The age old question - is that marketing or sales that primarily generates our pipeline?

 

It takes a village. Attribution for leads is an age-old problem.  But I have a proven solution.

When I became the CMO of one of my previous companies, I immediately knew I had a problem. The marketing team used last touch attribution for sales leads i.e., the lead source in the CRM system was attributed to whoever touched the lead last. This led to lots of conflict between sales and marketing.  The sales cycles for the product were long – so invariably every lead was touched by one of more nurture marketing campaigns, even when sales (or SDRs) had brought the lead in and kept it engaged.  So, on the surface it appeared that over 85% of the leads were brought by marketing.  However, when I spoke to the SDR team, they scoffed at the volume (and quality) of leads send to them by marketing.  I knew I needed to solve the problem immediately, to not only get marketing and sales to start working together, but more important, understand the real ROI of demand generation investments.

The solution was simple.  We created multiple lead attribution fields.  The Lead Source field was used to capture which team (and program) brought the lead into the company such as Google Ad Words, trade show events, webinars, outbound calling from SDR team etc.  This gave us visibility into what top-of-the-funnel programs were working. These programs tend to be expensive and conversion rates tend to be low.  But some programs typically do better than others.  So even a slight change in marketing mix here can yield huge returns.  Then we a created last-non-marketing-touch field to understand which SDR and sales campaigns were the leads responding to. We also left in last-marketing-touch fields to understand which marketing nurture programs the lead was responding to?  By adding date fields alongside these attributions, we were able to capture the timing of that touch.  These fields non only helped us get clarity into whether marketing or sales was being more effective for certain segments/regions/verticals, but more important, it gave us a better understanding of the customer journey, as well as the ROI of various sales and marketing programs.  With this data, we were able to map how customers moves through the process and the investments we need to make in the website, content, and programs to make those interactions more engaging for the customers, as well as more productive for us.

It does take a village to make demand generation programs work well.  The right tracking is critical not only for getting the right collaboration between sales and marketing, but more important, delivers the insights you need to improve the effectiveness of your precious marketing spend.

Please let the readers know how you solved this age old problem by adding your comment below.