Marketing reporting your leadership can trust

Subtract what you spent on marketing from the revenue it produced, then divide by the spend. The hard part is the revenue side: it needs clean source data in the CRM, so closed deals can be traced back to the campaigns that started them.

A 5:1 return, five dollars of revenue for every dollar spent, is a commonly quoted benchmark, with 10:1 seen as strong. It varies with sales cycle and deal size, and in B2B the number is only as reliable as the attribution behind it.

Pipeline reporting shows the deals at each stage of your sales process, their value, and how they move over time. Paired with marketing source data, it answers the question leadership asks most: how much pipeline did marketing create, and what is likely to close?

Not quite. A funnel describes the buyer's path from first visit to customer, usually from marketing's side. A pipeline tracks active deals through sales stages. Good reporting connects the two, so you can see where leads drop out before they ever become deals.

The common models are first-touch, last-touch, linear and time-decay, with position-based (U-shaped) often added. Each one gives credit to different touchpoints along the way. For most B2B teams, the bigger win is clean data feeding any model, rather than picking the perfect one.

Google Analytics reads UTM parameters automatically when they're in the link and reports them as source, medium and campaign. To see UTMs against leads and deals, your forms also need to capture them in hidden fields and pass them into the CRM.

Start with a small set of numbers leadership acts on: leads by source, lead-to-customer rate, pipeline created, revenue influenced and cost per customer. Each figure should come from clean CRM data with a clear definition, so nobody argues about what it means.