Janis Zech: Hey, Philip. Hey, Anders. So what's going on in today's episode?

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Today, we'll talk to Charlie Saunders on how to track funnel metrics across the entire marketing and sales funnel. Charlie shares many valuable lessons on funnel metrics he's gathered since founding CS2 eight years ago with his wife. Enjoy.

Janis Zech: Super excited to have you.

Charlie Saunders: Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Would you mind giving the audience a quick background about yourself? I mean, I know you're quite experienced, so was super curious, you know, about that.

Charlie Saunders: Of course. Yeah. So like you said, I'm Charlie Saunders, cofounder and CRO of CS2. We're a marketing and revenue operations consulting agency. We've been around since twenty fifteen now. So coming up on our tenth year. Prior to that, I worked at a couple of technology companies, Urpcor and Jive, primarily in demand gen marketing ops roles, earlier on in my career. Started CS2, you know, like I said, back in twenty fifteen with my co-founder Chrissy, and have been running the company now, like I said, for almost ten years. And we only really work with B2B SaaS companies during their stages of growth through generally, like, series A all the way through to IPO. Most of our companies that are pre-IPO going through those crazy growth stages, the B2B SaaS companies go through trying to scale, growing their teams, trying to implement tools, are trying to implement what we would call revenue growth architecture, and just really helping them on an ongoing basis to mature everything they're doing from an operations standpoint. So excited to be here and talk about some of the stuff that we work on with our clients.

Janis Zech: Yeah. So, I mean, it's great to have you, and we got so many positive recommendations about you guys, so we want to have you on the show. I mean, you know, super curious about, you know, what you typically work on for customers. Are there specific areas that you mostly cover?

Charlie Saunders: Yeah. So, really, we break down our services into a few different categories. So the first one is actually what we're gonna be talking about today. It's all around funnel architecture. So how are you capturing demand? How are you building out your sales stages? How are you tracking all of those stages from demand capture to revenue and customer expansion, and all of the analytics and all of the decision making that can go into that once you have the right architecture and business process around your funnel. We also help our clients with campaigns. This is where we get a bit more into multi-touch attribution, campaign operations, how you're actually delivering on all of the campaigns that you're working on. The third category is all around the tech stack. So we're pretty tech agnostic at CS2, so we help our clients across the board. When it comes to marketing automation, most of our clients are on HubSpot or Marketo, although we do have Pardot. Salesforce, as CRM, is one of the areas that we're least tech agnostic, so all of our clients have Salesforce, but then we help our clients implement the rest of their tech stacks, so whether that's ABM tools, data tools, CAT tools, analytics tools, and everything in between. So we have a really experienced and really great team that helps our clients day to day on all of these projects. And then the last category is all around analytics. So once you've got the infrastructure, once we've built out everything you need from a tech stack tracking point of view, then the job is how do we analyze this data and make the best decisions. So that's generally the four primary areas that we help our clients with.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Awesome. I mean, we'd love to dive really into funnel metrics today because I think that's an area we spend a lot of time, and that is fundamentally broken. So, yeah, I mean, you know, if you could maybe give a quick intro in what is funnel metrics for you and what matters there?

Charlie Saunders: Yeah. So funnel metrics, the way that we think about it is really how you capture demand. So whether that is through someone coming in through a demo request, an event, any of the typical sources that you can imagine that is a tipping point, and we always talk about tipping point being the model for our funnel where it is now time for sales to engage. So someone fills out a demo form, maybe they've scored up an MQL, maybe they've gone to an event, now sales engages or sales has gone outbound. That's what we would typically say is the beginning of the funnel at that tipping point. And then all of the operations and architecture that you have around that sales handoff process, so how are you getting sales to follow up? That could be, you know, syncing the data to Salesforce using a tool like LeanData for routing, then even maybe getting the data into a sales engagement platform for follow-up. And then tracking and having a really repeatable and solid business process all the way through the sales stages, both pre-opportunity sales stages, so moving into sales working, maybe into a meeting booked stage, and then all the way through opportunity stages to post close. And that is the funnel. Right? It's the marketing and sales shared funnel of creating demand and then turning that demand into customers. And then there's gonna be, you know, upsell expansion funnels. There's a couple of aspects that you need, and we can dive more into this, but the TLDR is the good business process, a good setup of your technology to have a repeatable and efficient process, and then tracking the milestones and the stages along the way so then you can get the analytics that you need for your funnel metrics to then improve that business process and make it the most efficient. So that's generally how we think about funnel.

Janis Zech: Yeah. And if you think about tracking, I mean, what are some of the pitfalls you see, you know, customers going into?

Charlie Saunders: Yeah. So back in the funnel, I mean, there's a lot. Where to start? So I think that a lot of it does come down to the data model that you're using. And there's kind of a long arc to this. So when we first started CS2 and even prior, kind of what people were doing when they were trying to operationalize this and then track everything is they were using, you would say, Marketo because that was our primary marketing automation platform that we were helping our clients with back then. And they were using Marketo to essentially — every time a lead or a contact moved through different stages, Marketo would stamp a date stamp on leads and contacts. All the data that you had was on leads and contacts, and then you might have a lead source field on the leads and contacts to then say, okay, this lead came from this event and we're tracking those date stamps. But then over the years, people have just kept on bumping up against issues with that data model. Because when you think about the funnel, although when you look at a picture of a funnel, it looks kind of linear and they just go through these steps, that's not actually how things work in practice. Right? So there's several issues and maybe I can go through, like, just the names of them and we could dig into them. But one of the first ones is what happens if they're not ready yet? The person isn't ready. So sales starts engaging, they then add them, they recycle them, and then maybe six months later they come back again. Because the data model that you're using, you're tracking the date stamps on the lead and contact, you have to overwrite those date stamps. You might have like an original MQL date, original meeting date, etcetera, and then a latest, but then what happens if it happens three times? You've got — you've missed the middle one. So we kept on having clients come back to us back in the early days and they'd be like, oh, I'm looking at this month over month report. We had like, you know, a thousand MQLs and five hundred meetings or whatever in Q1. When I got to Q4, those numbers were reduced in Q1 now because, you know, that meeting or that MQL has just been moved to Q4 in that reporting because you're basing it on, like, maybe latest MQL date. So that's one of the issues. And then the other side of this — and maybe I could focus on these two issues, I think they're very related, basically based on the lead and contact there — is in Salesforce, as everyone knows, you have leads and you have contacts. Yay. And when you're trying to get a full funnel, you're trying to look at, okay, what are my conversion rates through all of these stages? You're having to pull a lead report, you're having to pull a contact report. Also, based on some people maybe not getting enough information onto the lead and contact, you may be having to also pull a campaign member report. You're then having to get an opportunity report. You might want some other account data, get an account report. I mean, you're getting all of that data, you're putting it into like an Excel file to try and marry it all up and connect it to then get your full funnel metrics. And one, that's terribly inefficient. Two, it's often wrong because the way that you're putting all that data and then trying to match it up is just very imperfect. So you end up with a situation with this old model where you're overwriting data, data retention issues, and then you have this massive cluster of a process that's inefficient and pretty broken to actually get an idea of how your business is working. So those are a couple of the big ones there that I'll start with.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Really big ones, I think. I mean, curious. So, like, the way we certainly at Weflow talk about Salesforce is, you know, you kinda wanna treat your CRM as a system of truth, like a one source system of truth, ideally. But is that, like, from your experience, particularly when it comes to attribution and the whole leads-contact topic — is that even, like, a good idea from your point of view? I mean, I think it kinda makes sense to separate there maybe, like, you know, we kind of try to get the leads in and try to convert them into meetings and then sort of the other part of the funnel where it's more about, like, you are in discovery and you go through the stages. And I think it's a much more, I think, clearer process, I would say, easier to attribute. But this first part, does it actually work in the CRM? Can you turn it into, like, a proper one source of truth?

Charlie Saunders: Yeah. So I think there's a couple of things to dig into here. So, like, the pre-opportunity stages — but maybe once you hand off to sales, right, that definitely obviously needs to be in the CRM. Sales are working with those leads and contacts, and if not, opportunities. I think these days, like, back when we started, people were using the Marketo modeler and stuff and trying to do some of their lifecycle reporting in Marketo using, like, RCE and throwing out random things some people might not even know of these days because, like, no one really does it that way anymore. But then you started getting to the point where, you know, sales and leadership wanna see reports and you're like, okay, go and try and find this report in Marketo and everyone wants to actually get that reporting in Salesforce. So over the last ten years, especially with the companies that we work at, kind of, you know, growing B2B SaaS companies, there's been a massive reliance on needing the reporting in Salesforce as a first step. Over the last five years maybe, a lot of companies are delving more into BI. But I think one of the issues that happens with that is that when you start to have a data warehouse and a BI tool, you often try to correct some of these issues with the Salesforce data outside of Salesforce. So, yeah, you're joining data tables, you're doing some data manipulation in a data warehouse, and now your BI reports look great. But when your VP of sales goes and tries to replicate that report in Salesforce, it just doesn't work. So then you have this — you know, your source of truth is kind of outside of Salesforce now. I'm kind of a believer more in a distributed truth where you kinda want your BI data and your Salesforce data to be the same, and you want everything to match. And so it doesn't matter if people are pulling a report in different places, it is the same data, which kinda leads us a little bit onto maybe the better data model for funnel tracking around the custom object that I know we're gonna talk about today. Because if you can get your Salesforce data right, then you've got the reporting in Salesforce working great, and then you can just use that object in that table in your BI tool without manipulating it, and then maybe create better reports because the visualizations are better, but you're using the same data. That's why I'm a big believer. Get your Salesforce data working really well and then you can distribute that data to other tools and reporting tools and do whatever you want with it. But when you start to manipulate along the way, that's when we've just seen companies get massively confused because everyone comes to a meeting — the marketing person and the salesperson — with a different report, and it just doesn't work.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, to your earlier point with regards to just the issue of, you know, how do you actually update the timestamps. Right? I would just say a huge issue if you think about it. Right? Like, I mean, I know you created this custom object. I mean, how is that solving that specific issue?

Charlie Saunders: In terms of updating the date stamps, I mean, it's relying on similar logic. It's just where it's updating the date stamps is different. So obviously, in either option, you wanna update the date stamps when that sales milestone, that sales stage has been obtained. So say working stage is gonna be triggered off when someone's added to an Outreach sequence based on a demo request coming in. You wanna know that they've been added to the Outreach sequence or an email's been sent out of Outreach, and maybe you're updating an Outreach stage in Salesforce or you're triggering off an activity being created in Salesforce to be able to move to working stage. Or, you know, the meeting booked stage is happening when a meeting is actually booked and maybe that's based on activity in Salesforce or maybe that's based on a stage zero opportunity being created in Salesforce. That's often what most of our clients do for meetings — stage zero opportunities is like a little side thing. But either way, like, the logic for saying we've met the stage is the same. The way of updating the date stamps would be different. So the lead and contact model is you update the date stamps on the lead and contact, but then because it's one record, every time they re-MQL and go through the funnel and come back around, you're overwriting the data and then you have the lead and contact issue. But with the custom object, you're creating a whole new object, so a different data table, where you can relate records to leads and contacts, but you can have multiple — you can have a one-to-many relationship between funnel records and the lead and contact. So if the lead comes through, gets recycled, say they get an MQL, they get recycled, that is one funnel record. And then they MQL again or sales go outbound, you just create another record in that table and relate it to the same lead and contact. So you can see every journey through the funnel as a separate record, you're not having any of those data issues with retention. And then you're just using that report type. You're using that custom object report type to do all of your reporting. You're not having to do, like, lead report, contact report, opportunity report, all these reports, trying to stitch it together outside of Salesforce.

Janis Zech: So if I understand you correctly, you essentially create a custom object that's probably kind of a package you can just easily install. And then, like, whatever objects you work in, whether that's leads, contacts, opportunities, it automatically writes essentially many relationships into that custom object, which essentially is almost like a date tracker without creating duplication, right, which is always a fun issue to deal with. And that custom object — is that then used for, like, reporting purposes? I mean, to Philipp's earlier point, right, to continue to have the system of truth and use Salesforce as your heart, would you say then basically this is really almost like a new data model that can be used in Salesforce reporting, but then can also be exported into any BI system and be looked at and becomes kind of the heart, or how do you describe it? And did I get that right?

Charlie Saunders: You got that right. Yeah. So, I mean, the custom object is an object for reporting. Right? Your reps aren't, like, updating anything manually on that object. There's no, like, kind of operations around that object. It's just as the leads and contacts go through the funnel, as the opportunity gets created, goes through the sales stages and closes won, we're using all of those triggers and updating the date stamps and also pulling other things like — we're relating that record to the opportunity so we can get all the opportunity fields on the custom object. You know, we can get any of the lead and contact fields. When the tipping point occurs, we're also stamping all the marketing activities. So we always have this concept of the where and the what. So where did the person come from and what did they do? So maybe they came from a paid ad and they did the demo request. That would be updated on the lead and contact, but then when we're creating that custom object record, you are then also stamping that on the custom object record. Then you see, okay, this funnel journey started with a demo request from a paid ad. These are all the sales progression stages and date stamps. They then turn into an opportunity. Here's all the opportunity data. You also have account data on there, which is great for the customer side because you can stamp the account type, so you could see this is a prospect funnel or a customer funnel if you had a concept of, like, a customer MQL or something like that. But then the object, yes, it's a reporting object. It's used to combine all of that data into one table, and then you could use that data for reporting in Salesforce or BI.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I love it. I think it's so important. I mean, even — we're building Weflow, a pipeline management forecasting tool, and one of the earliest things we did was to allow cross-object fields to be populated in a table, which is a different use case. It's more from a, you know, how do you make reps and managers more productive by enabling them to combine data in a different way. So it's not reporting focused, it's really more like workflow focused. But it's a similar idea, right? And I think especially with the rise of data warehouses and BI being used to drive deeper analytics into what's actually going on, it feels like a really, really nice addition to the overall stack.

Charlie Saunders: Yeah. It's — I mean, without this — I mean, I'm pretty bullish on this being the right way to track a funnel. We've tried — I mean, there's so many other ways that you could do this. We've talked about the lead and contact model. There's some people who try and use campaign members, so, like, try and add the date stamps to campaign members, which can work. I don't know if people are familiar with, you know, Full Circle Insights is a tool that can do that. But then, like, you have the issue of trying to work with a campaign member is a bit more difficult than a custom object. So if you're gonna try and build that yourself, it's gonna be a bit easier to build on a custom object. Then the other thing is I think for a use case like this, I don't know if, like, a subscription for this particular custom object tracking is required. Like, you can set this up. We have an unmanaged Salesforce package that we install for our clients to get this set up, you know, unmanaged, kind of open source. Right? Like, it's theirs to use and take on if and when they don't work with us anymore. No subscription cost or anything like that. So I think it's a nice middle ground if you're trying to get, you know, advanced funnel tracking to solve some of these issues. You maybe don't have the budget for a tool to do this specific use case. And you have a pretty maybe a pretty custom environment where — and it works for custom environments and more simple environments. You have a custom environment where you don't wanna have to, you know, build a lot of extra automation around, like, a managed package. You can kind of just use the unmanaged package and edit it if you do need to account for something custom within your system. And then just when it comes down to the source of truth question, I do believe that even though companies are moving to BI, people still create reports in Salesforce, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. So I just have had so many situations where people are like, why is this report in BI showing this conversion rate, you know, MQL to pipeline, and I can't replicate this in Salesforce. It's just — once you hear that like a hundred times, you go, okay. We should probably have the reporting in Salesforce how we need it and working with a good robust dataset, and then we can sync that to BI instead of working with our, you know, data team to do some magic outside of Salesforce that we're just never gonna be able to replicate in Salesforce. So it really does hit on some of the key problems that we've been working on with our clients now for ten years. So a lot of thought has gone into it for sure.

Janis Zech: Curious, like, part of this whole funnel tracking is, of course, also to kinda make a decision on kinda what sources, what channels actually are worth, you know, doubling down on or maybe also discarding at some point if they don't really pay off, don't have good ROI, for instance. Do you use a custom object to also then feed into other custom objects that kind of like standard signals that you use for funnel tracking, or is it really like the whole reporting is based on that one custom object then?

Charlie Saunders: I mean, I haven't — I mean, you could, you know — I'm sure there's use cases to expand on this for sure, maybe even some that we haven't even thought of. When it comes to optimizing your marketing and sales, I think the key thing to think about with this is that funnel metrics is just one way to measure what you're doing. Right? I mean, before we started recording, we were talking about kind of like other forms of attribution. And I think it is worth mentioning there are other ways to measure, you know, marketing and sales — multi-touch attribution, self-reported attribution, etcetera — and funnel metrics is one version. Our point of view is that it's the most important to get right first. So if you're gonna do them in order, work — get this funnel working because not only is it an analytics project, kind of like we've talked about, it's also figuring out your business process. It forces you to go, what should we hand off to sales? What should sales do when something is handed off to them? How do they create meetings? How do we make sure that every step of this process is going to tie all this data together in the right way? Then when it comes to — to answer your question more on, okay, we're tracking the source of the funnel. So maybe like the example I gave earlier, demo request from a paid ad. You've gotta be careful of over-optimizing that. I think it's really good to show, like, okay, this is where we're capturing demand, and you can look at — we always call it the three V's even though there's not three V's. It's conversion, velocity, and volume. Conversion has that strong V in it. That's why we call it three V's. Okay. But you're looking at the velocity through the funnel, you're looking at the volume through the funnel, and then you're looking at conversion rates. So I think my favorite way of optimizing is looking at just conversion rates. You can see, okay, what are our conversion rates between something like content syndication leads versus demo requests, or looking at the different comparisons there to help you optimize. But you have to know the limitations of that model because you're tying a very complex sales cycle back to one touch point. It's the tipping point model. It's what pushed the person into the arms of sales, basically. And there's a lot more touch points on the customer journey that you need to also look at to see if they're somehow influencing the purchasing decision. So I wanted to make sure that's clear because some people — it's very useful. Our clients make decisions with it every day. But you do need to look at things in a broader picture too to make sure you're not gonna optimize in the wrong way.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think it's so fascinating because the marketing attribution side and the things you cannot really track and you don't really understand, right, they are there. Right? But what you're referring to, first and foremost, is get the fundamentals you can track. And especially between the handover between marketing and sales, I think there's a huge gap in terms of measuring conversion rates. Right? It is really challenging. And so if you make that a lot easier and you can actually look at — first and foremost, get the data model right, get the tracking right, making sure that you understand where there are drop-offs, and then go deep in and try to change them. And then that's probably also very much, you know, a topic that's not just data related, but that's also behavior and change management. Right? I'm super curious, like, what are your top learnings with regards to not just tracking the funnel, measuring it, and reporting on it, but then actually changing the behavior of people. Where do you see often, like, huge potential to drive more revenue?

Charlie Saunders: That's a really good point. Yeah. And that's kind of what I was getting at when I talk about this being an operations project, of building out the fundamental kind of what people need to do at each stage, as well as an analytics project. So when it comes to thinking about, like, what are the most high-leverage ways of optimizing this process, a lot of it does come down to the people and the sales team. So, like, what's great about having the custom object and really good dataset for this is that you can see, okay, which one of my salespeople are meeting the SLAs? So, okay, we've got, like, a ten-minute SLA for demo requests. How many — if you're also tracking your SLA data on the custom object, which you can do, you then see, okay, which salespeople are actually meeting this SLA? Does that impact conversion rates? Which, obviously, it does. And then you can further maybe enable those salespeople and train them on that process. And then I mentioned kind of the content syndication versus demo request. So much of sales and marketing alignment is based on what you're sending to sales. And then are you building trust there that what you're sending to sales, they feel good about it and they wanna follow up with those people? Because as soon as you send too much crap, then they just kind of check out and they don't really do the right activities to engage with those inbound contacts. So then you end up having a double whammy issue where you're sending crap, but then they're also checked out and they're not doing what they need to do even if it was a good lead. So if you can see those conversion rates — like, so often when we're working with our clients, it's very clear. You look at it by channel and you look at it by the offer type and you go, okay, there's some really underperforming channels here. I don't wanna call out any in particular. But then when you see there's some channels and some conversions that are, like, converting into pipeline, like fifty or more percent, and then there's some at, like, naught point one percent — it is a very clear signal on how to improve. And you're not only gonna improve kind of the marketing effectiveness, you're gonna improve your relationship with sales because they're gonna start trusting, okay, when I do look at my list view and I start to engage with these inbound leads, they're good. And then that human behavior element comes in and they start working them harder and they do a better job, and then you start to see both the lift of the improvement of what you're sending plus that self-effectiveness. They then start working in a better way as well.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, so important, right, and so challenging to do if you just think about this typical MQL, right, not all MQLs are created equal. How do you distinguish those? Do you actually distinguish those by kind of channel as well and then, you know, try to prioritize accordingly, or is that often something that is very effective?

Charlie Saunders: Yeah. So I mentioned the where and what thing earlier so that when we think about what is being sent to sales — we don't really actually like the acronym MQL, so we use sales ready. So sales ready can mean kind of marketing sales ready. It can mean like a PQL, like they're sales ready in our product. It could mean like a customer is sales ready. It could also mean sales have gone outbound, like sales have deemed them sales ready. So it's kind of a catch-all for all of them. But purely focusing on, like, a marketing sales ready, we always wanna capture the where and the what. So the where is where did they come from? So that's all of your marketing channels. It could be they came through like organic search, they came through paid search, paid social, an event, etcetera. And then the what they did is like — what was the conversion that they actually converted on? So that could be your demo request form, your contact us form, the specific event that they went to, etcetera. And if you have those two pieces of the puzzle, then you can see, okay, you can break it down by the where, like all of the channels, or you could break it down by the offers. You could break it down by a combination of the two and start to really see what has the highest conversion rates and the best velocity through the funnel.

Janis Zech: Yeah. That's where the qualified makes a lot of sense, and I really like the sales readiness because I think marketing qualified leads is just — I mean, I get it, right? But I think it's always a question of definition, and it's often a lot more complicated than this one term. Right? So to break it into specific buckets and basically qualify those buckets as sales readiness that are then really attractive and, you know, essentially, ideally end up being, you know, qualified opportunities, right, and then progress in the funnel is something that is, you know, again, I think not something most companies are doing a very good job of. Right? And it's hard because the fundamental data model is often not there. So you basically simplify it, then the simplification creates a real challenge in kind of what you call sales readiness, and then sales and marketing not being aligned because I think of the typical problem we all know. I feel we could continue this for actually hours, and also I'd love to maybe find more time to talk about all of what we didn't talk about, marketing attribution, which I think is a super fascinating topic. But any other thoughts or notes on the funnel metrics you haven't shared? I mean, probably many, but wanna ask an open question before we come to our closing question.

Charlie Saunders: I think we touched on all of the main things. I think the thing that maybe is to highlight is it's such a critical element of what companies need that so many companies don't have. Like, pretty much every client we work with, the first project is how do we architect your funnel? We have clients coming in. They're spending, you know, a million dollars a month on ads, and they don't know if this is working at all. They have no data on the leads coming through these ads converting into meetings and pipeline and revenue because this isn't set up. Or maybe someone's tried to do it, but it's just not working. And often the trigger to then working with us is, like, a new CMO comes into that company and goes, you're spending millions and millions of dollars on marketing. Is anything working? And everyone goes, I don't know. And then they go, okay. We need to get an agency in to kinda help fix this, and maybe we've worked with that CMO before and they bring us in. So what I really wanna try and get across when I'm speaking to people is that it's better to invest in this stuff earlier. So there's, like, this weird dynamic that's so frustrating where companies don't feel the pain of this until it's sometimes not too late, but it's getting to the point of where it's been — this is late. So they get to that point where, yeah, they're spending millions of dollars on ads. The new CMO comes in, wants to optimize the business and see what's working, and they can't tell the CMO how it's working. That is not the time to invest in funnel architecture. You should have done it two, three years before that. Because if you had started it two, three years ago, then you'd see, you know, two, three years of data to then base everything off. When you start it today, your data tracking starts today. So you wanna do quarter over quarter reporting? You're gonna have to wait six months from the launch day. You know? You wanna do year over year reporting, you're gonna have to wait, like, a year or two to be able to get reporting. So it is something to invest in early, but I don't know how to crack that perfectly because so many companies don't wanna put the time and effort in early enough, and then until they're just having the acute pain, which is frustrating. But the more I can talk about it, the more we try and get that out there, hopefully someone might listen. But it does feel like most companies seem to make that mistake over and over again.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, look, I hope that people listen to this and, you know, think about it early. I can only subscribe to what you said. And I think one thing is the tracking and reporting.