2. Where is performance strongest or weakest?
4. What are we going to do differently as a result?
The golden rule: If it doesn’t lead to a decision or an action, it’s just a dashboard screenshot.
To stop reports becoming data dumps, we use a simple structure:
1. Metric: What happened?
2. Insight: Why did it happen?
3. Context: What’s normal?
4. Recommendation: What should we do next?
Every important slide or section should be able to fit into that pattern.
We use three types of benchmarks:
1. Best in class2. Historical
3. Next best
Instead of saying, “Mid-market opportunity rate is low vs industry benchmarks,” a better story is:
“Mid-market opp rate is 5 points below our proven baseline. Here’s how we plan to close that gap over the next quarter.”
That’s actionable. And it respects how your business actually operates.
When marketing owns revenue contribution, you can’t stop at the MQL. And before I go any further… let me define what I mean by MQL:
An MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) is a prospect who has shown clear intent or engagement strong enough to indicate they’re ready for a conversation with sales.
At Cognism, this isn’t based on arbitrary scores or gated content downloads, it’s rooted in real buying intent.
Our definition: An MQL is a hand-raiser. Someone who explicitly requests to speak to sales, typically through a demo request, pricing form, or chat interaction that signals in-market intent.
This definition aligns marketing with revenue by ensuring MQLs are:
Measuring how many people filled in a form or booked a demo tells you very little without context on what happened before and after. Real visibility means understanding the entire journey, from first touch to revenue, and how every stage connects.
Think of it as shifting from a snapshot to a storyline.
These are the early signals that show whether your programs are creating future demand. They tell you if the right people are engaging in the right places, long before they’re ready to buy.
The goal at this stage isn’t conversion — it’s momentum. You’re tracking signals that your ideal audience is moving closer to being in-market.
Once someone raises their hand, the focus shifts to conversion efficiency. This is where you see whether all that early engagement is translating into real pipeline and revenue.
True full-funnel visibility means connecting these leading and lagging indicators into one cohesive picture.
In practice, that means:
When that happens, reporting stops being about proving value and starts being about improving performance. You move from “what happened” to “what’s next.”
Choose one recent monthly or quarterly marketing report. Then:
1. Rewrite the headlines using the Metrics → Meaning framework.
2. Define your benchmarks.
3. Add a full-funnel view.
Bring this into Lesson 2 – it’ll make the cadence work much easier.
Most teams fall into one of two traps:
Finding a balance between the two to ensure you have oversight on progress, without getting misled with too small of a snapshot. This lesson is about building that rhythm.
At Cognism, the team has learned that consistency beats intensity. A solid cadence ensures that data is being used to guide strategy, not to fuel anxiety.
You’ll learn how to:
Operational reporting is about now. It answers the question: “Is everything working as it should this week?”
These reports focus on leading indicators - the early signals that help you catch problems before they snowball. They’re tactical, concise, and action-oriented.
Example metrics:
For us, these are weekly “temperature check” meetings between Marketing and MarOps.
Strategic reporting looks at the bigger picture. It answers the question: “Are we still heading in the right direction?”
It focuses on lagging indicators - pipeline, revenue, ROI, and long-term trends, and is where leadership alignment and decision-making happen.
Example metrics:
Typical rhythm:
At Cognism, we think of it like this:
|
Cadence |
Type |
Focus |
Primary Question |
Output |
|
Weekly |
Operational |
Leading indicators |
“Is anything broken?” |
Quick fixes, small optimisations |
|
Monthly |
Strategic |
Funnel performance |
“Did the engine work?” |
Diagnosis and next-month actions |
|
Quarterly |
Strategic |
Trends & direction |
“Are we still heading the right way?” |
Strategic bets and re-prioritisation |
One of the biggest unlocks in Cognism’s reporting rhythm was splitting performance reviews into two distinct meetings - one focused on creating demand, and one on converting it.
When marketing owns a revenue number, this separation is essential. Otherwise, teams end up treating every bad month the same way, when in reality, low results might stem from volume problems (not enough qualified demand being generated) or conversion problems (good leads not being worked effectively).
By dividing reporting along these lines, you can diagnose issues faster, assign ownership clearly, and avoid misdirected fixes.
Purpose: “What’s driving (or blocking) MQL volume?”
This is a marketing-owned session focused on the health of demand creation, everything that happens before someone raises their hand. It’s where the team analyses early-stage signals to understand if campaigns are on track to generate the right kind of in-market interest.
Typical attendees:
Key focus areas:
Purpose: “What happens after someone raises their hand?”
This is a cross-functional session between marketing, sales, and RevOps - focused on how effectively qualified demand is converting into meetings, opportunities, and pipeline.
Typical attendees:
Key focus areas:
The Post-MQL meeting focuses on conversion efficiency, not volume. It’s about identifying friction points that slow down revenue, and assigning clear owners to fix them.
Keeping Pre- and Post-MQL reporting separate helps everyone stay focused on what they can actually control:
|
Problem Type |
Common Symptoms |
Meeting |
Who Owns It |
Example Fix |
|
Volume issue |
Not enough MQLs, drop in traffic or engagement |
Pre-MQL |
Marketing |
Rebalance spend, refresh creative, run new TOFU experiments |
|
Conversion issue |
MQLs generated but not converting |
Post-MQL |
Sales & RevOps (with marketing support) |
Improve speed-to-lead, audit handoff process, enforce follow-up SLAs |
Without this separation, teams often blur the two - tweaking ads when the real issue is SDR response time, or rebuilding sales cadences when the real problem is top-of-funnel engagement.
Your reporting rhythm should help you see clearly which problem you’re solving, and bring the right people to the table to solve it.
A great reporting rhythm is worthless if nobody trusts the numbers behind it. The moment marketing, sales, or finance start questioning which version of a number is right, reporting stops being a tool for action.
That’s why one of the most important principles at Cognism is having a single source of truth for all revenue reporting.
It removes ambiguity and lets discussions focus on why performance looks the way it does, not whether the numbers are real.
We use Salesforce as our core system of record, the data foundation that everything else feeds from.
From there, different tools serve specific roles in our reporting ecosystem:
This setup ensures everyone — from marketing and RevOps to finance and leadership — is looking at the same numbers, just through different lenses depending on their role.
Even with a strong foundation, mistakes happen - sync delays, naming inconsistencies, human error. That’s why every performance discussion at Cognism starts with a quick sense-check:
This habit keeps conversations productive, and ensures that when teams discuss performance, they’re working from fact, not speculation.
Design a reporting rhythm for your own team.
1. Map your weekly, monthly, and quarterly touchpoints.
2. Separate “volume” and “conversion” conversations.
3. Define your source of truth.
Data on its own doesn’t change decisions, stories do.
The same numbers can lead to completely different conclusions depending on how you frame them. A dip in conversions can sound like a crisis in one report and a learning opportunity in another. A 20% increase in spend can look wasteful to finance or like a smart reinvestment to a CMO, it all depends on how clearly and credibly you connect the dots.
That’s why good reporting isn’t just about showing data - it’s about making data meaningful.
When marketing owns a revenue number, the goal of reporting is not to impress stakeholders with graphs, but to help them make better decisions. That means learning to:
In this lesson, we’ll explore how to take the data you already have, campaign results, funnel metrics, pipeline impact, and turn it into clear, tailored narratives that resonate with each audience.
Once you have a solid set of metrics, the next step is learning how to communicate them differently to each audience.
Cares about:
Wants to know: “Is marketing bringing in the right opportunities, and how can we tighten the funnel together?”
The sales leader doesn’t need to see ad CTRs or impressions, they want clarity on how marketing performance translates into sales productivity.
Frame your story around how marketing’s work supports their targets:
Cares about:
Wants to know: “Where are we getting the best return, and where should we redeploy budget?”
Here, the narrative is about effectiveness and prioritisation. The CMO wants confidence that marketing spend is moving the business forward, not just driving short-term metrics.
Frame your story around learnings and decisions:
This version of the story proves marketing knows how to allocate investment intelligently and continuously improve performance.
Cares about:
Wants to know: “Is marketing delivering its share of revenue, and is that share becoming more efficient over time?”
Executives don’t need the granular breakdown of campaigns, they need clarity and confidence.
Frame your story around business outcomes and risk mitigation:
This gives leadership assurance that marketing is not just hitting goals, but scaling sustainably.
For leadership-level reports, we use a simple memo structure:
1. Executive summary
2. Key metrics vs targets
3. Insights + recommendations
4. Business impact
In practice, this might look like a 1-2 page memo, supported by a small number of charts, not 40 slides of screenshots.
Pick one upcoming stakeholder report (monthly marketing review, board update, etc.).
1. Draft a one-page narrative.
2. Write three tailored intros for different audiences.
3. Stress-test with a “neutral” lens.
The best reports don’t stop at explaining performance. They use data to direct it. When marketing owns a revenue number, every dashboard, insight, and meeting should help the business decide where to place its next bet.
That might mean:
In other words, reporting should be the engine of prioritisation.
Hard numbers get you in the room. Context and story get your investment approved.
Use both:
Together, they show how marketing is influencing revenue, not just whether it did.
Multi-touch tools like Dreamdata won’t give you perfect truth, but they will show you patterns.
Examples of useful journey insights:
The key:
Once you’ve analysed performance, your next step is turning that insight into a business case for action, one that leadership can quickly understand, trust, and approve.
A good report should never end at “here’s what happened.” It should clearly show “here’s what we’re going to do next, and what impact it will have.”
To make that happen, Cognism uses a simple, repeatable structure: Challenge → Diagnosis → Action → Impact
This framework transforms your data from a retrospective into a plan, helping you move from reporting to recommending.
Start by stating the business issue in simple, measurable terms. Keep it factual and outcome-oriented, not emotional or speculative.
“Mid-market pipeline is 25% below plan in EMEA.”
The goal here is to make the challenge instantly recognisable to leadership. Don’t hide behind jargon or overcomplication, this opening line should make everyone in the room sit up and say, “Yes, that’s a problem worth solving.”
A clear challenge sets the direction for your entire case.
Once the challenge is defined, use your reporting data to dig into the root cause. This is where you connect the dots between metrics, context, and behaviour.
For example:
“Pre-MQL indicators show healthy engagement, but MQL → meeting conversion has dropped. Speed-to-lead has slipped; 52% of meetings are being booked more than 5 days out.”
The diagnosis should be supported by both quantitative and qualitative insight — combining hard metrics (conversion rates, velocity, ROI) with human feedback (sales notes, buyer comments, tool insights).
This step matters most because it shifts the conversation from symptom to source. Leadership can’t back every problem, but they will back one that’s been properly understood.
Next, outline exactly what you’re proposing to do about it. Be concrete. Vague recommendations (“we should test more campaigns” or “improve follow-up”) don’t get approved, actionable ones do.
“Add one inbound SDR for EMEA MM, enforce calendar availability SLAs, and refresh mid-market paid capture campaigns.”
A good action plan should:
This is the part of the report that converts insight into execution. It tells leadership: we know the issue, we’ve thought through the fix, and we’re ready to act on it.
Finally, translate your recommendation into business impact. Use historical data or benchmarks to project what will happen if your proposal is implemented.
“Based on historical conversion, this should recover ~£X in quarterly pipeline and ~£Y in revenue, bringing MM EMEA back within 5% of target.”
By linking your actions directly to potential revenue outcomes, you make the case not just logical, but financially compelling.
If possible, also show what happens if the issue isn’t addressed (lost revenue, pipeline risk, continued inefficiency). Framing the opportunity cost can be just as persuasive as showing potential gain.
Choose one strategic ask you’d like to make in the next 3–6 months (e.g., extra paid budget, a new hire, or a campaign bet).
1. Draft your 1-page business case.
2. Add 3–5 proof points.
3. Write a 3-sentence version.
Fran leads Cognism’s demand gen engine, owning a revenue number, not just an MQL target, which means reporting is how she proves that marketing isn’t a cost centre, it’s a growth driver.
Simon leads marketing operations and acts as the “neutral brain” for go-to-market performance. His world is data models, dashboards, and forecasting, but his real job is turning numbers into decisions the whole revenue team can trust.
Together, they’ve built a reporting motion where marketing consistently contributes more than half of Cognism’s total revenue, and can prove it.
Test what you’ve learned with this quick interactive quiz. Check your knowledge and see how ready you are to apply it.
