Turning Touchpoints Into Touchstones: Revenue Attribution in B2B

The delicate balance of customer journeys and attribution doesn’t have to be a mystery, and neither do your number of touchpoints — marketing and sales should work together like a well-orchestrated play. 

That’s easier said than done, right?

Laura Erdem, Sales Manager at Dreamdata, aims to help companies recognize the importance of sales and marketing alignment, turn touchpoints into touchstones, and answer pressing questions such as “What’s led past customers to our product?” and “What will lead future customers to our product?”

The path to a clearer understanding of the customer journey does more than support smoother decision processes — it encourages a tighter collaboration between sales and marketing. Laura has seen this proven time and again. 

In her conversation with Rachel Ann Kreis, VP of Marketing at Landbot, and Jiaqi Pan, CEO & Co-Founder at Landbot, Laura unpacks how she views revenue attribution models and the power of sales and marketing alignment. 

Why Tracing Touchpoints Supports Sustainable Success

When setting up an attribution model, there are multiple factors to consider:

• How are your clients buying? 
• Do they open cold emails or answer cold calls? Both? Neither? 
• Are they coming to discovery calls and booking meetings?

The more you learn about how your clients buy, the clearer what needs adjustment and what works will be. 

“What you — in basic terms — want to do is to find the touches throughout the customer journey that are helping your clients move forward throughout the pipeline,” Laura says. 

In B2B, it can take half a year to close an Enterprise Client, if not more. If you only relied on one touch that helped you get that client, does that make sense? What if it was four years ago, and you met somebody at an event who was the touch that you actually want to attribute it to? 

By looking into the actual data and the journeys of how your clients are buying, you're more likely to recreate success. You need to have the complete data set before you use attribution. 

“Map out the full customer journey from all your clients within a given timeframe, and start understanding, if we remove the sales touches, which marketing touches are the most impactful ones? Which ones are closing the clients?” Laura says.

From there, you can start to figure out if you should put more resources and energy into:

• Paid ads;
• Organic ads;
• Webinars;
• Face-to-face events.

Once you understand those metrics, you can start calculating the return on investment from each initiative in the company, and then you can start talking about attribution.

The “Sweet Spot” Between Too Many and Too Few Attribution Initiatives

Customer journeys are never complete — anyone claiming they can build you one is misled. Don't expect your customer journeys to be perfectly mapped. 

“Even if you've got close to perfect customer journeys, you will still have to use your guts: ‘What's the next big thing that is going to get more prospects for us?’” Laura says.

Laura cites three main steps for nailing down a solid customer journey — test (and test and test), measure, and survey.

Going directly to your customers can lead to sometimes surprising realizations, and you never know how those takeaways could impact future initiatives — sometimes, the least expensive outreach proves the most effective. 

“Customer journeys are also going to change all the time. So the most important thing is to test, but also ask your clients, ‘What's the most impactful part?’ So you can adjust all the time,” Laura says. “If it worked last year, probably it won't work this year, because all of the companies will start doing the same, and the performance of those is going to go down.” 

Constant reassessment and evaluation are part of what keeps a company chugging along, gathering leads, and adapting to the changing landscape.

An Attribution Model That Supports Sales & Marketing Teams

Remember the well-orchestrated play you hope your sales and marketing teams will be? Having the correct attribution model is part of that performance.

Laura outlines a few key aspects of implementing a model that supports both teams.

• First-party tracking on your website: This element ensures that you know each time a customer returns to your website because you will be tracking them. 

• Map the customer journey of what occurs outside of the website: Are you doing events? Webinars? Other forms of registrations? Map them to paint a complete picture.

• Map the customer journey throughout the sales pipeline stages. Build out your understanding of the data. What is helping your prospects move from first touch to MQL to SQL? 

“Map it out so you can start understanding all those touches happening on the website, outside of the website, and which of those are repeating, or at least correlating with, the data that you're moving throughout the pipeline stages,” Laura says.

Map as much data as you can and then start looking into the reporting. The most crucial part is to align internally: What is it that you're measuring, and what types of touches might be missing?

Knowing where leads are coming from helps you know where they’ll go next and informs future decisions around investments across the differing ring of marketing materials and sales generation tactics. 

Clear direction is a steadfast friend in the name of crafting effective customer journeys and tracking revenue attribution. Do you know where your customers come from?

‍Interested in learning more? Listen to our full conversation with Laura on the latest episode of Ungated Conversations, where we dive into attribution models, the customer journey, sales and marketing alignment, and more. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player.