Report (Accuracy): capabilities for funnel analysis, forecasting, and financial reporting

The "Report" phase is all about ensuring that your RevTech stack delivers accurate insights, helping your team make informed decisions. This phase focuses on capturing, analyzing, and reporting data related to the entire sales funnel, from lead generation to revenue forecasting. Reporting and analytics tools ensure accuracy in metrics, which is crucial for aligning sales and marketing efforts with financial goals and driving long-term growth.

1. Revenue Analytics and Business Intelligence (BI)

What problem does it solve?

Revenue analytics helps businesses track and analyze sales performance, forecast future revenue, and identify trends that inform strategic decision-making. This capability is essential for companies looking to understand their financial health, improve forecasting accuracy, and make data-driven decisions.

How it interacts with the stack:

• CRM Integration: Pulls data from CRM systems to ensure comprehensive and accurate analysis of sales and customer interactions.
• Marketing Automation: Integrates with marketing automation tools to track campaign performance and customer engagement.
• ERP Systems (Accounting Systems): Connects with ERP systems to combine sales data with financial and operational data for a holistic view of business performance.

To Tool or Not to Tool?Revenue analytics can be managed manually for smaller companies or those just starting out, especially if you’re handling relatively simple datasets. Basic reporting can be done via spreadsheets or built-in CRM reports. As data volume increases, tools like Salesforce Einstein Analytics, Tableau, or Looker provide more sophisticated data visualization and predictive analytics, enabling deeper insights and scalability.

I Have It, But It Isn’t Working How I’d Like It To:

• Are you using clean, high-quality data? Poor data quality can lead to inaccurate reporting. Implement data validation and cleansing processes.
• Are you focusing on actionable metrics? Avoid focusing on vanity metrics that don’t directly impact your bottom line. Focus on metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC), CLV, and win rates.
• Are you integrating data across departments? Ensure that your analytics tool integrates with all relevant systems, such as CRM, ERP, and marketing automation, to get a comprehensive view of your data.

Typical Mistakes People Make:

• Focusing on vanity metrics: Metrics that look impressive but don’t provide actionable insights can lead to misguided decisions.
• Ignoring data quality: Analytics tools are only as good as the data they receive. Ensure that your data is accurate and up-to-date.
• Overlooking context: Be sure to consider external factors like market conditions when analyzing revenue data.

Various vendor choices & pricing

2. Data Hygiene and Management

Accurate firmographic, contact, and opportunity data form the bedrock of effective sales and marketing. Duplicate or inconsistent records can derail lead scoring, hamper territory assignment, and undermine account-based marketing (ABM). Ensuring data hygiene throughout the stack—whether in CRM, CDP, or warehouse—helps teams operate on a single source of truth and reduces costly errors downstream.

How it interacts with the stack:

Three Types of Tools & How They Connect to the Stack

1. CRM/CDP-Integrated Tools
   • Where They Operate: Embedded within or layered on top of CRMs/CDPs (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot) to handle deduplication, validation, and data governance.
   • Key Benefit: Keeps your “source of truth” clean at the point of entry, preventing polluted data from spreading downstream.
2. Warehouse & Pipeline Tools
   • Where They Operate: Within your data warehouse (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery) and/or ETL/rETL frameworks (dbt, Hightouch).
   • Key Benefit: Cleans and standardizes data at the transformation stage before syncing back to CRMs or analytics tools, ensuring all systems operate on consistent records.
3. Cross-Stack Data Quality Platforms
   • Where They Operate: Spans your entire data ecosystem, monitoring multiple pipelines, databases, and SaaS tools for anomalies and errors.
   • Key Benefit: Comprehensive observability and alerting for large or complex B2B setups that need proactive identification of data issues.

I Have Tools, But My Data Hygiene Still Isn’t Great

• Check Your Rules: Ensure you’ve defined clear validation standards (unique emails, standard industry codes, positive revenue amounts). Even robust tools won’t help if they don’t know what “clean” means.
• Automate Alerts: Implement notifications for duplicates, missing fields, or sudden data spikes so you can fix issues before they proliferate.
• Align Your Pipelines: If you rely on multiple data flows (e.g., marketing automation, CRM, warehouse), each must adhere to the same governance rules to avoid reintroducing errors.

I Have Bad Data Hygiene and Don’t Know What Kind of Tool I Need

• Start at the Source: If your CRM or CDP is riddled with duplicates, begin with a CRM/CDP-integrated solution.
• Warehouse-First Approach: If you’re already centralizing data in a warehouse, consider cleaning it there (via transformations or rETL) and pushing corrected records back into operational systems.
• Complex or Large-Scale: For bigger orgs or multiple pipelines, a cross-stack platform with anomaly detection and lineage tracking may be best.

Typical Mistakes People Make

• One-Time Cleans Only: Data degrades quickly—ongoing maintenance and monitoring are a must.
• Focusing on Only One Layer: Scrubbing the CRM is helpful, but ignoring upstream events or warehouse transformations can reintroduce bad data.
• No Ownership or Governance: Without clearly defined data owners, rules, and processes, hygiene initiatives lose momentum.

Various Vendor Choices & Pricing

3. Attribution and ROI Analysis

What problem does It solve?

Attribution and ROI analysis help businesses understand which marketing and sales efforts are driving the most value. Proper attribution ensures that marketing teams can allocate budgets effectively and that sales teams focus on the most impactful channels. It answers the question: What’s driving results, and where should we invest more?

How it interacts with the stack:

Attribution tools integrate with CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and analytics tools to pull in data from multiple touchpoints and generate a comprehensive view of customer journeys.

To Tool or Not to Tool?

Once your sales extend beyond your immediate network, it’s time to get an attribution tool. And, in our view, it almost always makes sense to buy a tool rather than try to build something custom here. A big mistake people make is actually waiting too long to start this process as it’s unfortunately not one of the easier ones to stand up. 

I Have It, But It Isn’t Working How I’d Like It To

• Are you using the right attribution model? A last-click attribution model might not be appropriate if your sales cycle includes multiple touchpoints. Consider multi-touch or weighted attribution models.
• Are you integrating all channels? Ensure that all marketing channels (paid, organic, email, social, etc.) are included in your attribution analysis.
• Is your data consistent? Mismatched or inconsistent data from different platforms can lead to inaccurate attribution. Ensure data from all sources is standardized and accurate.

Typical Mistakes People Make:

• Relying on a single-touch model: Multi-touch attribution provides a more accurate view of the customer journey, especially in long sales cycles.
• Ignoring certain channels: Failing to account for all marketing channels (e.g., social media or referral traffic) can skew attribution and ROI analysis.
• Using inconsistent data: Attribution analysis is only as good as the data feeding into it. Ensure consistency across all data sources.

Various vendor choices & pricing

These capabilities in the "Report" phase help ensure that your business has the accurate insights needed to align sales and marketing efforts with broader financial goals. Accurate reporting, data hygiene, and robust analytics enable better decision-making, more reliable forecasting, and higher overall performance.