There is lots of talk about the volumes of data that marketers collect to ideally make better decisions. Right now, I see lots of people who are doing one of two things:

1. Not collecting enough data

2. Making incorrect assumptions based on bad data

In this post I'd like to talk about why you should collect data for the hell of it. If you're reading this blog, or you know anything about me, you know I've been at this marketing game for a bit. I've been lucky because the entire time I've been in marketing, my tactics have been trackable. I can tie spend to results. It's quite nice, because it allows me to continue to learn and tweak my spend so that I am getting the most out of every marketing dollar. 

I couldn't make good decisions about where to put my marketing dollars if I didn't have data that showed me where my MQLs, Pipeline and Revenue was coming from. 

Some of the places I track data include (but are not limited to):

Website: code snippets from GA, Hubspot, Crazy Egg. These three pieces tell me where people come from before my site, they tell me where they go once they hit my site, they tell me what CTAs are converting, they tell me raw traffic and lead numbers. And, in general Hubspot can be swapped out for most any demand gen software code, but I think Hubspot has the most data in a single place that's easy to understand. And GA data, it doesn't matter if you are using Hubspot or Marketo, or whatever, you should ALWAYS HAVE Google Analytics code on your site. You need that as a baseline, in case you ever decide to switch marketing automation tools. 

Lead Sources: While often this can be tracked from your website, there are other offline things that happen that might be adding more leads to your funnel. Some examples that I include in my lists in Salesforce include: Advocate, Tradeshow, Webinar, Partner Marketing, Sales Discovery, other. If "other" is selected, I require a detail field to be completed, so that every quarter I can determine if we need to add another term to my suggested drop down list. This helps me continue to track sources and understand the changes/trends when lead sources either impact revenue or stop impacting revenue

Sales Funnel: In order to understand what leads are turning into deals, I have to have visibility into the sales funnel. Not only do I want to know what leads are turning into deals, I more importantly, want to know what leads are not turning into deals and at what point they are falling out of the funnel.

NPS Score: This is a great way to keep your pulse on customer marketing efforts. If you haven't already- start tracking how happy your customers are with an NPS score.

So, there's four places you should be collecting data. What did I miss? Where else are people tracking data that's helping them make better decisions?