Going for growth with revenue operations and attribution: Q&A with Drew Smith

In the eternal search for ways to push growth further and faster, marketing teams have turned to data and operations as the silver bullet.

MOps and RevOps functions are springing up out of every corner; leveraging data and processes to enhance performance across the go-to-market organisation.

The Ops pro is looking at how the end-to-end customer journey is set up in the organisation. Mapping out when and how accounts first become aware of the brand or product, how they progress through the journey and figuring out where the faultlines are.

But, with tech stacks growing more complex, data silos are becoming the marketing Achilles heel. It’s this gap that attribution - revenue attribution - has come to fill.

Attribution connects and models data on all touches and activities in the customer journey with revenue. Helping Ops teams access all the insights they need to unpack potential and drive growth.

To help shed further light on how RevOps tackles the question of growth, I sat down with the Director of Revenue Operations at Directive Consulting, Drew Smith.

With 7 years of RevOps and MOps under his belt, Drew has had plenty of exposure to those teething issues that continue to challenge B2B marketing teams.

Let’s take a look at what he had to say. 

1. Would you give us a brief introduction of yourself and your background.

“I’m currently the Director of Revenue Operations at Directive Consulting. I’ve been working in marketing operations and revenue operations for the last 6.5 years. 

Before that, I started my career in B2B technology sales–selling computer hardware and software to businesses and organizations. Then, I moved into event marketing where I was coordinating over 100 tradeshows a year along with coordinating roadshows, customer appreciation events, summits and more. 

After that, I moved into more digital marketing including email marketing, social media marketing, and web marketing. It was during this stint that I started getting into reporting and analytics and realized that I love reporting. I also had a short stint working in sales again at a world-famous auto-racing school.”

2. What’s your current role at Directive?

“I’m currently the Director of RevOps for Directive. What that means is that I run our RevOps practice at Directive. RevOps is super new to Directive, so I get to build this department from scratch. 

This includes helping to grow clients, create our methodologies, identify and nurture partnerships, hire and train team members, document processes… basically, you name it, and it’s part of my role.

The reason I was brought on, and this role was created, is because Directive was being asked by a number of clients to help solve RevOps problems. Mostly things like attribution, reporting, conversion rate tracking, optimizing systems, etc. They didn’t have the skillset in-house to do that, so they brought me on so they could start saying yes to helping clients solve these challenges.”

3. What would you say are the challenges B2B SaaS marketing teams are looking to solve?

“Tons!! Most of them involve data and reporting. Trying to understand marketing’s impact and effectiveness is a challenge that almost every org I speak with is challenged with and many don’t have a good solution.

I mean, leveraging data to boost growth is a common theme across virtually every B2B go-to-market team. But with tech stacks growing in complexity, making sense of that data becomes more challenging every day.

It’s in this context that we see the growth of the Ops space, especially RevOps - which spans the whole go-to-market umbrella. Same thing for attribution tools helping to bring all this data together and unpack the customer journey.”

4. How aware would you say these companies are of attribution as a possible solution for this?

“I think most orgs, and marketers, are aware of attribution as a solution. But, the challenge is that they’re aware of attribution but don’t really understand how it works, how to implement, or how to use it when it is implemented. To most orgs and marketers, it’s a black box, so I think there’s a lot of mistrust in it. Attribution also has a history of some people pushing it as the be-all-end-all for marketing analytics, so people instinctively push back against that.”

5. How important would you say Marketing and Sales alignment is, and what role can the tech stack play in pushing alignment?

“Marketing and Sales alignment is very important. If marketing and sales aren’t pulling the same rope in the same direction, it’s going to create friction in the buying process and buyers are going to opt out. So, it’s best if they are speaking the same language and telling the same story. Orgs can succeed in spite of marketing and sales being misaligned, but it’s difficult and leaves a lot of revenue to be had.

Tech stack can help with that, but more than anything it’s about process. The tech stack then plays a role in the process and in the data that is shared through that process. Without process, the tech stack wouldn’t play a big role, because there aren’t any lines of communication.

So, process first… tech stack second.”

6. From your experience, how useful do you reckon a Revenue Attribution platform can be for RevOps?

“I think that a revenue attribution platform is a critical part of a tech stack for RevOps. It’s the equivalent of a carpenter having a tape measure in their toolkit. A carpenter can still do their job without a tape measure, but it’s going to be a lot easier with one and they’re going to be able to do more if they have one. 

It should be looked at as a tool though. It’s one tool out of many that Marketing Ops and RevOps pros should have in their toolkit. And, it’s not the only tool that’s used for measurement. There are other tools that should be used for measurement in addition to the revenue attribution platform.”

7. If there’s one piece of advice you’d give to a B2B marketing team struggling to drive growth with data, what would it be? 

“Start out by breaking the data challenges into smaller, more bite-size pieces. Most orgs don’t even get started because it feels so big and like it’s too much to solve for. So, I always say to start small and just start stacking wins.

There’s an old saying that goes, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” I don’t propose anyone eats any elephants, but the elephant in this analogy is the big huge data problem that most orgs have. The “one bite at a time” is breaking that out into small manageable projects that are more achievable.”