Solving the Marketing vs. Sales Dev Attribution Problem For CROs and RevOps

If you have worked at a B2B company that uses an ABM strategy for their Go To Market, and has an SDR team, you have inevitably run into the problem of lead attribution....

In B2C, or E-commerce, these problems exist as well. Was it the Facebook ad that helped us drive the sale? or was it the blog, or the TV ad? What's the impact of each? It's hard to know.

However, in Enterprise B2B it gets even more complex, as you don't care about the person itself, but the full account. Moreover you must measure lead attribution at the moment it becomes an SQL, rather than waiting for purchase, due to long sales cycles. It's tough.

Maybe one person attended a webinar, a different one stopped by your booth at a tradeshow, but it was the CRO's assistant that sent a demo request after the SDR had cold email the VP of Marketing and connected with the Sales Ops Manager on Linkedin... Good luck with lead attribution! What was the % influence of each action to get the meeting?

In this blog I'll present the fallacies of current attribution models, and propose a better alternative. It'll be fun, let's dive right in!

The Foundations

Let's first acknowledge that attribution is rarely single-source. If a demo request comes in from an Account that was never reached out to by an SDR, it's purely a marketing lead. The opposite is also true. A net new account scheduled for a meeting via a cold call, is purely an SDR sourced lead.

The problem arises in the middle. What if there were a lot of interactions with the account like in the example above?

It's impossible to split the perfect % influence of strategies. It would be crazy to think you can build a model that would perfectly capture attribution to 23% webinar, 18% trade show booth, 15% SDR phone outreach, 12% LinkedIn outreach... stop lying to yourself!

Time-Based Lead Attribution in B2B

The most common method is to have a time-based attribution. This was stolen from the B2C world as a purchase coming from a user that clicked an ad 12 days before, can still be attributed to that ad (especially if the item was added to cart then).

In Enterprise it's commonly between 30 and 90 days. If a lead sends a demo request 23 days after a trade show, we'll count it as trade-show driven lead. If they do it 3 days after a webinar, it's a webinar lead. So far, so good. Until you add an outbound SDR to the equation. Let's assume a 45 day timeline is being used, and let me give you two scenarios:

1st scenario: Webinar + Outbound

A prospect comes to a webinar. They get added to a "webinar follow up" sequence. 3 weeks go by, no response.

20 days later. Account gets targeted by Outbound SDR. A meeting is set! It's been 42 days since a lead came to a webinar... your current attribution of 45 days says "webinar"...

You might argue, 45 days is too long, the SDR deserves credit... Make it 20 days!

2nd scenario: Outbound Driving Inbound

SDR sets a cold outbound demo. Meeting is held. Prospect tells the AE "This is awesome, but we're too busy. I need 6-9 months".

AE offers to follow up and drip content. Prospect declines... "I have all I need, I'll contact you later". The AE doesn't want a deal in pipeline with no next steps in 6 months. Marks it "closed-lost"

5 months later, lead comes inbound via "demo request"... your rule says 45 days... so lead attribution is "organic search". SDR no longer has credit for this lead, which moves to pipeline very quickly. Commissions for the SDR won't happen here.

You might argue, 45 days is too short... make it 180. But that's not really the solution. Time-based attribution is fine for B2C but a fallacy for B2B companies with outbound SDRs.

Last Touch Attribution

To eliminate timelines, some companies have decided to just use a "last-touch" attribution. If the SDR gets the meeting it's "SDR sourced". If Marketing gets the meeting via demo request or form-fill it's "Marketing sourced". If the other department touched the lead, you mark it as "influenced by"... but is this really helpful?

If you have a limited number of target accounts (call it 1500), it's easy for marketing to claim to "influence" all Opportunities. They could email every Target Account every 89 days, and ensure they are seen as an influencer in any meeting scheduled by the SDRs, as Marketing also "touched" that account. Vanity metrics at play.

SDRs in enterprise are more strategic and work 30-80 accounts at a time... so "Last touch" is heavily biased towards "marketing influenced", and the SDR commissions get muddy. Do you pay for "influencing"... if so, why wouldn't your SDRs try to email blast everyone?

The Buckets of Multi-Touch

What is more helpful than time-based of last-touch is to have a few buckets and categories. Let's look into that!

Marketing teams that have properly set up lead routing know that the response time for a Demo Request, Pricing Inquiry or Chat, should be as fast as possible. Therefore these leads fall into one bucket, and get routed with high urgency to SDRs or AEs. [Inbound]

Another bucket is for leads that might have certain amount of interaction with content on the website (read 2 blogs, clicked on "features", clicked on pricing, downloaded an e-book) have surpassed the lead scoring threshold and have high priority, but SDRs should wait 1-24 hours to reach out (give them time to read the e-book!). [Hot Accts]

Then there might be some leads that had little interaction with the website, like just one interaction with gated content. [Warm Accts]

Another bucket might be leads from intent data (Thanks Bombora!), or perhaps you're buying leads from a 3rd party website that writes articles about your industry. [Cool Accts]

Finally, there's the "export a list from ZoomInfo and dial away!" [Cold Accts]

It's not always 5 buckets. You might just have 3 or you might have 7... but if marketing has created these separate buckets, great job! This makes the life of sales development much easier, as each bucket requires a different strategy. Quick examples below:

Working Different Buckets

The Inbound ones require a bit of research to ensure they're within the ICP (employee count, geography, industry, etc.) and a friendly message of "Excited to chat, book time here"

The Hot Accounts, also require some research, yet you must add some "helpful hand" messaging... "John, I see you downloaded X e-book! A lot of people also enjoy Y article and Z webinar to learn more about {{problem_to_be_solved}}. Find them attached. Finally, if you'd like to talk to a {{problem_to_be_solved}} expert, I'd be happy to schedule a chat"

The Warm Accounts are "suspects"... and require you to explain the value and reel them in! Try something like "John, it might not be you, but according to Bombora someone at {{their_company}} has been researching {{solution_you_offer}}. I am off base? I'd appreciate if you point me in the right direction so we can offer some resources to your team"

The Cold Accounts require a pure cold strategy. Plenty of examples here.

Solving the Muddy Waters of Attribution

I hope by this point you know where I'm going. The reason to reach out, and the bucket you got the lead from is the driver of how easy or hard it is to get a meeting.

A sequence about the tradeshow happening in 2 weeks "See you at Dreamforce" is only possible if marketing pays for a booth, so if a lead responds to it, Marketing deserves credit. A "reheat of webinar attendees" sequence where 1000 leads get added would also give credit to marketing as that sequence would not work without them attending the webinar.

The type of sequence used will tell you in which bucket of attribution this falls, regardless of timeline or "last touch"...

It's incredibly important to create these buckets in advance. You can't decide the %s after the fact. As a CRO, I know that for those Inbound demo requests Marketing is driving 90%+ of the interest. For the lead-scored Hot Accounts, they convert at a high rate, and I'd give marketing a good chunk of credit. It's a sliding scale all the way to SDRs getting 100% of credit for Cold Accounts.

Each company should determine their own %'s but here's what I recommend:

The final thing is to determine your decay time and the SLA. Every lead added to Hot or Warm, must be worked by SDRs within 7 days . Once added to sequence, it gets moved to Cool Leads, where it stays for 30 days.

OK, This Helps...But wait....

Once you see the graph you might scroll back up and re-read the examples and say "Ok Tito, I get how this solves case #1. If the SDR picked the lead from the hot bucket after the webinar, and the lead had responded to the sequence, it was considered a Hot Lead, so marketing would get 60% credit... but since it got picked up from the "Cool Leads" bucket, and scheduled through a cool outbound sequence it's a "Cool Lead", so marketing gets 15% credit... nice! I can build a formula now to determine the ROI on marketing initiatives. Remember that your % attribution might be different!

But how about case #2? That inbound lead that came 5 months after their first demo? Would that just be inbound? Isn't that unfair?

You're right. There's one last issue to solve here...

The time-based attribution is not a good way to determine the % contribution of scheduling the first meeting. However! Time-based is a good way to determine if a meeting that comes back after it was marked "lost", should be attributed to a previous bucket... I use a 12-18 month attribution (starting from the initial Discovery call) depending on ACV.

If the first meeting was Cold, and the lead is revived within 12 months with a demo request, it's still Cold. Similarly if the first meetings was booked form Hot, and gets revived from Cold, I would still mark that as Hot bucket for measuring ROI of Marketing initiatives.

That should still not affect SDR comp, which is structured properly for Enterprise.

There you go! You now have a new, improved model as a CRO to determine the attribution of each "marketing initiative" on the meetings generated. This is incredibly important as it will help determine the $ investment $ in each initiative.

Final Thoughts

In the rare-instances that leads come inbound after being marked "closed lost". I always ask the prospect if they'd like to talk to the same AE they worked with before or if they want a new contact. The reason is that many times there's a mismatch between the AE personality and the prospect personality, and even though the prospect might like the solution, they did not enjoy working with your AE... but this will be a topic of another blog.

Now, please go change your attribution methods and make sure you invest in the right Demand Generation motions :)

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