Remember the days when marketers treated their data with completely justified suspicion?
The era when marketers preferred to eat dirt rather than try to analyze countless spreadsheets and a scary amount of raw data from way too many siloed data sources?
The not-so-distant past when marketers had to fend off their decisions based on a hunch, what they used to do 90 years ago, or what everyone else is doing?
Well, good people. Those days are gone, and there’s no turning back.
In this blog, we’re going to show you how to (FINALLY) talk to your data so you can actually understand it, plan ahead, optimize, and execute your GTM strategy with full confidence.
But to get there, let’s first talk about the current state of affairs and how it directly affects your ability to be awesome at your job.
Collecting data ≠ Connecting data
Collecting data is relatively easy. You can use so many solutions to help you extract data from an increasingly expanding MarTech stack.
Here’s the problem, though.
Cleaning, structuring, and building hierarchies out of disparate, missing, and mislabeled data across your entire GTM so that you can reliably drill down into it — is the farthest there is from easy.
Messy data leads to messy decision-making. To put this into context, let’s look at a very common scenario: Instead of converting a marketing-influenced lead into a contact underneath its proper opportunity in your CRM, one of your SDRs creates a new contact with their personal email.
The result is underreporting Marketing’s influence, incomplete or missing data, and ultimately misguided decision-making. Building dashboards and reports on top of skewed, fragmented data means you can’t properly model, forecast, plan revenue growth, optimize your funnel, or run root cause analysis.
And if you attempt to run analysis based off of your chaotic data, your insights will be flawed and the decisions that will follow are bound to be wrong.
So you likely make GTM decisions based on gut feelings or what used to work historically or what the competition is doing, without ever knowing WHY things happen the way they did or what needs to be done to fix the holes in your bucket.
Data quality and connectivity is therefore the biggest issue plaguing your ability to execute a successful GTM strategy. When garbage goes in, garbage comes out — and when that happens, even the fanciest, most expensive, shiniest analytics tools won’t be able to help you.
Just because you can measure it, doesn’t mean you should
Your data needs to be properly connected so you can tie in all data sources together, weed out the mess, model & structure your data in a way that enables accurate measurement — so you can actually do something with it.
But that’s not the only aspect of data connectivity to consider.
Your measurement needs to be tightly tied into how your business defines success, which is likely to be pipeline and revenue.
There’s no shortage of metrics, KPIs, trends, and events that you can visualize in a dashboard. But just because you can — doesn’t mean you should. That’s because at the end of the day, you don’t need more data. You need deeper access to the right data, so you can track pipeline performance and buying behavior that align with revenue goals.
We’re living in an era where data dumps reign supreme. But data doesn’t always equal truth.
“How much of an impact will optimizing bounce rate have on our lead gen?” is an ok question when it comes to leading indicators. But to be able to understand how marketing influences pipeline and revenue, marketers should aim higher, think bigger, and ask strategy-defining questions.
“How will adding $10K to our LinkedIn Paid campaigns improve our ROAS?” is one example for the right kind of question.
Because when you ask the right questions, you’re able to get answers that can then be put into an executable action plan.
Data rich, insights poor
Most attribution and analytics tools out there help GTM teams find more data and present it in pretty dashboards. Not to help them gather insights. And here’s why:
In essence, these solutions are data collectors that prioritize data exposure, as opposed to real-time data exploration and analysis — which is where real insights live. GTM teams have access to more data than ever before, but they still can’t explore it, interact with it, or drill down past it by asking the right questions.
This is because insights are hiding underneath static KPI dashboards, and most of these tools either make it very difficult for marketers to access them (which calls for data analysts), or simply don’t offer that capability.
This means marketers end up being data rich, and insight poor. They have the data, but can’t understand it, tell a story with it, or use it to drive meaningful GTM decisions.
And here’s where this becomes a vicious cycle for marketers:
Pretty graphs and charts that offer zero actionability perpetuate the myth that data is obvious, interpretation isn’t necessary, and customer journey data is simple. In reality, however, nothing could be farther from the truth.
Consequently, marketers have grown reliant on overly technical, often misleading KPI “trashboards”.
In order to get to why certain performance trends occur and what to do next — you need the ability to explore, investigate, question, and drill down in real-time, without the involvement of data analysts or endless spreadsheets.
In-depth analysis, holistic GTM context, and actionable insights are what will empower you to make defensible, mission-critical decisions about anything — from attribution, to budget optimization, and down to strategic planning.
Reactive vs. proactive decision-making
If you can’t explore your data and ask questions in real-time, you can’t proactively plan your GTM strategy. Instead, you’re forced into reactive decision-making and a perpetual state of catch-up:
For example, when something dips in your KPI dashboard, you react. This lowers your response time to market changes, competitive actions, or shifts in performance, and also reduces your ability to experiment or iterate in real-time.
On the growth side of things, reactive decision-making makes it harder for you to identify new opportunities you can capitalize on, be it low hanging fruits or strategic, slow-cook initiatives.
Over-reliance on data analysts is labor-intensive & inefficient
Despite their best efforts, most non-techy marketers are wholly dependent on data teams to support their analysis and data interpretation needs.
When you think about it, it’s kinda funny that the very tools that promise to deliver insights are in fact hiding them behind clunky report builders and endless dashboards — both calling for data expertise in order to be used effectively.
The result is delayed decision-making (analysis requests queue is usually long and winding), communication gaps, slow responsiveness, standardized reporting, bottlenecks, and incomplete analysis, because the reports you get are often not aligned with business outcomes or strategy.
Not a pretty picture, we know. But here’s where it gets exceptionally painful for marketers:
Misallocation of budgets & unnecessary constraints on revenue growth
Garbage data leads to overvaluing easy-to-track channels, under-valuing longer term campaigns, misunderstanding customer journey complexity, and misrepresenting ROI — resulting in misallocation of funds.
And this oversimplified Marketing approach doesn’t end with a bleeding cash cycle.
Despite the mounting evidence that certain easy-to-track or linear marketing activities don’t actually support long-term, sustainable growth — Marketing teams are forced to prioritize them or risk political backlash from inside their org.
Bringing us to one of the most harmful side-effects of this cruelty fest:
Marketing’s loss of credibility by stakeholders, who view Marketing as nothing but a cost center or Sales support.
Well, it’s about time we fight back, isn’t it?
Positioning Marketing as a serious revenue driver
The inability to prove a clear ROI or a data-backed GTM strategy, often causes Marketing leadership to lose internal trust, preventing them from securing a seat at the revenue table, and undercutting their ability to advocate for the Marketing team’s contributions.
And if you’re nodding profusely, don’t worry. We got you covered.
To help you reclaim the throne of credibility and regain your ability to make decisions with confidence, here are seven basic yet highly impactful tactics to follow:
- Clean. Your. Data
Make sure your data is de-cluttered, unified, and properly connected before running any analysis on top of it. Without clean, trustworthy data, even the best attribution model is useless. So whether it’s self-reported, multi-touch, or AI-driven — starting with usable data is an absolute must.
- Go on the offense with proactive decision-making and experimentation
Now that your data makes sense, start exploring it to be able to draw actionable conclusions. Drill down past the raw data to dig up performance trends, like the impact of certain channels on your ROAS, under-performing campaigns that need to be put to sleep, or ROI-positive events that yield high-intent leads.
- Hedge against downturns and anomalies before they happen
Remember the reactive vs. proactive Marketing mindset we spoke about earlier?
Insights are not just about doubling down on lucrative opportunities or shutting down budget-drainers. They also enable you to identify risky factors or worrying trends and then act proactively before they strike.
Nothing crowns you as a strategic thinker & doer better than being able to accurately predict red flags so you can prevent revenue loss or harm to your brand.
- GTM strategy without guesswork
Want to excel at what you do? Start with ditching the “gut feeling Marketing” mentality. It’s the very reason so many stakeholders have so little faith in what we do or our ability to deliver results.
By building your strategy on data-informed insights that factor in your historical data, current performance trends, and predictive analysis — you’re crafting a bulletproof GTM strategy that not only makes complete sense, but is also very hard to argue with. Because after all, it stems from data you can trust.
- Reduce dependence on data teams & accelerate time to insight
Remember the days when you couldn’t build a report or get a single question answered without the involvement of data analysis? Well, just stop it.
Nowadays, non-techy marketers can access their data on their own, draw actionable insights on the fly, eliminate bottlenecks, and speed up what used to be lengthy, painstaking, and labor-intensive processes.
So no, you no longer need to depend on a data analyst to spend countless hours on getting you board-ready. Whip out your InfiniGrow account, drill down, get mission-critical answers, plan ahead, and showcase clear, undeniable ROI. Yay!
- Understand what works, what doesn’t, why & how to fix it
Are Google Ads hitting their mark in terms of ROAS? Is content creation bringing in high-quality leads? Are MQL-Opportunity conversion rates dropping lately, and if so — why and at which stage?
Is there anything more important to us as marketers than the ability to measure the impact of our Marketing activities, understand the root cause of performance trends, and then apply our knowledge to introduce changes or pivot our strategy in real-time?
The answer is a resounding no. And luckily for you, now you finally can.
- Get buy-in to scale programs you now know work
Even the most doubtful CEO or suspicious CFO can’t argue with trustworthy data. So next time you’re in need of internal buy-in so you can double down on ROI-positive channels, campaigns, or events — show them the money.
Your strongest case is in the numbers. Proving not only past and current results but also assessing future impact based on trend analysis, is how you secure consent from stakeholders and ensure constant growth.
TLDR
- Static “trashboards” hide dirty data behind clean visuals, which forces marketers to misuse metrics like a broken compass — making them chase the wrong goals and build the wrong GTM strategies.
- The first and most important step in breaking the “data rich, insights poor” cycle — is to de-clutter and structure your fragmented, messy data. You can’t make the right decisions when your data doesn’t make sense.
- Once your data is cleansed, unified, and modeled, it’s time to start asking questions that have a direct impact on your pipeline and revenue. Drill past the pretty yet useless “trashboards” and get the WHY and WHAT’S NEXT. Not just the WHAT.
- This new era of data exploration will enable you to:
- Make proactive decisions that are backed up by solid data and real-time experimentation.
- Rebuild internal trust in your decision-making and streamline buy-in.
- Improve collaboration and reduce friction across your GTM teams.
- Accelerate your go-to-market and speed up execution.
- And finally — turn guesswork into a distant dream.
