About

Beyond the ranking

At an agency early in my career, I gave two clients the same SEO work and reached the same rankings. One business grew while doing outreach, email and brand advertising, and my SEO work benefited from that business's reputation.

The other could find no return, lost faith in the SEO, and had ranked for people who weren't going to buy. Its bad reviews stood in the way of a sale, though my reports showed the work I'd been hired to do.

At first, I was distraught at the gap between what the report showed and what the business got. I'd done the job, but that hadn't been enough for the client to feel its value.

I could point to the rankings and show that the SEO had worked. I couldn't use those rankings to explain why someone would choose that business.

The same leads, read differently

On a campaign of my own, marketing called the leads qualified while sales dismissed the same batch as noise. Neither team had acted on them; they were judging the same untouched leads.

I opened the CRM audit logs and queried the raw tables with SQL. I found genuine buyers who weren't ready to purchase that quarter, so neither team's report was false.

The handoff carried the evidence of interest. What the handoff failed to carry was whether the buyer was ready to buy that quarter. More leads wouldn't, by itself, settle what those leads meant.

I knew the habit of stopping at a report because I'd delivered those reports myself. In the agency loop I'd worked within, we prepared the brief, placed the media and returned with traffic figures.

If revenue disappointed, we could recommend spending more or changing the creative. We could also put the failure on sales without checking what had happened to the buyers.

That kept the test inside the work we controlled. The report could support another round of activity without showing whether the last round had helped the business.

A paid lead left waiting in a queue for days may benefit a competitor more than the business paying for it. I couldn't check that handoff by looking only at the click. After the CRM audit, I didn't leave the buyers who weren't ready that quarter in a report; I sent them to sales for the next quarter's follow-up.

Learning enough to check

I followed the leads past the handoff, into the CRM audit logs and raw tables, because I had to check it myself. That's what I mean by a market-side builder: I own the outcome until it reaches the buyer. With those leads, that meant following the buyers to sales, not handing them off in a report. The name points to where the work lands, not where I sit.

Across over twenty years in marketing, I've worked inside businesses, at agencies and as a consultant. Code, data and analytics became part of my work as I met problems I couldn't otherwise examine.

I didn't begin with a plan to combine those skills. I needed ways to get past the summary and test what I was being told, including what I told myself.

I track demand problems across marketing, sales and operations, like leads that marketing calls qualified but sales dismisses as noise.

I use SQL, Python and site code to investigate without depending on someone else's account.

I check my predictions: 38 of 65 calls I marked 90% sure were right. That is 58%, not 90%. The record, not the years, is what I ask people to trust.

That leaves me with uncomfortable news to give clients, sometimes about my own work. I prefer to give it before they discover it without me.

An account can be lost that way. I'd accept that cost rather than keep the account by controlling which results the client sees.

Both clients got the rankings. I needed to understand why only one could use them.