Inside a B2B Marketing Contribution Attribution Model That Works

Will we ever solve the age-old attribution challenge in B2B marketing? Whether it's about dashboards or definitions or politics, attribution debates seem to go on and on.

At last week's CMO Coffee Talk, Leslie Cocco Alore shared an innovative and exhaustive approach to defining and measuring marketing contribution that has worked well for her team at Ivanti .

If you are in the CMO Coffee Talk community, DO NOT MISS Leslie's presentation deck in the #swipefile channel in Slack. It includes guiding principles, detailed definitions, dashboard samples and more.

If you're a B2B CMO or head of marketing and want to join a community of 2,400+ of your peers, let me know or click here to learn more and sign up.

Chat highlights and more perspectives from attending CMOs last week are below.

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Attribution is NOT a credit game

+1 to no 'credit' and 'sourced' conversations!!!!

Nor is it CYA.

Exactly - we should avoid 'marketing-sourced' vs 'sales sourced'

I tell people that attribution is about the future, not the past.?What has happened is a sunk cost, we care about attribution so we can create more predictable future outcomes.

I absolutely philosophically agree - “we’re all in this together”. How do you navigate conversations when it’s time to discuss what’s working, what’s not, where to invest, where to pull back - holistically across the GTM org?

Measure channels vs teams then it’s attribution not credit - eg inbound, outbound, partners etc

???? is built together.?mktg+sales

Precision is not the same as accuracy

We talk about it being "Smarketing" at my current co -- Sales+Marketing. I also like "Rev Team"

of course you want to track lead source to optimize your channels and investment. What is important is to avoid reporting it at the top level and to avoid the mentality of "This is what marketing created vs this is what sales created"

How do you align on role clarity when you’re stating both teams should be supporting full buyer & customer journey

we talk about random acts of marketing all the time! we also deal with "the good idea fairy" trying to reign that in ??

The point re: too many metrics is so imp. Saw the downside of it when I joined my role:

I love how this defines the difference between pipeline activities and justifies the TOFU and brand activity that’s not as easily measured

If you are truly united as one team, YES 100% marketing should be part of kickoff

Love these - but I am a believer in fewer metrics are better - what are the key causal factors in driving the business?

Having a strong POV on the “how” and your Marketing OS is a must as a marketing leader.

In my experience when you have good pipeline but bad revenue, you need to revisit your pipeline quality including ICP definition, SDR qualification, and stage definition

In case she doesn't get to it, some of the tools in Leslie's tech stack to support this include FullCircleCRM, LeanData, RingLead, PowerBI, Drift and Integrate

basically marketing isn't?a "Source" - it's either contributing to the pipeline/bookings or not

Seems like it kinda breaks the account and multi-buyer group principles if an individual is the basis for measurement.

it’s not measuring the individual, it’s measuring ALL the individuals

MarCom needs to be part of the Strategic Marketing Plan from the beginning instead of the end! Totally Spot on knowing the Channel mix up front, know where to find your customers also sits with the MarCom team.

Sales is also sick of the tug of war of credit

“response”: Account Engagement (pre or post-opportunity): One or more people in a target account engaged in a measurable way which leads to a Campaign response from a known person (Lead or Contact) in SFDC. These campaign responses may have occurred either before or after the creation of an opportunity but must be prior to opportunity close.

Sales doesn’t like fighting about credit any more than we do. But we’ll all continue doing it unless we give everyone a better language and model for talking about it. This slide does that.

One challenge we have is a bunch of AEs acting like Inside Sellers / Marketers - they’re in send tons of email / do Zoom calls mode.?Makes Campaign responses tough.?We call this “Covid Cave” mode for sales.

It makes sense to me that you can maintain autonomy around keeping attribution conversations within the marketing walls as long as you’re in alignment with ELT on targets and then pacing against that.

Here is Leslie's full deck in the Slack: https://b2b-cmo-roundtable.slack.com/archives/CCVFR389K/p1683894084401789

Questions = engagement — I’ll take that all day.

80% of our customers don’t have data in the big data firms.. too small ??

Exposing target accounts “engaged” and contacts per account have been HUGE in building stronger ties between marketing <> sales.

Contribution vs. attribution- excellent....

Any time my team says “we brought this deal” during a QBR I cringe. Totally agree with “contribution” and “assist” terminology.

Love these principles, issue is getting buy in from Exec levels - generally they agree 'in principle' but putting into practice is the difference.

These are all great, need CRO to be your partner and agree to all of these. Luckily my last few heads of sales and ceos agreed

I seriously had the CFO send me a file this week with the net new revenue gained through client acquisition via the new logo team (vs. all GTM strategies and sales teams) to cost of marketing and the sales team (Total comp).?I responded with a question of NRR, LTV vs. CAC and COGS and the furrowed brow on that side was a big red flag.?My chartered accountant father would be proud.

Need to set these up in the first month of joining an org — super hard to get sales people and leadership to rethink years in on who gets “attribution”

My CEO insists on MECE ?? (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive); Sales and Marketing are well aligned by we have a partner team who wants “credit” for every partner referral

Similar aligned needed with product leadership: lots of “beliefs” that “the entire world is the TAM for xyz new product”. and a”bc competitor is probably reaching them all better than us..”

If marketing owns BDRs - I would argue that that even the operational KPIs should be internal to marketing. Just report on opps/pipelne etc

Metrics can be parsed into “activity” /tactical with marketing only, results/outputs (leading indicators,) and Impacts — c-suite only sees output/impact metrics

in our business, the Salesforce Campaign is the ultimate source of truth. Campaigns have respondents. Respondents belong to accounts. Accounts have deals.

Yes, but its hard to measure responses from all the people from the account (outside of the contact attached to the opp’ty)

Agree. Salesforce Campaign Influence requires someone to manually add opp roles. We use Bizible which takes that problem away.

I also recommend always referring to this stuff as “trackable contribution” — remind your CEO/board that there’s a whole universe of marketing influence that simply can’t be tracked in Salesforce

I don’t ever report on a campaign or sourced pipeline.

Precise is NOT equal to accurate

the Marketing Team are the ones hardest to convince that we don’t need tons of attribution.

We use the 100% of the pipeline value per deal also eg your 100k example, interestingly that means in Q1 for example marketing contribution was 96% of all pipeline for new and expansion.

Had to convince the CFO we don’t need to attribute a win or pipeline per channel or per specific campaign

I am curious about how a centralized Analytics/Ops team works.?I can’t imagine not having Marketing Analytics not in Marketing.

A single touch point with a single person at any time?— > marketing contribution?

So I gather, a website-generated lead would not "count" toward Marketing for this approach??(e.g. Sales says they or a partner were already talking to the account before the website lead was generated).

It puts everyone on the SAME TEAM

if you use something like Bizible you don’t have to do that manually. Any contact w/ the account will have their touchpoints linked.

One team, one goal….REVENUE.

Getting buy in - is a reverse game here.?Do they buy into you and this method vs. you buying into the old way!!??TRUST ME, I’m an expert to drive revenue.

It's like trying to say customer renewals or a former customer that went to a new company and reached out are based on the sales team. Why make that assumption?

If you do a win-touch analysis with sales VPs and they can confirm the touchpoints are real (“Oh yeah, we did meet this person at that event!”) they will start to trust.

Show them 3 deals each quarter and open the touchpoints

The only reason the sale person met the account at an event is because marketing paid for them to be there!!!?Thus, marketing contribution.

I have used a similar model at the last two companies and it was a game changer for pipeline growth and cross-functional collaboration.

Love that you’re tracking renewal too

Making all this work requires a solid tech stack - silly little stuff like - is the Lead/Oppty source field in Salesforce write once, etc matters.?At a prior company we had AEs who were struggling rewriting it to show they generated things that weren’t.?I left there.

REV OPS is king/queen!!!

We need AEs to actually put all of the contacts into the opportunity…

I think the only real way to quantify dark funnel impact is through win/loss interviews. Even that isn’t perfect.

Rev Ops to CMO although acts as Switzerland internally

RevOps at my company reports up to the CFO. We removed all ops functions from Marketing, Sales and CX and put them in to one backbone function. Highly recommend this model.

OK with IT managing SFDC.?But can’t envision a scenario where Marketo isn’t in Marketing.

REV OPS belongs in marketing

Rev ops owns the GTM stack.

We have centralized revops and it’s not working … I have created a marketing orchestration role that sits in marketing.

All roads lead to rev ops.

This is hands down the best marketing session I’ve ever been in. Thank you!!