Why Marketing Attribution is Broken, and How to Fix It!

Jennifer Preston

By

on August 12, 2019

There are many Marketing Attribution platforms and systems out there. Yet true B2B Marketing Attribution is still elusive.

Can you really quantifiable and accurately tie Marketing spend to Deals & Revenue? If you can, you are way ahead of the pack!

We strongly believe without access to WHO is involved in the Deals and Opportunities this is not possible. Let me explain:

Here is the Happy Path of a Lead:
Marketing Attribution Happy Path

Here we have a Prospect who clicks on one of your LinkedIn Ad Banners, gets to a Landing Page, fills out the form and gets created in your CRM as a Lead (with the Linkedin Ad as the leadsource). Because he is a “hand raiser” the lead gets scored, qualifies as a MQL and is passed to Sales, who performs a Discovery Call. It is determined they are indeed qualified, the Lead is converted to an Account, Contact and Opportunity, a Sales Cycle is run, and after 3 weeks Sales closes the Deal. We have straight line path from Ad to Deal. Sounds great right? It does, but how often is this the path that is taken?

As you know the act of converting this lead to a Opportunity is what creates this attribution linkage.

What happens when the lead is not converted? Or what happens if an Opportunity is created because a different person from the Prospect’s Organization shows up at the meeting and is now the primary point person?

What happens is attribution is gone and we lost the linkage.

Enter Sales Contacts and Sales Activities to the rescue.

As you know in your Marketing Automation (Marketo, Eloqua, Hubspot, etc…) you run Campaigns and Campaigns have Campaign Members. These are nicely tied to all the various outreaches and Ads you are running.

Opportunities have Stakeholders or Opportunity Contact Roles, which, unfortunately, mostly go unused by Sales because its work for Salesreps to populate and doesn’t really provide value to the Reps, “what’s in it for me” type of thing. But these Roles are HIGHLY valuable for Marketing Attribution and understanding if we (Marketing) have influenced the deals.

Marketing Attribution needs Opportunity Contact Roles

Typically only one person is in the Opportunity Role, why? Because in many cases an Opportunity is created from a contact or lead. But as we all know a typical B2B Enterprise deal has 5+ stakeholders and we need visibility into all those.

Since SalesDirector.ai is a Revenue Intelligence Platform and connected to Activity Data, Email, Calendar, Call data, etc… we “discover” lots of new Contacts Sales is engaged with. SalesDirector.ai will further automatically associate these Contacts with the right Accounts and Opportunities, automatically populating these Opportunity Contact Roles.

Now that we have this visibility, we can nicely tie the people on the Deal back to the Campaigns. Voila!

And then we can do cool stuff like this:
Marketing Influence on Revenue

Regardless of which Marketing Attribution platforms or BI systems you end up using, its the Data that enables this. As the old adage goes, Garbage in, Garbage out.

See Other Attribution Reports from SalesDirector.ai.

Want to learn more about SalesDirector.ai’s Revenue Intelligence Platform, get a demo.

Happy Marketing!

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