- Somebody Digital
- For Investors
- How We Report
THE REPORTING LADDER
Every level gets the numbers it already cares about.
The metric that matters changes with who’s asking, cost per opportunity for the growth lead, the exit multiple for the board. One operation produces one set of numbers, and each tier reads them in its own units, so the board never sees a channel dashboard and the channel team never gets handed an IRR target.
The four tiers
Each tier gets the metrics it is graded on, and nothing below its altitude. The bottom row is split deliberately, because the numbers on the left roll up and report upward while the ones on the right stay on the floor, answering nothing a board ever asked.
Ownership / Board
Executive
Strategic Leadership
Execution
One quarter, four altitudes
The same number travels up the ladder and is read in different units at every tier. A channel manager's cost per opportunity is read one tier up as the CMO's CAC payback, then as the CFO's magic number and the board's EBITDA line, and eventually it turns on the exit multiple. The failure this ladder exists to stop is reporting the wrong altitude's number to the wrong tier, an MQL chart in a board pack, or a payback target handed to the person running the campaigns.
At a cloud infrastructure client, paid search was rebuilt around paying customers rather than trial signups, and on the channel dashboard website leads fell by around 85% in the months that followed, which looks like a campaign collapsing. One tier up, cost per paying customer fell because spend had stopped going to signups that never converted, payback shortened at the executive tier, and the board saw new customers up around 8x on the same budget. Only the floor reading looks like bad news, and it is the one most agencies would have led with.
What is measured, and what is inferred
A board that has been promised every dollar attributed to an activity, and then watched the numbers fail to reconcile, stops listening to marketing altogether. So we don't make that promise. In our experience only a minority of marketing activity can be tied to a specific deal with any confidence, and we say so up front rather than let a dashboard imply otherwise.
What we report instead holds up under a CFO's questions, starting with sourced and influenced pipeline tied to the deals it touched wherever that link can be made, and total marketing spend against what the business generated each quarter and each year, which is coarse and true. CAC and payback on new paying customers are defined the way your finance team defines them, and every readout carries a line saying how much of the pipeline figure is measured and how much is modeled, so nobody has to guess which kind of number they are looking at.
See the ladder applied to a real portco.
Every case study on this site is written to be read at the top of it.