Executive summary:
Sparkforce, a digital B2B growth agency founded in late 2022, revolutionized its data reporting process by adopting Funnel, a no-code platform that enables true full-funnel reporting. Funnel significantly boosted reporting speed and accuracy, leading to smarter media investment decisions for their clients. As a result, Sparkforce's advanced and reliable reports have become a cornerstone in their client's strategic planning, strengthening Sparkforce's reputation as a cutting-edge B2B marketing agency and trusted advisor for its clients.
Key results:
- Funnel enables Sparkforce to build insightful and accurate reports that are trusted throughout client organizations
- Reporting on true return on ad spend (ROAS) enhanced efficiencies by up to 3-4x by identifying overspending patterns
- Funnel’s no-code interface allows any team member to create custom reports, in a matter of minutes
Agency profile:
Founded in 2022 by Casper Rouchmann, Sparkforce has quickly established itself as a leading agency in the Northern Europe B2B marketing landscape. Their bespoke digital marketing strategies, tailored to each client's needs, leverage a flexible and iterative approach. With a robust team of digital marketing experts, Sparkforce excels in driving tangible business results through strategic planning, clever data management, and lead generation. Demonstrating remarkable growth, the agency has expanded to 14 employees within 18 months.
The challenge - Bridging the B2B reporting gap:
SparkForce emerged from a recognition of fundamental gaps in the B2B marketing agency landscape. Having been on the buyer side of many agency relationships throughout his career, Sparkforce founder Casper Rouchmann noticed that most agencies were predominantly focused on, and had the most expertise in, the B2C and eCommerce space. Knowing first-hand that B2B and B2C are fundamentally different, Casper set out to build an agency with the sole focus on B2B to be able to deliver superior services to this segment of the market.
The agency got off to a flying start, but Casper notes that reporting was a nagging challenge:
“The first tool we used was adequate for pulling reporting data from ad platforms but couldn’t accurately extract HubSpot and Salesforce data. And having to manually blend data in Google Sheets meant it took me around one month to produce the first client report. We already had 17 clients at the time, so I knew it would never be a scalable process”
Casper understood that scalable, robust reporting that incorporates conversion data from CRM systems as opposed to conversion metrics in the ad platforms would be essential in order to prove the impact of their marketing efforts and to further propel the agency forward, so he set out to find a solution that could help him achieve it.
The solution - Revolutionizing reporting with Funnel:
Recognizing this imminent need, Sparkforce undertook a comprehensive approach to overhaul its data management and reporting capabilities. Casper was familiar with Funnel and at this stage Sparkforce was in a position to upgrade its reporting capabilities with more sophisticated tooling:
“One of the biggest selling points for me with Funnel is that you don’t have to use Google Sheets as middleware for data storing and transformation, because at some point spreadsheets always break. Funnel allows us to keep everything in one place, and perform the data modeling in one place.”
Another important step was to hire Ethan Collins as Sparkforce’s new Growth Lead. With a long background in B2B marketing from the agency-side, Ethan was also acutely aware of the challenges with reporting facing B2B:
“In B2B sales cycles are often greater than 90 days long, which is very different from most B2C, and can’t be reported on using ad platform data alone. But when you blend ad platform and CRM data in reports, you are actually able to calculate true ROAS based on signed customers, not just indicators like signups, leads or SQL’s”.
With Funnel and Ethan onboard, Casper and the Sparkforce team was ready to bring their updated reporting stack to its customers.
The results - Improved ROI and transformative insights
According to Casper and Ethan, deploying Funnel has been hugely impactful in terms of the value they are now able to showcase to clients. The ability to use Funnel to seamlessly blend data across ad and CRM platforms has enabled Looker Studio reports to be upgraded to include important cross-channel metrics such as weighted pipeline ROAS, CAC payback time and pipeline velocity which have become centerpieces in customer reports, elevating strategic insights and discussions. Funnel’s no code platform also allows anyone in the Sparkforce team to create advanced customer reports, improving customer satisfaction.
The new reports surfaced another valuable benefit: the ability to uncover inefficiencies in media buying. Casper notes that: “One of our clients invested hundreds of thousands of dollars every month on Google Ads, but never knew what their return on investment was. Our new reports showed that the payback time for customers coming in via search was 3-4 years on the initial investment alone, which is very high, and could be invested elsewhere. So Funnel has been a game changer because it allows us to have these conversations we couldn’t have before.”
Ethan also remarks that Sparkforce’s new reporting is being trusted throughout their customer organizations: “Most of the time, companies look at ad platform data and CRM data separately. But when it’s time for the CMO to go to a board meeting, someone actually needs to blend the data together to figure out the important KPI’s. Just recently a client of ours asked for help with numbers for their board slides, and I was able to simply share screenshots from their dashboards that we had built using Funnel.”
