Marketing Insights Executives & Investors Actually Want To Hear
If marketing is a story, then data is the plot. But the plot hole, so to speak, is that many marketers hand executives and potential investors a stack of stats that reads more like a technical manual than a page-turner. And the crowd isn’t exactly hanging on every word.
The C-suite and buyers are looking for productivity.
Many of the metrics that marketing departments track, though, can be viewed by business leaders as irrelevant to business performance. That’s a problem. The issue lies partially in the numbers themselves, but we should also consider how those numbers are framed. Marketing teams often focus on tactical outputs, while executives and investors speak the language of financial outcomes.
The C-suite and buyers need the ability to readily connect the dots between marketing performance and revenue. It’s not tossing out “the old way”, but rather about embracing the realities of business dynamics and the technology redefining how organizations grow.
So, what does that actually look like?
In partnership with Software Equity Group (SEG), an M&A advisory firm for software and SaaS founders, we’ve reframed the metrics conversation to reflect what executives and investors care about.
Quantitative Metrics
Making the Numbers Work
Bring impressions and pageviews into the boardroom, and you’ll probably get some polite nods before the conversation moves on. These metrics have their time and place in marketing conversations, but they don’t answer the question that’s top of mind for leadership and buyers: How does this impact revenue and enterprise value?
Cost- and value-driven metrics fill this need.
We’re talking about:
CAC shows how efficiently your company acquires new customers. Pairing it with payback period—the number of months it takes to recover that acquisition cost—transforms it into a powerful indicator of marketing efficiency and capital discipline. Improving CAC payback from 12 to nine months, for example, signals faster return on investment and greater capital efficiency.
LTV reflects long-term profitability and business durability. When LTV consistently outpaces CAC, it shows that growth is scalable and sustainable. For executives and investors, this signals that the company’s marketing engine can reliably generate and retain high-value customers.
Quantifying marketing’s direct contribution to total revenue is one of the most effective ways to build trust with executives and investors alike. Tracking marketing-generated pipeline and closed-won revenue connects spend directly to financial results rather than activity volume.
ROMI is the ultimate proof point for marketing performance. It quantifies how effectively every dollar spent turns into revenue, revealing marketing’s financial contribution to the business.
The real power comes from reframing pipeline metrics as revenue conversations. Each stage in the funnel should connect spend to revenue: Spend → MQL → SQL → Closed-Won → CAC → Payback. That’s the structure that engenders confidence from business leaders.Instead of simply reporting “we generated 500 MQLs,” show how those MQLs flowed into SQLs and ultimately into closed deals. For example: Of the 500 MQLs last quarter, 120 became SQLs, and 30 closed, generating $2.1M in new revenue. Now, MQLs are a business impact.
SQLs demonstrate how well marketing and sales are aligned. If marketing is consistently passing high-quality SQLs, you’re likely reducing wasted sales effort and shortening deal cycles.
In later-stage or investor-backed organizations, SQL reporting typically evolves into higher-level measures, such as incremental pipeline created, conversion to ARR, and marketing ROI.
Tracking the SQL-to-closed-won conversion rate provides a direct view into how efficiently marketing contributes to revenue. This metric demonstrates that marketing’s contribution to revenue is strategic and scalable, evidence of an organization operating in lockstep toward growth.
This ratio highlights funnel efficiency. Improving from 20:1 to 15:1 means fewer resources are needed per customer acquired, which directly affects margins.
How you report on metrics depends on your company’s size and stage. Early-stage organizations may report MQLs and SQLs to establish pipeline visibility and alignment. As you grow, reporting naturally shifts toward efficiency and impact: how much was spent, what pipeline it created, how efficiently it performed, and always the question of, “If you had more money, where would you double down?”
Alignment & Data Integrity: The Hidden Multiplier
While using pipeline language to frame lead metrics, there are also ways to connect customer experience metrics more directly to revenue.
Consider these three metrics in perspective:
High NPS feels good, sure, but it also predicts customer loyalty, referrals and lower churn. For example, companies with NPS between 50-80 experience 20-60% higher revenue growth than their competitors.1
Consistently high CSAT signals happier customers, which reduces churn and expands upsell potential. For executives, this translates into steadier recurring revenue.
Retention is the clearest measure of customer and revenue health, and one of the first metrics potential buyers scrutinize. When gross revenue retention reaches 90% or higher, it signals that customers are staying, expanding and delivering ongoing value.
The most important thing marketers can do is make sure their data aligns. Marketing can get data from so many sources, and that information can conflict. If data doesn’t align, that prevents buyers and investors from believing in what you’re presenting.”
Quantitative Metrics
Filling in the Gaps
Hard numbers earn attention, but qualitative data lend those numbers more context and depth. When framed correctly, qualitative insights show not just what happened, but why it matters.
Brand Awareness
Executives and investors want to know if increased visibility is paying off. Rising share of voice on social channels or in industry conversations is valuable when it connects to performance improvements such as lower customer acquisition costs (CAC). When awareness rises and CAC falls, it’s proof that brand investments are compounding into efficiency gains.
Online reviews play a key role here, too. Strong feedback signals that customers feel confident in your brand—a detail buyers often verify directly through customer interviews. In this sense, brand reputation becomes a market asset and a valuation driver.
Customer Engagement
Keeping existing customers engaged is just as critical as acquiring new business. Retention protects revenue. If you have 10,000 users but only 10% are active, that raises red flags. On the other hand, if 1,000 users show 80% engagement, that’s a sign of a loyal, high-value customer base.
Email performance provides a clear window here: high engagement means customers are consuming the resources that make them more successful, which reduces churn risk and makes upsell conversations easier. Pairing engagement data with net revenue retention (NRR) or expansion revenue shows how ongoing interaction protects and grows enterprise value.
Content Performance
Strong-performing assets prove their worth when they consistently attract the right audience and move them closer to purchase. An ROI calculator, for instance, may consistently attract qualified leads at a lower cost than paid campaigns, but its true value lies in how it improves funnel efficiency and accelerates deal readiness.
When each asset is measured by its influence on SQLs, closed-won deals and CAC improvement, content performance transforms from a marketing metric into a business performance indicator. Framed this way, content acts as a pipeline-creation engine.
Pipeline Velocity
Time-to-revenue is always a priority for business leaders. Pipeline velocity shows how quickly qualified leads move through the funnel and directly impacts how soon revenue is recognized. Reducing the average cycle from 90 days to 75 can mean deals close in the same quarter instead of slipping to the next.
Paired with marketing-generated pipeline, CAC and payback period, velocity tells a complete story of both the speed and efficiency of revenue creation.
Framing qualitative data this way connects it to the same bottom-line outcomes executives and investors are focused on: cost efficiency, revenue growth and profitability.
Storytelling That Resonates With
Executives & Investors
Marketers are natural storytellers. They know how to weave a narrative that captures attention, builds trust and inspires action. The same skill applies when speaking to executives and potential buyers, only the medium shifts. With the right data and framework, marketers can tell stories just as powerful in the boardroom as they do in the market.
It comes down to structuring metrics the way executives and investors evaluate growth: pipeline contribution, CAC and payback efficiency, and customer expansion. When these metrics are tracked consistently across paid, organic, account-based marketing, events and other avenues, the story tells itself: marketing is a predictable revenue system.
Spend → Pipeline → Revenue → Payback → Retention,
you turn marketing data into financial intelligence. It’s the same lens investors use to assess value, and it gives the C-suite complete confidence in marketing’s impact.
At Kuno Creative, we help marketing teams align data, strategy and storytelling so every number contributes to a larger narrative of business growth and value. From shaping marketing frameworks to defining the metrics that prove impact, we help you build trust with executives, confidence with investors and momentum across your organization.
If you’re ready to rethink how you’re telling your story to leadership and the market, let’s talk.
Sources:
1. https://medium.com/@lightingbeetle/how-does-net-promoter-score-impact-revenue-growth-f04c762ece67
2. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/651203/workplace-answering-big-questions.aspx
3. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/