How to move from attribution to accountability
There is a famous quote from the late 1800’s:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Pre internet, advertising might have included billboards, events, newspaper ads, sponsorships, editorials, TV and radio ads.
When the customer walked through the door you had no idea which of these, or which combination of these led the customer to that point - there was no attribution.
Marketers would try to solve that with unique phone numbers, discount codes or post office boxes linked to specific campaigns.
The internet brought attribution
Digital marketing made it much easier to make these links.
Paid advertising on Google or Facebook provided a direct link between the ad spend, the click, and the resulting purchase.
A web visit “cookied” an anonymous user who was then identified later when they downloaded an ebook.
An SDR or MDR tagged themselves to an inbound call, linking their activity to the resulting opportunity.
Attribution drives short term behaviours
Optimising for attribution has three big issues:
It focuses on the short term results. It encourages marketers to focus on the analytics they will be presenting to leaders around this day, week or month’s activities.
Longer term strategies like brand, partnerships, or customer experience don’t carry the same attribution so are more difficult to prove value from.
As buyers become immune to the continual onslaught of tracked emails, web forms and cold calls marketers need to rebuild their skills in low/no-attribution channels.
It focuses on the last step. When a consumer walks through the car dealer’s showroom door they have probably seen 20 TV adverts, read three auto magazines, a newspaper review, spoken to friends and finally received a flyer from the dealer through their letter box. “How did you hear about us?” asks the dealer. “I got this flyer”
Attribution focuses on a single step being the action that created the opportunity, when the reality is it is the culmination of many steps.
Even with multi-step attribution, there is no inclusion for the dark funnel - word of mouth, private Slack communities, third party events and blogs - all critical steps in a buyer’s journey.
It encourages siloes. Attribution is selfish in its nature.
This is marketing’s lead. This was the SDRs great work. This was the AE’s prospecting activity. Attribution pits your teams against each other to claim the effort of generating a lead, when we know it is the combination of multiple touch points.
Focus on accountability
Instead of focusing on attribution and who gets to ‘claim’ a lead focus your revenue functions on accountability for your revenue metrics.
As a unified revenue engine, we need to bring revenue in:
New customers
ARR/MRR and one off services fees
Upsell/Cross-sell
Renewals (and lack of churn)
And we need to spend money on our revenue generating activities
Employees (salaries and commissions)
Systems
Data
Advertising
Partnerships
The gap between these two drives our profitable, scalable growth.
Each function - Marketing, Sales and Customer Success need to be accountable for the success of the entire revenue engine, instead of focusing on the attribution to their own function.
As a revenue leader you’ll want to construct a compensation model for your leaders and their teams that breaks them out of their own silo and has them considering what happens before or after their part of the process.
Let’s take a simple view of this.
At each step of the process, provide an element of compensation around what the next team is responsible for.
Marketing is compensated not just on MQLs, but on bookings
Sales is compensated not just on bookings but on churn
Customer Success is compensated not just on churn, but on the pipeline created for newly released products
The immediate reaction will be one of rejection,
“That’s not fair, I have no control over what happens once we hand over to the next team.”
“The deal was good when I had it”
“I can’t control if the customer changes their mind later on”
You can smile when you hear these. This is your siloes in action and exactly why you are driving this accountability into your teams.
This is real life! There are plenty of people who’s compensation is tied to activities beyond their control - you as a revenue leader. The CEO. Shareholders. Anyone with a pension. A home owner.
Having implemented this into your compensation model, you’ll start to see teams work out how to turn the system to their advantage.
Instead of just throwing event attendees into the MQL pot and patting themselves on the back, marketers will work more closely with their sales partners to ensure they have the right content, branding, proposals, case studies, events that actually drive customers to a winning decision.
Instead of closing poorly fitting customers that are difficult to onboard and then churn, sellers will be more selective and ensure they close the right customers and provide the best handover possible to the onboarding and customer success teams.
Instead of focusing purely on a customer success plan your CSMs will communicate what they learn back to your marketing team around the value customers are actually getting from the product and the problems they are dealing with that could lead to opportunities for the new products being released.
Now instead of attribution driven siloes we have a unified and accountable revenue team.
For a real life example of this, read Sam Blond’s thread about how they changed the SDR compensation model at Brex from opportunities created to revenue closed:
Of course there are nuances to this, and attribution doesn’t go away. We still want to know which events a customer attended or what sales content they looked at during their buying process.
But this is in support of your accountability agenda, not in place of it.
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Whenever you are ready, there are two ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue growth.
Buyer Experience Audit - I’ll impersonate a buyer researching your segment and company and let you know what I find. Ideal for planning your RevOps strategy.
RevOps Impact Playbooks - I’ll help you implement one or more tactical processes across your revenue teams - content, referrals, testimonials, adoption and more.