Building A Reporting Requirements Document

Documenting reporting requirements is an essential step in the development of meaningful B2B marketing reports and dashboards. Successful measurement efforts start with a clear understanding of the organization’s need for visibility into marketing performance. Precisely defined measurement specifications reduce the waste commonly seen in measurement efforts.

When marketing operations and analytics teams build marketing reports, a reporting requirements document is an element that cannot be overlooked. The reporting requirements document, which is created during the alignment stage of the Forrester Aligned Measurement Process Model (see The Aligned Measurement Process Model: Phases And Stages), clarifies the purpose and use of a reporting deliverable by defining the intended audience, the questions that need to be answered about marketing performance, and the metrics required to answer those questions. In this report, we explain how to document reporting requirements for each report or dashboard in a marketing measurement program.