Most marketing ops teams build reports for themselves. Then they hand those reports to the sales team and wonder why the sales team doesn’t use them. The reports are technically correct. The data is clean. The visualizations are tidy. And the BDM closes the tab within a week and goes back to working off a personal spreadsheet.
I’ve been on both sides of this conversation. I’ve built the reports nobody used. I’ve also sat with BDMs and watched what they actually do with their morning, which is a deeply educational experience for anyone in marketing ops, and the gap between what they need and what they get is wider than most marketing teams want to admit.
Here is what I’ve learned from those conversations, in case it saves you the same months I spent figuring it out.
BDMs don’t need to see marketing performance. They need to see their own work.
Most marketing dashboards are organized by marketing’s logic. MQLs by campaign. Pipeline by channel. Conversion rates by program. That structure makes sense if you’re trying to evaluate marketing. It makes no sense if you’re a BDM trying to figure out who to call this morning. The unit a BDM works in is not “campaign” or “channel.” It’s “the person in front of me, what do I know about them, what should I do next.” Reports built around campaigns answer marketing’s question. Reports built around individual leads and accounts answer the BDM’s question. Those are different reports.
The most useful thing you can give a BDM is context, not scores.
A lead score is a number that summarizes a lot of underlying activity into a single point of comparison. That’s useful for prioritization. It’s not useful for the actual conversation. When a BDM is about to make a call, the question they have isn’t “is this a 90 or a 70.” It’s “what does this person care about, what have they done recently, who else from their company is in our database, and what should I open with.” That information exists in the system. It’s almost never surfaced in the way a BDM can use in the thirty seconds before they dial. The score is the headline. The context is the article. Most marketing dashboards show only the headline.
They need to see what’s about to happen, not just what already happened.
Most marketing reports are retrospective. Last week’s MQLs. Last month’s pipeline. This quarter’s conversion rate. BDMs don’t work retrospectively. They work forward. The question they’re trying to answer is “what should I do today, and what’s likely to come into my queue tomorrow.” A leading-indicator view, what accounts are heating up, what contacts are engaging again after a dormancy period, what campaigns are about to release a new wave of leads, is more useful to them than another quarterly summary. Marketing teams don’t build these views because they don’t run on them. BDMs would, if they had them.
The integrations that matter to them are not the ones that matter to marketing.
Marketing cares about HubSpot writing to Salesforce. BDMs care about Salesforce writing to Outreach, Outreach writing back to Salesforce, and the activity record being right in both places. They care about LinkedIn Sales Navigator surfacing the right insights at the right time. They care about whether the routing tool sent them a lead five minutes ago or five hours ago. The integration architecture diagram that lives in most marketing ops documents shows the marketing side cleanly and the sales side as a fuzzy box labeled “Salesforce.” The fuzzy box is where the BDM lives every day. That’s worth knowing.
The broader lesson underneath all of this is one I want to be direct about. Marketing ops can’t build useful reports for sales without spending time with sales. Not a kickoff meeting. Not an annual review. Recurring, regular, sit-with-them-during-their-day time. The number of MOps people who have never watched a BDM work for a full hour is alarming, and it shows up in the reports they build. The reports look right and don’t get used, and nobody can explain why.
The fix isn’t more dashboards. It’s a conversation that most teams haven’t had in a long time, if ever. Sit with three BDMs. Ask them to walk you through what they look at when they start their day, what they pull up before a call, and what they wish the system showed them that it doesn’t. Then build what they described. The reports you get from that exercise are different from the ones you would have built on your own, and they’re the ones that get used.