If you are searching for a Datorama dashboard, you are probably trying to pull marketing data from many sources into one view. That is the right goal. This article answers a narrower question for a company of 10 to 250 people: do you need an enterprise marketing intelligence tool to get there, or can the CRM that already holds your contacts and deals do the job. For most firms in that range, the second answer is right, and the rest of this guide shows how to build that view on the levelpartner.ai platform.
What the job actually is
Enterprise marketing intelligence tools exist for large teams that run dozens of channels, several brands and multiple regions. Their job is to collect spend and performance data from many systems, standardise it and present it in one place. That job matters when you have a lot of data in a lot of places.
A 60-person service firm has a different shape. It typically runs two to five channels, one brand and one sales team. Most of the data that matters, contacts, sources, opportunities, revenue, already lives in one CRM. The integration work an enterprise tool is built for barely exists.
What to check before you choose a dedicated tool
Answer these honestly before committing to any separate marketing data platform:
- How many systems hold marketing data you cannot already see in your CRM?
- Who will maintain the data connections when one breaks?
- Will the tool see won revenue, or only marketing activity?
- How many people will read the dashboards it produces each week?
If the honest answers are "few", "nobody in particular", "only activity" and "two", a dedicated tool will cost time and money without changing a decision.
Before you start
- Your ad accounts, email and social channels connected from Settings.
- Source capture on every form, calendar and inbound call.
- Opportunities carrying a value, a source and a won date.
- A list of the decisions your marketing data needs to support.
How to set it up
- List every system that holds marketing data today.
- Mark each one connected, exportable or isolated.
- Go to Settings, then Integrations, and connect your ad accounts.
- Move form and booking traffic onto pages built in Sites.
- Check that every new contact records its source automatically.
- Go to Dashboard and click + Add Dashboard.
- Add Amount Spent from Meta Ads and Total cost from Google Ads.
- Add Contacts by Source, Booked Appointments and Lead Source Report.
- Keep a monthly log of each isolated channel's figures.
- Review the dashboard monthly against the decisions on your list.
What this replaces
Building the view inside the CRM replaces a separate subscription, a separate set of data connections and, in many cases, a contractor to maintain them. More importantly, it joins marketing data to revenue directly. Most standalone marketing data tools stop at leads or conversions, which leaves the most important number, money won, sitting somewhere else.
Consider a firm that runs paid search, paid social, email and two industry events a year. A dedicated marketing data tool would need connections to four channels, the CRM and the finance system. A build inside the CRM would need the four channels connected and a manual entry for event spend twice a year. As a rough comparison, that is perhaps a day of set-up against several weeks, and only the CRM route would show revenue from the first day.
Time it takes each week
The CRM-based build takes one to two days. The weekly check is ten minutes to confirm connections are live and spend is flowing. A monthly review of the full dashboard takes half an hour. Compare that with the ongoing maintenance a standalone data platform needs whenever a channel changes its reporting.
The mistake most people make
Buying a reporting tool to fix a data capture problem. If forms do not record a source or salespeople do not update deal stages, no dashboard tool will fix it. Fix capture in the CRM first. The dashboard is the easy part once the data is right.
When a dedicated tool is the right call
There are firms in the 10 to 250 range that genuinely need more. If you run several brands with separate budgets, operate many regional campaigns, or report to a parent company that already uses a specific tool, a dedicated platform may be justified. The same is true if your marketing team is large enough to have an analyst who will own it full time. In those cases, still make sure revenue from the CRM flows into it.
The marketing analytics dashboard covers the diagnostic side of the same data. For combining credit across channels, see multi-channel attribution. If budget sign-off is the main audience, the CMO dashboard is the shorter version.
Troubleshooting
A channel cannot be connected. Record its monthly spend and results in a custom field or a simple form, then report on that field. It is not elegant, but it is complete.
Spend appears but results do not. Ad links lack UTM values, so contacts arrive without a source. Fix the links and test with a form submission.
Numbers differ from a previous tool's reports. Older tools often counted platform conversions. Your CRM counts contacts and deals. Explain the difference once and stick with the CRM view.
The dashboard is too slow to load. Too many widgets over long periods. Split it into a monthly view and a separate yearly trend view.
Frequently asked questions
Can the platform import historical data from another tool?
You can import contacts and opportunities by CSV with their source and values. Channel-level historical spend is usually easier to keep in a spreadsheet for comparison than to import.
Is a CRM-based dashboard good enough for board reporting?
For firms of this size, yes, provided spend is complete and source capture is reliable. Boards want revenue against cost, which the CRM holds directly.
What if we later outgrow it?
Contacts, opportunities and sources can be exported. Starting in the CRM does not lock you out of a dedicated tool later.
Should we compare against Salesforce reporting?
Only in general terms: any CRM-based reporting depends on the quality of data entered. The choice of platform matters less than the discipline of capture.