When we think about revenue attribution, one of the most common topics that we think about is “How much revenue did marketing influence?” or “Where did our leads come from?”.

That makes sense when business leaders intuitively already have a sense of what is moving their pipeline. It’s also useful when brand awareness and lead generation need primary focus. It provides a quick measure of marketing or lead generation performance.

But, this simplistic measure doesn’t help drive positive change in designing the integrated sales and marketing tactics.

And lead generation will always be in focus regardless of how well you are doing it.

So today, I’d like to add to that analysis a more collaborative angle which will help avoid significant revenue leakage too. Let’s try to answer “how can we maximize revenue potential?”

When we look at the question from this perspective, exciting possibilities emerge. We can actually action our insights creatively and positively influence revenue. The conversation becomes more productive, not adversarial.

Let’s look at 3 relevant scenarios today:

1. Did customer actions influence our deal close rates? How?
2. How can partners help?
3. What kind of leads perform well, and why?

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A quick look at revenue attribution

Revenue attribution analysis is becoming a game of science.

Many platforms including HubSpot have the popular first, last, and multi-touch attribution tracking & reporting. As you know, first touch attribution is commonly used to simplistically indicate marketing originated revenue.

As of my last review, HubSpot also had W model, J model, reverse J model, time decay model, and so on!

This space is heating up, and those who are making advancements in their analytics journey are using these models to fine tune their approaches even more. Revenue operations (RevOps) as a field is growing and becoming more data science driven.

With all of these advancements, things can get confusing. If you are just getting started, my sincere advice is to follow the Pareto 80/20 and try to ignore these advanced attribution models.

So, we’ll simply use the linear multi-touch attribution model. That helps us understand everything that is happening with a customer right from ingestion into the system to deal closure (and beyond if we are tracking that).

Keep in mind that the same philosophy can and should be used for account growth too. After all, 90% of our growth every year comes from existing accounts. And the cycle is logically the same. But this is often forgotten when we discuss sales and marketing strategies.

What if we don’t have the data: That’s a cue to embark on doing marketing and sales experiments. Start by selecting a buyer persona and then plan a journey with multiple touchpoints and CTAs. Then refine and improve. Results will follow. It’s not rocket science.

Let’s review our scenarios.

1. Did customer actions influence our deal close rates? How?

We generally look at what we are doing to our customers.

However, if we have an integrated marketing and sales database, we can also begin to see what out customers are doing that are potentially moving us closer to a successful (or lost) deal.

For example, did a customer review our website for case studies, a blog, a demo, partner page, or company page? Did they do so before a sales meeting? What stage of discussions were they in? Did that sales meeting have a positive next step?

This data is invaluable. Because it tells us about contributing factors towards the deal. And then both marketing and sales teams can strategize to adjust the needed customer experience and quality of content. For example, we can refine our case studies, add a brochure, add more technical information, and so on.

A preplanned customer journey helps tremendously if you have developed it for a buyer persona. It can be validated and fine tuned with this multi-touch attribution report.

The result will be shorter sales cycles, and higher conversion rates.

2. How can partners help?

When it comes to partnerships, we generally evaluate whether partners brought us any deals (e.g. partner sourced revenue). And that statistic is often a source of debate between the partner and sales teams.

Here’s how we can change that dynamic. Looking at multi-touch attribution reports can give us more insights than simple lead source anecdotes will. After all, even big platforms such as AWS and MS are touting how their revenue is influenced by partners. Same goes for consultancies too.

Attribution reports can help us evaluate if partners are influencing our deals in a positive way.  For example, a partner solution demo could be a factor in reducing the deal cycle time, or perhaps a joint presentation is helping the deals push through, or reactivating a dormant deal.

Since HubSpot brings both sales and marketing campaign information together under a unified view, such insights are easily generated.

Once we know what’s happening, then the right teams can come together to create the right experiences. To better enable this, look at the partner maturity model I created for better partner mobilization.

3. What kind of leads performed well, and why?

The lead source is a very contentious data field in any CRM. In many ways, it’s a psychological win for whoever owns the data inside it. Unless, there’s too much of it, in which case it quickly pivots towards unhealthy adversarial discussions.

By adding “why” to the performance of a deal, we can come up with a better way to use the lead source.

For example, we may find that referrals or events are typically leads that convert into successful deals. We may analyze further and find that leads from events we actually spoke to, or leads touched by webinars on technical topics have a better chance of conversion. We may also see that relevant nurturing within 2 weeks of the lead being generated from a particular source led to higher close rates (or other favorable outcomes).

Now that we are drilling down one more level, you can probably see how the lead source need not be vital on it’s own.

Next steps on revenue attribution 

There’s so much more to this topic.

In summary, the right attribution analysis (not just reporting) yields insights that can get the team working together. That can maximize revenue operations in positive ways rather than proving attribution by itself.

So, turn your revenue attribution reports into a driver of collaborative action. Put in place the right actions to positively influence revenue growth.

• If you are early in the game, then get started by selecting a buyer persona and planning an integrated sales and marketing journey. That alone will help you drive up growth.
• If you have been doing this for a while, then it’s time to start aggregating and looking at the data. Then refine and experiment again.

If you’re looking for a platform, then review how HubSpot can help you better integrate sales, marketing, and customer service. If you are a small team, then the HubSpot CRM starter bundle is a good option to consider. But it’s fairly limited so don’t think of it as a way to try the platform out.

As always, to discuss how to set up an integrated marketing and sales system that enables this, set up a free discovery call.