What marketing attribution means to the sales number

Most B2B organisations know that filling their sales pipeline is no longer quite as easy as it used to be. Or maybe our memories come with the benefit of hindsight and rose-tinted glasses.

Looking back though, there were times when it was possible to measure sales performance as a direct result of marketing efforts. But that was in the days when there were fewer marketing and advertising channels and a more-or-less straight-line measurement between marketing action and sales performance. A simple example of this is redemption coupons in magazines (remember them?)

Although still a valid approach today - lose the 'snip' and replace it with a QR code - there’s way more data and channels to go at and you're vying for attention in an overwhelmingly crowded content marketplace.  You can see already, it's difficult to fully comprehend what you're actually getting for your demand-generation dollar and importantly, what it's doing for your revenue number.

Safe to say, customer acquisition is a complex affair.  Evaluation of a successful outcome needs to be viewed over months, or longer depending on the complexity and size of the deals in question.  Stop-start, one-and-done, single attribution measurements should be consigned to the past in favour of carefully monitored and measured methods from multiple touchpoints.  Not easy if they're disjointed and sales teams don't have access to every bit of information that will help them when it matters - when engaging in a sales call. 

Beware #1 'vanity leads'

Businesses spend as much as they can afford on marketing activity but, unless they’re able to assign a true marketing attribution value (cost per lead), they have no way of understanding the value they’re getting from their investment in each activity, or what the total cost is of the resource involved to achieve it.

The whole notion is very complex – especially when you consider that in many B2B organisations sales and marketing operate independently. Businesses rarely have sight of the full picture of what an actual ‘cost per lead’ is and how much their investment in activities has improved revenues and profits.

If it’s left to chance and ‘finger in the air’ metrics to gauge success, it creates an artificial success or failure rate. We call these artificial success metrics ‘vanity leads’ as they're of little use to anyone.

Beware #2 measuring only ‘last-touch’ attribution

There are many models that can be adopted to measure performance but, with the advent of Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics and others like them, many put a strong emphasis on measuring ‘last touch’ attribution. This assigns all the value of a sale to the last interaction the individual had with your brand - wherever that lies. The danger here is to overstate the importance of this single interaction without taking into account any other interaction or exposure that has happened elsewhere.

If we take the case of PPC, there’s a finite supply of advertising slots that relate to particular searches on Google, Facebook and LinkedIn. Not only does this push up the cost of attribution, but ‘last-touch’ reporting leaves sales teams high and dry when making a call, as they have no information beyond the reported 'click' to inform a meaningful conversation.

Calculating marketing attribution

When working out a ‘conversion’ it’s a result of a cumulation of scores arising from engagement with multiple ‘touch points’. These conversions can come from customers past, present or future and be a result of a broad range of interactions collated from digital and non-digital touchpoints - email, social, events, articles, press, PR, ads and so on. The entire possibility a potential buyer has to experience a brand.

The leads are weak!

Today, if you don’t have the tools, capability, or resources to understand these buyer engagement journeys and touch points fully, you'll never have the information to adequately measure performance which justifies the expenditure. Basing successful outcomes on a single point in time – such as attendees at an event or clicks on an email, is only of limited use to sales leaders.  This makes them less likely to see them as valid leads and so are reluctant to put valuable resources into following up.

Lead apathy

This is when “lead apathy” occurs.  Sales don’t believe the in the value of the lead they’ve been passed and so only pay it cursory notice while they carry on doing things they do see value in.

If immediate interest isn't determined leads may be returned to marketing nurture, but more often end up on the discard pile.  The danger here is, just because they aren't ready yet, doesn't mean they will never be ready.  

Worse still, is when marketing budgets aren't directly linked to sales revenue numbers.

What marketing attribution should mean to the sales number

Every interaction has a monetary value which should be assigned to a cumulative “cost per lead”.  This allows you to figure out how many of marketing leads are needed to convert to orders by working through metrics around deal size, conversion ratios and sales cycles.

If marketing teams don’t build this calculation into their budgets they will never be able to measure their performance, least of all accurately report it to the business.

Let's not forget the cost of 2-tier sales channels

By adding partners into the mix to create demand, calculating the cost per lead becomes more complex and disappears further towards the horizon.

Sales performance and the last mile

No seasoned sales professional wants to spend hours on end doing what they’d deem to be cold-calling when they don’t have the right information to be able to open a warm conversation.

Their job is to get as close to a new deal as quickly as possible whilst allowing them to also focus on selling more to their existing accounts and renewals.

Counting the cost per lead - especially in a downturn

Generating net new business is different from how account managers leverage existing accounts using cross-sell and up-sell techniques.  Paying special attention to creating net new business should figure in every organisation's sales strategy as the risk of relying on the 80/20 rule is too great.

As such, it requires a different calibre of a team to seek out and nurture opportunities which often come from marketing as virgin leads. However, they too shouldn’t be expected to follow up ‘one-click-wonders’ and be expected to turn in results.

Time to march as one army!

Unless sales and marketing teams are working in harmony, the true cost of a lead cannot be determined, or more importantly, improved upon and repeated.

So what are we talking about here?  A single programme we call Market Activation™ that delivers key components of what we’ve talked about here designed to drive down the CPL and drive up ROI. It supports marketing teams whilst offering sales teams (direct or indirect) everything they need to convert high-intent leads assigned to them. 

Every aspect of the programme is measurable. We’re so sure it works that we’re prepared to back it with performance guarantees and SLAs.  

Get in touch and we can show you it in action for your direct or channel sales teams.