🕵🏻‍♂️ B2B attribution model

Mar 09, 2022 1:00 pm

Did you know that a customer can have hundreds of interactions with a brand before making a single purchase? (Source)

Yet when it comes to giving credit to the touchpoint that made a prospect convert, many B2B marketers would zero in on the landing page the lead converted on. They usually overlook all the social media posts, emails, ads, and site pages, which also influenced their buying decision.

Truth is, as the buyer's journey gets longer and more complex, it becomes even more difficult to ascertain which channels and touchpoints are really creating sales opportunities.

That’s where attribution modeling comes into play.

If you're interested in learning more about attribution modeling, this newsletter comes in handy as it uncovers some of the cleverest techniques used by Nick Wentz and his team at Clearbit.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

How to score leads based on intent and personalize marketing activities to generate opportunities?
Clearbit’s approach to lead scoring
A real example of the buying journey of one of our recent clients and an overview of how we attribute deals at Fullfunnel.io

Before we dive in, here’s a quick update on our upcoming summit.

As announced, you can sign up for the summit for free but the recordings are sold for $97.

Just so you know, we decided to donate to Ukrainian families all the money we will make from selling those recordings.

So, in case you want to invest in your education while supporting Ukraine, this could be a great avenue.

These are the seasoned marketers you’ll learn from.

You can buy the all-access pass here.

TRENCHES JOB BOARD

CELONIS is hiring a Business Development Representative

Here are some of the things you can expect to do:

Work as Celonis' first step in the sales cycle and discover new business opportunities in your industry;
Understand accounts’ needs and effectively communicate how Celonis will meet those needs while ensuring 100% satisfaction with all customers;
Use the best channel out of Celonis' multichannel approach to address new prospects.

Learn more about this offer and apply here.

FILEBASE IS HIRING A SENIOR DIGITAL STRATEGIST (REMOTE), $75-125K

Here are some of the things you can expect to do:

Develop, test, and iterate on the company's digital content marketing strategy;
Work collaboratively with other departments to create a regular cadence of content for lead generation (ebooks, webinars, blog posts, etc);
Plan and manage a promotional calendar across all content assets to ensure a high level of activity.

Learn more about this offer and apply here.

Now let's get to the meat of the matter.

How to score leads based on intent and personalize marketing activities to generate opportunities?

B2B marketers can burn a ton of energy and time merging data from disparate systems and tying specific actions to close deals or waiting for certain actions based on their likelihood to result in future conversion events. While the spirit of that approach might be right, it can often lead to missed results, missteps, and ultimately ill-advised investments.

If you decide to invest all of your money and effort on LinkedIn because that was the last touch, you're missing a huge part of what led to that actual conversion.

Case in point: Nick got a friend who used to work at Slack. Their team of well-versed and well-resourced marketers spent about two quarters building out a very sophisticated attribution model. And at the end of the exercise, they still called it an agreed-upon lie.

Why?

Because you can't have full transparency. You just can't have a complete view of everything going on in the buyer’s journey.

So, the learning here is that when it comes to tying revenue to marketing, it’s important to look at trends at a high level of things.

While a performance marketer can spend all day making micro-optimizations, if you do that as a marketing team, you're going to have missteps.

Prioritize ratios instead. Let’s say you are running a webinar or an ebook download. At the end of that event, or after a certain period of time, analyze the ratio of qualified versus unqualified leads (based on your own ICP).

Then, identify the value those customers are looking to get from your products or services without necessarily talking to them. Here are two tips you want to consider.

Tip #1: Ask direct questions like what problems are you trying to solve?

Sometimes you’ll get straight answers and sometimes you’ll get a jumble of letters because people are just trying to get through the form.

That’s why you need to apply the second tip.

Tip #2: Keep your forms as simple as possible. The more fields you remove, the more your conversion rate goes up, and the more qualified leads you're likely to generate.

At Clearbit, their attribution system is at a point where they have a pretty comprehensive view of a customer's journey. They can understand and tie specific engagements and actions to a lead object.

All of this information and context are super important in making sure that the sales reps have the right information accessible to them. That way, they know what might be the most interesting things to leverage during a sales call or a demo.

Clearbit’s approach to lead scoring

1- Technology

At Clearbit, they use Madkudu for scoring. It makes it easy to identify leads based on demographics and B2B attributes. You can then tie that to your customer base and create a kind of likelihood to a purchase model.

It’s at 95% confidence. Meaning they’re able to identify an incoming lead and check how similar that profile is to the customers closed already.

Furthermore, deanonymize your site traffic, leverage qualified trackers, and check which accounts are visiting your website, where are they coming from, why do they meet your ICP, and what marketing activities, channels, and messaging drove them to your site.

Use those insights to inform your future investments.

2- Segmentation

What are the target segments that you have and what are those target segments viewing on your website or your other web properties?

Which sources or channels were most successful or most effective in driving those target segments to the key pages you care about?

What solutions are those target segments interested in? Here, it's very possible that you have a suite of products and multiple target segments and each one might fit into a different product or a different solution. So, what you want to do is to measure the ratio of qualified leads and look at where qualified traffic is coming from.

3- Pure qualitative feedback

One other signal marketers like to use at Clearbit is having conversations with their sales reps and customer success managers.

What are those conversations with customers looking like?
What are the friction points?
Where do those conversations get held up?
How informed are the leads and prospects that come in and have those conversations?

The answers to these questions definitely say a lot about how well marketers are doing their job, and of course, it gives them a better picture of what to improve.

Quick wrapup: In a nutshell, Clearbit’s marketers know while downloading an e-book is a really important step in the customer life cycle, it's not the last touch converting event. In other words, it's not the event that is necessarily going to lead to a sales conversation.

III- A real example of the buying journey of one of our recent clients

B2B companies that develop attribution models the same way as DTC brands are making a HUGE mistake. The last touchpoint that led to filling in the demo request form doesn't give you a holistic view of the real buying journey.

And if you are going to double down on it, you'll definitely waste money.

Here is a real example of the buying journey of one of our recent clients.

1. A marketer attends one of our webinars

2. He started following Andrei and Vladimir on LinkedIn

3. The marketer learns about our community and joins

4. He saw our latest case study and shared it with the CMO

5. The CMO checks it out and thinks they would love to implement a similar framework.

6. Vladimir connected with the CMO and asked what she thought about the case study.

7. The CMO saw the message, remembered the case study, but decided it wasn't the right time and ignored Vlad's follow-up.

8. Then the CMO started seeing our posts on Linkedin but never engaged. Also, she reads regularly our newsletter.

9. The CMO saw a post about our Full-Funnel B2B Marketing Summit and recommended her marketer to sign up.

10. The marketer attended our session about full-funnel marketing planning.

11. The marketer shared some slides with our framework with the CMO.

12. The CMO checked out our website and recognized one of our clients.

13. The CMO reached out to our client and got a positive recommendation.

14. The CMO asked the marketer to book a call with us.

15. After the meeting, the marketer presented the proposal and got a critical question about ROI he didn't know how to answer.

16. The marketer didn't respond to Andrei's follow-up email.

17. Vladimir engaged with his recent post and followed up with the marketer on LinkedIn. Andrei engaged with other buying committee members.

18. Vlad booked a call with the marketer and shared a few more case studies, references, and addressed their concerns.

19. The CMO asked the marketer to check 2 more references.

20. The CMO initiated the last call with Andrei and Vlad and they addressed their final concerns.

21. We agreed to start with a simple audit and planning engagement.

22. After the engagement, she signed up for a long-term contract.

Some strategic questions that help us attribute deals in the CRM

1. How did you first hear about us?

2. What info did you collect about us?

3. What influenced your decision-making process?

4. Have you attended any of our events/read our newsletter/followed us on social media/or are you a member of Trenches - B2B marketing community?

That way, we get a 360-degree view of our clients’ buying process and the channels they used.

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Adechina D. Odjo,

Content Editor @Trenches

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