The least loved marketing practice
Attribution of marketing campaigns and their influence on sales opportunities is a muddied subject. It seems everywhere you look, there’s a ton of differing opinions which translates to: how should marketing teams report on program investments? Even with a ton of tech solutions claiming to do this (for years I might add), there’s equal amounts of push back and surprisingly from teams that don’t even manage the data pipes to understand it.
Just get more inbound “Contact Us”
As a growth marketer, do any of these statements sound familiar? “Just tell me what the last touch was before it became an opp” or “Can’t you just figure out how to get more inbound contact us form fills” or “Doesn’t every person in our database get a marketing touch”? The challenge with these short-sighted views is that the individuals asking don’t take the time to step back and understand the exact path that a buyer followed or the steps taken before raising a hand.
Do you care what the prospect knows about you?
As a sales person, you should want to know what the prospect has seen, heard or read. Knowing that someone referred you or attended an industry event where they saw you? Did they Google search or maybe spot an interesting piece of content via LinkedIn? All these touches constitute what they think of you as a brand and whether they believe you’re a fit. That should be gold-dust for any quota-carrying sales person.
At the same time, the sales rep will want to quickly scope if this contact is actually on a buying journey, yet. Yep, timing is critical. Knowing which behavior traits a prospect follows with a budget and deadline is just as important as knowing which traits to watch for a future buyer. Not now doesn’t mean not ever.
First impressions matter
As a sales person, you have the opportunity to leave a great first impression for your future customer. Take the time to ask questions, learn and fine-tune the playbook as you go. Making connections is critical as people move around and you never know where they will land next, and what future needs that company will have. If the sales rep openly discusses what a prospect has seen or read will impress them even more. Take the time to tailor.
Then give concrete feedback to team marketing
Marketing covets that feedback, once sales learns more. Outside of timing, was it the best-fit account? Any sticker-shock or did the messaging not hit the mark on explaining all differentiating features? Marketing will never learn and adjust without a steady stream of useful feedback from sales.
Data-driven reports
It’s very hard for marketing to continue to deliver valuable programs without monthly and quarterly reports. Data-driven reports show what’s working with the goal of getting more budget, which sales will benefit from. The challenge is that marketing teams collect a lot of data. Some of it is only useful for team marketing but summary reports can be shared across the full team.
Sales doesn’t need to spend their time and energy trying to understand different attribution models and reports from different systems. You can very quickly reach data overload and people will simply tune it out. All that matters is what pipeline is in quarter right now, that will help to achieve or exceed quota.
Keep it simple. Summarize by campaign type and best CTA
Sales teams can get behind a very specific campaign and what actions they can take right now to amplify. If that campaign is a particular type of webinar or something that is promoting say a new product feature, with a distinct CTA, the team will get energized. Show early results and rally everyone behind the CTA and how to use it.
Don’t bother sharing the broad range of integrated marketing touches and channel types.
If marketing knows the best channels to yield the highest return, that’s sufficient. Let’s be honest, sales doesn’t care if the opp came via a google paid ad, LinkedIn or other channel or five different touches. Amplification across channels is what team digital can focus on. Don’t over-complicate it for team sales.
Attribution. Use different words to describe it’s value
The word attribution to sales sounds data heavy or almost a philosophy around describing budget ROI. It’s cumbersome and isn’t aligned to what they care about, right now. A better way to describe it to sales is to share in the context of top contributors to pipeline creation.
Tell salesWhat’s working:
Here are the top 2 performing campaigns over the past 2 quarters that drove X% account engagement, generating $X in pipeline from our joint activities.
Recommend these actions:
Share this link with this copy on your social channel to drive more.
Send this email copy to mid and bottom-funnel accounts and contacts with this CTA.
For demand and growth marketers
Set-up Hubspot dashboards and review as a team at least once a month
Send summary reports to management and show spend ROI
Turn off campaigns that don’t yield. Agree timeframe for those calls
Double-down on the highest performing campaigns
Allocate a small $% of budget to experiment each quarter.
Always track all the data because you never know when you will need it.
Stay on top of the latest tools and trends. I spotted this newly published piece on the very topic by agency Animalz (whom I recommend for great content).
As always, share any thoughts or feedback in comments or shoot an email: deirdrebmahon@gmail.com
P.s. I used ChatGPT to understand what she thought about attribution which sorely lacked real human experience, so I made considerable edits ;-)
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https://marketingengine2.com/