In my last role, our sales and marketing teams were well-integrated under the revenue team banner. I thankfully didn’t have to go one day arguing on whether a lead was marketing sourced or marketing influenced. And i believe being held accountable to sourced lead goals vs. overall organizational lead goals is a recipe for division and conflict within an organization.
I’ve been following Tito Bohrt on LinkedIn for a few months now and have found his series of “Dear X” posts highly informative and entertaining. They’ve really helped me understand the nuances of attribution. Here is the Dear CRO email from the perspective of the SDR Leader:
This email shows how an organization can easily become divided regarding lead attribution. Especially since compensation for SDRs are usually linked to them sourcing sales qualified leads (SQLs) which easily convert to sales accepted leads (SALs) for the company’s AEs to convert into opportunities and finally deals.
At my former company, we used HubSpot to look at attribution reporting. Once our lead mapping was all set up we could easily track lead source to website traffic, organic search, social media, email marketing, referral marketing, etc. This allowed us to look at the lead source and which lifestyle stage a potential customer was in. With an organization that was primarily using inbound marketing we weren’t divided by inbound vs. outbound arguments. But as the company moved to scale and add an outbound sales team, I’m sure this conversation would have arisen if goals were set that were department focused vs. overall team focused. If sales had specific lead generation targets and marketing had specific lead generation targets then who will get the credit for a lead that is “touched” by both teams?!?
Let’s take a step back and understand the difference between marketing sourced vs. marketing influenced leads.
Definition of Marketing Sourced Lead
A lead source is simply the origin of where a lead found out about a company or product/service. For the definition of a marketing sourced lead it would then make sense to attribute marketing efforts to the origin of the lead through a company’s buying journey.
Definition of Marketing Influenced Lead
A marketing influenced lead may originate with a sales team but they convert to a different lifecycle stage in the buyer’s journey based on marketing activity. Marketing automation software will allow you to track the lead source of a prospect and using multi-touch attribution, you’ll be able to see if a marketing activity might have converted a prospect to the next phase.
Unfortunately, when looking at marketing influenced leads you get into lead source and ultimate lead source nuances. If the prospect downloaded a white paper are they a marketing lead source or did they find out about the white paper from an SDR? Being able to track all of this information is key to the success of sales and marketing teams being able to work together more seamlessly.
Example of a Marketing Influenced Lead
Let’s use an example of a prospect that is on an outbound list. They’ve received 2 cold emails but haven’t yet replied or booked a demo request. They’ve opened the email but we could never be certain if they read the email or not. This lead however sees a post on LinkedIn regarding an eBook that is specific to a business problem they are trying to solve. They download the eBook, get a marketing email describing the company’s product solution and they book a demo to learn more. This lead can’t be attributed to marketing solely because they originally got 2 cold emails. I would mark this lead as marketing influenced.
Why Relying on Marketing Sourced Leads Is A Slippery Slope?
The other problem that exists with measuring marketing sourced leads only is that attribution to marketing tactics is not always perfect. How do you track the effect of a webinar on a prospect who then finally responds to one of the outbound SDRs cold emails? Or the effect of a webinar that causes a prospect to click through on a social media post and do more research on the company’s website before converting. I think you get the picture on the sometimes non-linear nature of a buyer’s journey.
Why Are Sales Teams Frustrated with MQLs?
Another post from the Tito LinkedIn Series. Here is the Dear Marketing email from the perspective of a Sales Leader:
A marketing team has ample tactics to create marketing contacts. They have content on the website, eBooks, case studies, white papers, webinars, workshops, blog posts, social media, and the list goes on. Fortunately and unfortunately when gating specific content this can create an influx of marketing contacts based on a specific marketing campaign.
Unfortunately, due to the buyer’s journey, someone that has downloaded marketing content might be early in the problem education phase of the buyer’s journey. They might not even realize they have a problem yet and are therefore not in the solution research or solution selection of their journey. If that lead is marked as a marketing qualified lead (MQL) based on specific qualifications they might not serve the sales team at the moment of lead creation to then attempt to quickly convert them to a sales accepted lead (SAL). They may take more education and more time to be able to convert them from an MQL to an SQL before eventually an SAL.
Multi-Touch vs. Department Sourced
When researching topics like this I’m grateful for the Modern Sales Pros community that I’m a part of. I found an interesting thread on attribution and thought this response was well laid out.
What I liked about this post was to really dig into how an organization maps what an MQL and an SQL is. At my last organization, we labelled MQLs as a prospect that had downloaded or signed up for at least 3 pieces of marketing content. When I read the above, I realize we could’ve defined these better. And while it never hurt to then put the MQLs into an outbound sequence the conversion rate from MQL to SAL was very low and required much more nurturing.
As I was researching this blog post I also came across the article “There is no such thing as Marketing Sourced Pipeline…” by Stephen Shapiro
I believe that companies who will thrive and excel at new customer acquisition will strive for multi-touch attribution vs. marketing or sales sourced lead generation. From a joint team approach, marketing can prioritize activities based on the data that lead to new SALs and activities that can be tracked to be important to potential customers being targeted by outbound activities thus influencing them along their buyer journey.
It’s not about giving credit. It’s about understanding how each activity drives the prospects to a decision. Best-in-Class organizations have Marketing and Sales teams that seamlessly work together using engagement data to understand the activities that matter – continuously adjusting tactics to maximize ROI.
Steven Shapiro
How Can Marketing & Sales Work Together Towards Lead Generation Growth?
Another post from the Tito LinkedIn Series. Here is the Dear VP Sales, CMO, Rev Ops email from the perspective of a CEO (dare I say who gets it):
When a marketing campaign or an outbound team is truly successful they will prioritize discussing the business category and new industry trends before talking about a product or service key benefit. Only then can problem education aimed at a buyer be more effective at meeting a prospect in the right place along their buying journey.
There is a reason why this email excerpt above is from the email directed at multiple departments. When a B2B company has a product or service that solves a specific business problem and your potential customers might not even know why they need you, education must come first and foremost. That education needs to come from all teams including marketing and sales. That education needs to happen whether it’s in a cold call or in an eBook. Create the right content along the buyer’s journey and use multi-touch points to get to your ideal customer.
Want to discuss your current attribution model? Let’s book a time to chat about your marketing organizational needs.
