Part four. The Operation
The three-part answer
When someone asks how marketing is doing, give the number, its variables, and what you are doing about it.
Read the transcript
An operator asked how marketing is performing has three bad options and one good one. Bad: a number with no context, a story with no number, or a link to a dashboard. Good: three parts, in order, in about ninety seconds. The number. One figure that actually matters, stated plainly, including when it is bad. Its variables. What moves it, and which of those you control. This is the part that turns a report into an operation, and it is the part almost always missing. And what you are doing about it, with a date. Not a plan. The next specific action and when it will have happened. The reason to standardise this is not presentation. The format is impossible to complete without understanding the mechanism.
An operator asked how marketing is performing has three bad options and one good one. Bad: a number with no context, a story with no number, or a dashboard link. Good: three parts, in order, in about ninety seconds.
The number. One figure that actually matters, stated plainly, including when it is bad.
Its variables. What moves it, and which of those you control. This is the part that turns a report into an operation, because it converts a result into a mechanism, and it is the part almost always missing.
What you are doing about it, with a date. Not a plan. The next specific action and when it will have happened.
The reason to standardise this is not presentation. It is that the format is impossible to complete without understanding the mechanism. An operator who cannot name the variables discovers it while preparing the answer rather than in the meeting, which is the cheapest possible place to discover it.
It also changes what gets asked. Executives interrogate numbers they cannot see the mechanism behind. Given the mechanism, they tend to ask about the mechanism, which is a far more useful conversation.
Two things worth doing, neither of which costs anything
Read the standard in full, free and in the open, before you pay anything or give anyone an address.