Most marketing dashboards are very good at answering questions nobody in finance is asking. Reach. Engagement. Followers. Cost per click. All real numbers, none of them the one the CFO actually wants, which is this: what did it move, in pounds?
There’s a simple exercise that closes the gap, and it’s the first thing I do in any engagement.
Three numbers, eight stages
Every stage of the funnel, from Notices through to Preaches, can be sized in three numbers:
- Contacts — how many people are in this stage right now?
- Customers — how many of them have become paying customers in the relevant cycle?
- Value per year — what is the £ flowing through this stage annually?
Fill those three in for all eight stages and something happens that a hundred vanity dashboards never manage. The business becomes visible.
Once the pounds-per-year figure is on the wall against every stage, nobody in the room can pretend marketing is a cost centre.
The leak shows itself
With the numbers filled in, the conversation changes shape. It stops being “we should do more LinkedIn” and becomes “stage 2 has 40,000 contacts and stage 3 has 200, so the leak is in the consideration set, and that’s where we work first.”
You can see it all at once. Which stage is the bottleneck. Which stage is leaking. Which stage is over-funded relative to the revenue actually moving through it. Which stage has headroom you’re not using. None of that is visible from a channel report. All of it is obvious from a sized funnel.
The slide that changes the room
Here’s the real reason to do this, beyond the diagnosis. Sizing the funnel in pounds is the moment a marketing conversation becomes a finance conversation. When there’s a pounds-per-year figure on the wall against every stage, the argument about whether marketing is a cost centre or a growth engine is simply over. The numbers have settled it.
That’s why this is the first activity of an Audit & Roadmap, before a single channel gets touched. You can’t fix a funnel you haven’t sized. And you can’t defend a marketing budget you can’t add up.
Page views feel like progress. Pounds are progress. Size the funnel, and you’ll always know which stage to work on next, and exactly what it’s worth.
