Connecting marketing to the sales it creates

HECK! had grown fast, and its data had not kept pace. Sales could be tracked, but mostly for the sales team, and campaign performance was judged on total sales over a period rather than linked to the activity that drove it. There was little store-level detail and little transparency across teams.

Digital campaigns could be measured for engagement, but not followed through to the sales they produced. As HECK! invested more heavily in marketing behind a clear new strategy, it needed to measure what was working, and to target a modest budget where it would count.

We started with a discovery session and a detailed statement of work written in business language, not data jargon, so everyone understood what we were building and why.

Then we built the foundation: a clean, well-governed data platform in Microsoft Fabric that brings retailer sales, campaign spend, social performance and direct-to-consumer sales into one place, with housekeeping rules and semantic modelling so everything going in is consistent and trustworthy, and the platform is ready for future AI.

On top sits a connected suite of dashboards: a portfolio view of spend, uplift and return for leadership; campaign reporting and individual post-campaign deep dives; media dashboards showing which channels, formats and retailers drive uplift; product dashboards; and a direct-to-consumer view of online revenue by source. Underpinning it all is one consistent measure of uplift: sales during a campaign compared against a baseline, then set against spend to show return, with brand campaigns measured across all retailers to capture their halo effect. We delivered it in phases, each one showing value before the next began.

The teams now share a single, clear view of performance. Marketing can see what it is doing, where, and how it connects to sales, and can target campaigns by region rather than spreading a small budget thinly. Some media has already been ruled out, and early patterns are emerging, for example shelf barkers proving more effective than other in-store media for certain products, which is building into a decision model for future spend.

Just as important, the dashboards are genuinely usable, so a creative team that might find data daunting is actually using them. The Microsoft Fabric foundation gives HECK! confidence in the numbers, and a platform to build on as campaigns grow. BearTech continues as HECK!'s data partner as the work moves into further phases.

Read the full case study, the extended version with more detail on the build.