Start with the customer and the commercial decision
A professional service can have a long path from first inquiry to an agreed engagement. If marketing reports only the initial conversion while sales records use inconsistent statuses, the business cannot tell whether the problem is acquisition quality, qualification or response capacity. I map those stages and their owners before designing the report.
We review representative records, reporting periods and source fields to establish what the data can reliably connect. The resulting model distinguishes a newly submitted request, a reviewed opportunity and later commercial progress. That lets leadership ask more useful questions than whether the latest campaign generated a lower reported lead cost.