Running Marketing Campaigns with Attribution and Accountability

Why is attribution and accountability so challenging for marketers, and what are the best tools to ensure both to drive optimal marketing outcomes? Tim White, himself a marketer and the Director of Marketing of People.ai gives us the dual perspective – as a practitioner and as the Director of Marketing of a revenue intelligence platform.

Few themes have been more divisive across marketing, sales and management communities than the question of attribution; especially in the increasingly complex world of B2B marketing. The more people you ask, the more definitions and explanations of attribution you are going to get. Over the last few years, access to data and solutions to help process that data has become more abundant than ever. Access to better data, coupled with an increased need to show a return on investment for all marketing activities, has led marketers to obsess over attribution and due credit for various marketing or sales initiatives; and Revenue Intelligence has become central to scaling up successful initiatives.  People.ai, a platform that claims to drive ‘revenue intelligence across all go-to-market teams’ has been vocal about the need to drive accountability, insight, performance and efficiency across core revenue facing teams. We caught up with Tim White, the Director of Marketing of People.ai to better understand the complexity of attribution in the digital age. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation around attribution and accountability, where he shares his perspective with both hats: as a marketing practitioner and as the Director of Marketing of a revenue-intelligence platform.

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To set the context Tim, how do you define attribution?

Marketing attribution is either the origin of, or the influence towards a specific deal, sale, or desired action.

To measure it, marketers look at all of a prospect or user’s “touch points” and analyze the results using several different measurement models including multi-touch, first/last touch, linear, time-decay, u-shaped (position-based), weighted, or even custom.

Given all of these models, which attribution model should a marketer choose?  

While every marketer has their preferred measurement model, it all comes down to what type of product or service you’re selling, your sales cycle, your access to data, and the story/insights you’re looking to gain from the model.

In essence, the attribution model you choose to measure your marketing effectiveness is defined more by the business and less by the marketer.  

Using AI-based technology, such as People.ai, to assist in matching the right sales and marketing activities to the right sales opportunity makes it easier to determine where credit should be attributed once the deal is closed-won.  

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As a marketer, what has been your biggest challenge with attribution? 

While there are countless challenges with attribution, there are two major issues that all attribution models face: external and offline influence.

While it would be nice to think that your buyer's journey is a linear path consisting of only digital trackable elements such as ads, emails, and landing pages, it’s most likely not that simple. Touchpoints occur both online and offline, on multiple devices, across multiple platforms, sometimes in parallel and almost always in real-time.

The idea of a ‘cookie’ following you around until you see the thank you page is slowly becoming a thing of the past. Marketers need to find ways to weave programmatic digital efforts with offline sales activities in order to offer cohesive brand messaging throughout the buyer’s journey -  and obviously that complicates attribution.

What are the nuances with attribution in the B2B Marketing context?

While there are similar tactics used for both B2B and B2C marketing, the amount of sales team involvement typically increases dramatically with a B2B product or service. This increase of involvement is great for increasing the velocity of sales; but complicates attribution.  

For example, so much of attribution relies on what information is entered into your CRM. If your sales team suffers from low CRM adoption, their activities from marketing events like conferences, webinar follow-up, and other events will simply be missing in the CRM. This missing data can cause marketing events to appear to suffer from low ROI, when in fact they might be a great touch point for prospects, and the sales team is simply not logging their meetings, calls, and emails into the CRM.

What are some typical mistakes marketers make regarding attribution? 

There are two mistakes that marketers typically make regarding attribution.

First, marketers tend to trust their dashboards, when they should be questioning everything. After every deal, whether it’s won or lost, we take a look at every touchpoint and see if the reporting from our current attribution model matches what actually happened.

Second, be able to tell a story. The whole idea behind attribution is to determine what’s working and structure future investments accordingly. Without a story of what’s working and what’s not working, you can’t make intelligent business decisions and measure your marketing and sales effectiveness.

As a marketer, what has been your biggest challenge in working with your sales counterparts?

At the end of the day, in the B2B world, your fate is tied to that of the sales team. If they can’t move deals through the funnel and eventually close deals, there’s no point adding more leads to the top of the funnel.

The biggest challenge for marketers is typically holding the sales team accountable for follow up after running a marketing campaign. Without the help of our People.ai Campaign 360 marketing tool to help review the follow-up (or lack thereof) weekly with our sales team, I’d be chasing down sales reps and digging through campaign sales activity reports.

How does technology, like People.ai, solve for both attribution and accountability? 

With the industry’s leading activity capturing capabilities, AI-based opportunity and account matching, and contact data enrichment, People.ai unlocks the sales team’s productivity and empowers marketers with accurate data for reliable attribution.

Coupled with a suite of tools such as People.ai’s AI for Marketing solution called “Campaign 360,” marketers are equipped with unprecedented insights into their sales team’s activities in regards to a specific marketing campaign.

Now when they run a campaign, they can truly hold sales teams accountable by not just asking about their sales efforts, but closely monitoring the outcomes from those efforts.

As we wrap up, I ask Tim about the one lesson he’s learnt as a marketer. Unsurprisingly, he tells me “Always look for data to backup and justify your ideas and theories.”. I’ll bet you’ve heard that one before! The difference is that as the demand for efficiency, speed, and personalization increases; so does the data itself. As Tim puts it, “Without the help of AI-based tools and solutions, sales and marketing teams will be overwhelmed by mountains of indecipherable data. AI-based tools and solutions will find their way into more industries, verticals, and organizations. Marketers will need to look for innovative ways to leverage these new tools to not to get left in the dust.”

More about Tim White, Director of Marketing at People.ai

With over 12+ years of sales and marketing experience, Tim is a recognized full funnel marketer that strikes the balance between a “real-talk” realist and an industry visionary. He is responsible for strategic demand generation marketing activities including digital, SEO, SEM, marketing automation, and customer acquisition.

About People.ai

People.ai helps sales, marketing, and customer success teams uncover every revenue opportunity from every customer. Companies like New Relic, Tanium, Lyft, Okta, and Mulesoft choose People.ai to capture all customer contacts, activity, and engagement to drive actionable insights across all enterprise revenue. Founded in 2016 and based in San Francisco, People.ai is backed by Y Combinator and Silicon Valley's top investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners.