Lots of things are being pronounced dead in B2B marketing, from email to the corporate website, but one thing that is very much alive is the debate about attribution, and that’s the topic for this 2¢… I have an idea..
I heard a fantastic phrase on Dave Gerhardt‘s Exit Five podcast made by Zayo Group CMO Kimberly Storin:
“Marketing can’t be green when the business is red”
Meaning that we can’t toot about how good our marketing is when the business is failing.
And if marketing is green and the company is red, it also suggests we are measuring the wrong marketing things.
In a previous Tuesday 2¢, I talked about how when marketing loses touch with the business, we become The Chief Deckchair Rearranger – as in, we might be standing on the deck of the Titanic and rearranging the deck chairs, unaware of the threat.
We, in marketing, can’t immunize ourselves from the mission.
On the flip side, I had a conversation with someone the other day who claimed her marketing career included taking a SaaS company from peanuts to a gagillion ARRs. I suspect that growth was not entirely down to her undoubted gift for marketing; it’s a team sport in which marketing helps and plays a role, whether you find yourself strapped to a rocket ship or on the deck of the Titanic.
The topic of attribution is central to that conversation and how we marketers justify our existence in this cold, uncaring, commercial world.
The attractiveness of attribution is that our marketing automation tools have convinced us it’s easy to measure first touch, last touch, and the data is all there.
It fits a balance sheet-type model and is easy to explain to the folks counting the beans.
Or, more importantly, the folks handing out the beans.
It leads to targets like “30% of leads need to be contributed by marketing” – in reality, what does this mean? And the beast that is the MQL, that is being debunked by folks like Forrester and Gartner – and we start measuring the wrong things.
As Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face” and attribution models are like that as real-life messes them up. A B2B buying journey is a jagged path with many travelers on it, and whenever the touch was, we can’t say that was the definitive moment of enlightenment that showed them the true path toward our product or solution.
Working out attribution is like an Indiana Jones movie. At some point, our hapless hero finds themselves tied up with marketing automation in a pit surrounded by hissing salespeople and taking to LinkedIn or a marketing forum with a plea for help before the big ball of a budget review rolls over them.
There needs to be something better. I am constantly referring to a former boss and mentor of mine, Grant Johnson, for suggesting that marketing moves from attribution to contribution. In that, we need to look a little broader at the overall difference marketing makes.
The drawback is that this moves us away from the simple (on the surface) numbers game of counting the beans, but I have an idea.
I am a football fan, Chelsea in fact, having been born a couple of miles from their ground.
Football (OK, soccer if you insist), like many sports, is dripping with stats and metrics.
One of those is “the assist,” in which a player gets credit when they pass the ball to the player who scores the goal.
In fantasy football, points are scored when a player gets an assist.
And I wondered if this is a way to measure marketing contribution to a deal – as a series of assists that tees up sales to score the revenue.
Website visits, form fills, webinar views, social likes, event attendance (etc.) are all assists.
We could determine how many assists went into a deal.
Maybe all assists are not equal and are scored differently, but you could create a model that could demonstrate the assistance (or contribution) that marketing made to revenue.
So, time to think of assists, not attribution?
I would love to know what you think, as I will dig into this more….
Fancy more of this?
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I’m a 3xCMO, now a marketing strategy advisor and podcast host at Rockstar CMO. Although, I’m not a rock star, but a marketing leader, strategist, content marketer, columnist, speaker, industry watcher, and creator of ART (Awareness, Revenue, and Trust) for the companies I work with. But most of all, I am an enthusiastic tea drinker.
You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or now Threads! – or listen to my weekly podcast at Rockstarcmo.com
The half-baked thoughts shared on this blog may not reflect those of my employer or clients, and if the topic of this article is interesting or you just want to say hello please get in touch.