Creating Groundbreaking Visibility Into the ROI of a Multi-Million Marketing Budget
With a budget in the multi-millions, the marketing group at a multinational tech company contributed significantly to the company’s overall revenue and success. But there was a serious problem: leadership couldn’t truly get a clear picture of how this budget was being spent.
A problem of global proportions
A senior business program manager from the company approached Prime 8 Consulting to help them get more visibility into their investment so they could start understanding exactly how this money was being spent, and what kind of ROI they were generating based on their investments.
There were discrepancies across geographic regions, departments, and channels, with no one knowing exactly what was spent and when — or on what. “It should be a simple question, ‘how much did you spend in Asia in Q1?’ but the answer varied depending on who you asked,” stated the engagement lead at Prime 8. “Each region used different systems, and even had different definitions for when money was spent.” As a global organization, this communication breakdown was extremely time-consuming and wasteful.
The Prime 8 team determined that there were three main objectives to focus on:
Determine best practices and standards for calculating spend, so data would be consistent across regions and departments.
Capture and centralize rich data from multiple sources and tools so everyone could share a single source of truth.
Create a data visualization dashboard that would enable leadership and others to get a more mature look into how their budget was being spent across different categories (including multiple geographic regions, five product channels, and multiple departments).
The path to data-driven decision-making
Prime 8 approached this project in three phases:
Phase I: Collecting the Right Data
The first step was to meet with different regions, groups, and teams across the organization to get consensus on how data would be measured and interpreted. This was a painstaking process, as each individual had their own requirements and methodologies.
Then, Prime 8 needed to create data-sensing activities where none had existed before, so they created a cost-effective custom solution using SharePoint. Using this solution, the organization could now collect and analyze data that had been previously inaccessible.
Phase II: BI Dashboard Creation
The next phase was focused on creating nine BI dashboards that analyzed worldwide investment at each category level, with the goal of solving the misalignment issues between finance and marketing. These dashboards gave the company the ability to categorize and quickly visualize whether funds were spent on marketing operational expenses, or incentives and rebates.
Phase III: Analysis
Now that the company has a complete and accurate view into marketing spend, Prime 8 is helping them to identify discrepancies in funding sources and tracking those in one place. For example, leadership may review the data to analyze the group’s financial performance — but finance may show discrepancies because the P&L doesn’t account for any funding that comes from outside of the group. Prime 8 helped identify and track that type of spend and account for it, allowing for reconciliation of funds.
Better reports and future sight
While culling data from multiple sources and aligning it with the single source of truth was an essential (and painstaking) first step, the company’s ultimate goal was to do more with their data — and that’s exactly what happened. Among a host of benefits, here are some of the highlights:
Oversight and accountability. Perhaps the most significant outcome, leadership could now have productive conversations about what was really happening with the budget. They could tie ROI back to what was spent, they could eliminate shadow operations, and they had accountability at all levels of the organization.
Implementation of a single source of truth in data. Disagreements on what was “correct” data were now a thing of the past.
Advanced analytics and data reporting capabilities. With a few clicks, leadership could now disseminate data in a variety of ways — in terms of available budget or overspend, spend over a specific time period, or other subsets. Dashboards empower anyone to quickly see what’s happening at a high level, while people can also create custom reports or analysis for unique use cases.
Data democratization. From managers to senior company leadership, anyone at the company could now get instant data customized and relevant to their role.
The solution has now been mainstreamed into the company’s internal business, but they continue to work with Prime 8 to innovate their business intelligence and evolve the solution to provide predictive insights.
This tech company, like its competitors, is forging an inevitable path toward full maturity in business intelligence. It’s only a matter of time before every corporation is leveraging data to the best of their abilities — and those who don’t are liable to get left behind. By aiding this client in their maturity journey, Prime 8 helped them take one more step forward, ensuring they maintain their position as one of the world’s most forward-thinking and successful tech companies on the planet.
Project Snapshot
Industry: Technology
Location: USA
Company Size: 100k+
Critical Business Issues: No visibility into multi-million-dollar marketing spend, leading to waste, inefficiency, and lost business opportunities.
Solution: Create a centralized data hub with dashboards so leadership and other users could track KPIs and analyze only the most recent, accurate data, worldwide.
The Method: In three phases, Prime 8 created systems to generate, cull, and visualize data in a way that was useful to multiple stakeholders. Prime 8 continues to work with the company to identify discrepancies in marketing spend and improve the efficiency of their new BI infrastructure.
The Outcome: Employees at all levels across the globe can, for the first time, understand the full financial picture of the multi-million marketing budget using Power BI’s powerful visualization and filtering tools.
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