A dashboard cannot make a decision

If an impressions chart goes up 20 percent, what changes on Monday?

Before putting the impressions chart in a weekly meeting, I’d ask whether a rise would make us invest more in the topic or check whether the right buyers had found it. If nobody can name the decision, we’ve brought a graph to a meeting because graphs look good in meetings.

B2B SaaS marketing gets dressed up as a measurement problem far too often. An executive asks for more numbers as though the numbers will make the decision for them. The team adds MQLs, influenced pipeline, engagement, share of voice and a dozen other things it can pull from a dashboard. Soon the deck is 40 slides long and nobody has said what they plan to do on Monday.

If prospects keep describing your product the wrong way on calls, I’d pay more attention to that than to a rise in impressions. I’d listen for where they picked up the idea, fix the copy that’s giving it to them, and see whether the confusion stops. You won’t get a pretty chart out of the conversation, but you may find the problem.

In a weekly meeting I’d rather argue over which channel gets more effort or why buyers keep getting the wrong message. We can pull up the numbers that help settle it and leave the rest in the reporting tool. Otherwise we’re doing a group reading of a dashboard, and I would prefer almost any other book.

Sometimes the team hasn’t agreed on a decision, and another dashboard won’t settle that argument.