B2B business leaders, more than ever, are demanding to understand Marketing’s ROI and sales impact better.
One path to better understanding marketing ROI is to expand the conversation to include marketing attribution.
What’s the impact of events, digital marketing, or advertising?
Here’s a common scenario:
– The IT Director attends a webinar.
– The VP of Logistics visits a trade show booth.
– The Marketing Director responds to a salesperson’s phone call four months after the VP of Marketing opens an email and watches a two-minute video.
Marketing attribution is not so easy in that scenario. How would we allocate the influence of each engagement action that resulted in an opportunity with the Marketing Director?
Fortunately, modern CRM and Marketing Automation tools can help marketers attribute credit or influence to marketing initiatives.
Direct Marketing Attribution is straightforward: Marketing sends a relevant email to an IT Director, who clicks to schedule a meeting with a salesperson. That’s a Marketing Generated Lead (MGL) that usually ends up as a Marketing Generated Opportunity (MGO). Easy-peasy.
Indirect Marketing Attribution, also known as marketing influence, involves the scenario above where multiple individuals engage with marketing initiatives. In that scenario, we don’t have a Marketing Generated Lead to track. Instead, sales create an Opportunity from their prospecting or outreach efforts. If the salesperson associates one or more individuals with the Opportunity, marketing can measure how they influenced that Opportunity.
What Business Leaders Need to Know about Marketing Attribution:
1. Marketing Influence provides a consistent and reasonable framework the leadership team can rely upon.
CRM and Marketing Automation tools automate marketing influence measurement, so there’s no need for spreadsheets. The key is to measure the marketing influence trend over time.
2. Associating Contacts to an Opportunity should be mandatory.
This best practice benefits marketing, but more so sales.
Here’s why.
Lost Opportunities vastly outnumber Won Opportunities in most organizations. Compelling salespeople to associate contacts they engage with an Opportunity enables the sales leader to coach the salesperson better.
It also provides a treasure trove of information for sales to revisit lost opportunities in the future. Years from now, the salesperson or sales leader may not be in their respective roles, so knowledge of who was involved in the lost deal will help the new sales team revisit lost opportunities – a high percentage effort.
If your sales team does not associate Contacts with Opportunities, you’ll be out of luck using marketing influence.
3. Determine the period for influence/attribution.
Influence measurement looks in the rearview mirror. The starting point is when the Opportunity is closed (won or lost) and looks back a specific number of days.
Your sales cycle will play a part in determining how far back you should look. In many B2B organizations, we see a period between 90 and 180 days. The period for your organization can be longer or shorter, but it applies to all opportunities.
4. Begin measuring what marketing generates and influences versus what sales generate.
There are three options for how an Opportunity gets into the Sales Pipeline – a Sales Generated Opportunity (SGO), a Marketing Generated Opportunity (MGO), or a Marketing Influenced Opportunity (MIO). Below is an explanation and a visual.
SGO – The salesperson creates the Opportunity from their prospecting efforts
MGO – Marketing Generates a qualified Lead that converts to an Opportunity
MIO – the salesperson creates the Opportunity on their own from prospecting efforts, and marketing can determine influence based on the contacts associated with the Opportunity.
MGO – Marketing Generates a qualified Lead that converts to an Opportunity
MIO – the salesperson creates the Opportunity on their own from prospecting efforts, and marketing can determine influence based on the contacts associated with the Opportunity.
Final Thoughts
The topics of Marketing Influence and Marketing Influenced Opportunities (MIOs) are not new, but many B2B marketers have not yet begun to measure influence. One of the reasons is that it requires quite a bit of sustained work to get it off the ground.
With a challenging 2023 horizon, leadership teams and B2B marketers should accelerate expanding the marketing ROI discussion with Marketing Influenced Opportunities (MIOs).