Podcast 🎧: B2B Attribution follow the deals not just the leads!
Dreamdata’s CRO Steffen Hedebrandt sat down with The Tech Marketing Podchat host Gwen Lafage to discuss all things B2B Attribution.
In the episode they cover:
Whether too much tracking and measuring, is taking away the freedom to innovate and from creativity
What attribution models can be put in place to prove the value of marketing
The importance of tracking accounts for B2B attribution
Why ‘time to revenue’ matters for the long and complex B2B customer journey
and much more…
Here’s a link to the Dreamdata Attributed Podcast for more audio content.
Transcript:
Gwen Lafage:
Hello. Hey, hey, bonjour. I'm Gwen Lafage. And this is THE TECH MARKETING PODCHAT casual discussion. There's some of the best, most passionate tech monitors out there. They share their stories, their insights, their day-to-day. So get ready, to listen, learn and get inspired. My guest today is from Copenhagen, Denmark. Steffen Hedebrandt is cofounder and Chief Revenue Officer of Dreamdata.
Gwen Lafage:
Dreamdata is a leading B2B revenue attribution platform. And guess what? We talked about attribution. Is attribution needed for B2B tech companies? And why doesn't it kill creativity, innovation, and ultimately brand building? Doesn't it create kind of a sales versus marketing mindset instead of building together? Why do tech companies actually need it? And what are the best attribution models out there? Listen to this episode and see for yourself. Hello and welcome Steffen to THE TECH MARKETING PODCHAT.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Thanks a lot, Gwen. I'm looking forward to it.
Gwen Lafage:
Yeah, me too. Well, we obviously going to talk about attribution. I think this is something that you're an expert in. I'm excited about this. This is maybe a little bit outside of my comfort zone in many ways, because I talk a lot about brand... Had discussion with a lot of brand marketers, but I think marketing attribution or attribution in general and seeing where deals come from has been such a hot topic. The other thing is very interesting to talk about that.
Gwen Lafage:
I have pretty strong opinion and in general, I think that there are a lot of issues with that and with tracking marketing in general. And I feel like companies and marketers spend so much time that it takes away a bit from concentrating on getting those deals instead of tracking where they come from. And also somehow by doing too much tracking and measuring, it's taking away from the freedom to innovate and from creativity. So loved your thought about that and some of the... Yeah. What'd you think about that?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. It's definitely... You can from time to time see also a LinkedIn thread going crazy around attribution. And I think the reason for it is that there's some that just believe it's completely the holy grail of marketing. And then there's others like you who are used to running big brands that understands that one click on a Facebook ad doesn't make a brain or make a very large contract close. So there's a lot of opinions about it.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I think one of the reasons why I think the topic of attribution is interesting is that as marketers, we're trying to convince people to make a certain decision. We're trying to put... Ideally we want a formula that we can kind of repeat. We do abc, and then we get them to buy more. Then we've sort of reached the nirvana of marketing.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Obviously, it's rarely the case that you have any clue or you know all the moving things in a buying decision. The fact is you don't. But what I like about it, the attribution discipline is trying to figure out what is it that I can possibly repeat to grow to like... This is the where we can have a good discussion is that I come from a very much an opinion about marketing is that you do marketing to make your company make more money.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
First of all, you should have an explanation why or a narrative why what you do is helping impact the company's revenue. And secondly, at best you can also have the proof in terms of data that you're impacting your company's revenue. I think it also very much depends on the company type and the company size that you come from.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And you can say you've worked with a lot of really, really big brands and you do that now at cinch, where I've been working more with the kind of startup SNB space where I can say maybe the wallet is a little bit more thin. So the time of your activities needing to impact revenue is probably shorter because the clock is ticking and you're running out of money. And I think this is a very interesting discipline and something I'd like.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I'm happy to admit that navigating the scope between when do you need to do brand marketing and when you just need to do performance marketing is... I'm heavily tilting towards performance marketing often. And I don't know if that's right or wrong. You also kind of become a slave of the things you're good at, and I'm pretty good at the dimension performance marketing kind of style.
Gwen Lafage:
And that's also probably because that's the thing you can track. I mean, in easier way than you can with brand, right? The results are more, maybe visible and more immediate on performance sides. Then when you do more brand activity then it takes more time, it's not as direct response, right? From those initiatives. You don't see those result directly in the data immediately.
Gwen Lafage:
So it's a little bit... In a way it's kind of normal that we go towards what we can track and what we can understand and what we can prove. And especially when companies need to prove the value of marketing, if you get company, or CEOs, or CFOs that don't fully believe in the value of marketing and think it can just be replaced by a few SDRs then yeah.
Gwen Lafage:
You probably need to have a lot of proof and put a pretty detailed attribution model in place so that you can prove the value of marketing, right? So do you think that's what is for, to really prove the value, or is it also for marketers to decide where they put their money?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
That's good observation, Gwen. I didn't have... but it's definitely... There's also kind of a defensive discipline in it being like when the CFO and you have your kind of discussions about how much of a budget do you want to get this year, then you want to have something where you can say to him, "Hey, CFO, this is what you get when you put money into marketing."
Steffen Hedebrandt:
The truth is that it's not a direct correlation, or you cannot say because I did a then you got b always, but the reason why I am really passionate about attribution is that I want to understand where I can acquire new customers. Where can I put money in and then expect new customers to arrive.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
But I think it's also different marketing disciplines should be judged with different measures. And the purpose of them are different. If I can just take us off a little sidetrack here. So for example, I'm a cofounder of, now is called Dreamdata. And what we do for companies is that we pull every piece of digital touch that they have available into a database and sort them by the account that they belong to.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So you get a timeline of all the touches that this account has. We are never ever saying to our customers that we're going to give you a 100% of what happened, because nobody's ever going to get to that. But investing in attribution in terms of data and maybe a tool is about going from knowing 10 or 20% of the dynamics to knowing 50, 60, maybe, 70% of what's going on because at the end of the day, you're just looking for support of your gut feeling.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
That would probably be how I would express what you should use attribution tool for. It's a statistical expression of this is some of what's going on and some signs will be strong that this is a good idea, and some signs will be weaker, but you can do it to investigate kind of your intuition and your ideas about what's going on.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And the last point being that any attribution model applied to what only represents five or 10% of the data is always going to be wrong. Whether it's first touch or last touch, 5% only represents a small amount of what's going on. And I think this is where it kind of, when you misuse attribution, you forget that the data set is so slim, or you have not... One of the biggest changes we are bringing to the table is that you go from single-touch attribution to a multi-touch and multi-stakeholder attribution.
In B2B, you're selling to teams. You're not selling to me or Gwen buying a pair of running shoes where it's kind of, you click the ad, you sign up to the newsletter the next time you send the newsletter, you're selling something. That's a fairly simple journey, but in B2B, it's multiple stakeholders, three, four or five people. It's a journey over six to nine to 12 months or something like that.
Gwen Lafage:
Yeah. And it's like multiple touch-point, right? From maybe seeing an ad or listening to podcasts, reading a newsletter, going to an event. And then maybe the sales team are the one that spent a lot of efforts at the end to kind of close it, who owns the deal, right? But I feel like it's... I mean, I definitely find it very interesting, but I think the tricky part is where... Well, I guess, how do you attribute where the deals come from, right? I guess at which point is the deal made? And I guess it's the combination of all those efforts that bring the deal in. So you can't really say it some marketing, or is the sells, or it's all of it, right?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
It's much more a discipline of getting any touch you have available from the customer journey into one place. So it's not scattered in different kinds of silos, but getting as much of the customer journey into a digital picture. Then an attribution model afterwards is just an opinion about what's important. But the critical thing is trying to understand all the touches along the journey.
Gwen Lafage:
Right. I was thinking that often when you work on this attribution model, you kind of almost create a separation between marketing and sell. Then there's those discussion on like, no, this is a sales deal. No, this is a marketing deal in a way having maybe a more-
Steffen Hedebrandt:
It sounds so wrong when you say it out there.
Gwen Lafage:
Right. Yeah. I know. But when you look at it more, maybe in have a more complex model, you'll realize that it is a marketing plus sales deal. And that's the maybe-
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. And customer success as well. Yeah.
Gwen Lafage:
Definitely.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
That's why actually we were trying to like... So one of the things we are trying brand-wise is to talk about revenue attribution, as opposed to marketing attribution, because you don't do six-digit annual contracts from a click on a Facebook ad. That's just not going to happen. So we talk about revenue attributions as kind of the discipline of any place you have a digital touch, whether it's in marketing or whether it's in sales or customer success.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So even inside the product, you want to have all the touches to make a decision upon that, because you want to stop the journeys that go the furthest down the funnel. And you want to understand as a company, you can only invest your budget once. So you want to invest it where you get the most impact for the money.
Gwen Lafage:
Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense. And do you feel that the company that have been working with... Well, I mean with you or with your company, but also maybe before with attribution in general, that they make smarter choices on where they put the money on. What are some of the trends of best practices? Is there something that you see over and over again? Usually before really working on attribution, we'll spend way too much on PPC. I don't know. I'm just making it up, but are there things like that?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So first of all, what we're obsessed about is the accounts that go the furthest down the journey, to close to won, ultimately. And first you want to look at the accounts that you actually won. What journey did they go through? Sometimes you don't have enough velocity to do real statistics, but it's important to look through what were the touches along these journeys, where you actually want the account.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Then you might take a step back. You want to go as far down the funnel as there's statistical valid proof. Does that make sense?
Gwen Lafage:
Yep.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And if you only have enough velocity at the, let's call it marketing qualified lead stage, that's what you have to act out of. But ideally you want to be... And this is kind of where I think revenue attribution is disciplined where want to optimize the full budget of the company, because you want to give salespeople more leads from the reach sales qualified lead stage, instead of the ones that just reach a marketing qualified lead stage.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And I think this is one of the... This is where it kind of an attribution tool can offer kind of a sanity check to your ad spend, which I think is one of the fastest improvements you get with a tool like ours or others, is that you actually can follow the deals as they progress down through your sales pipeline. And you want to be buying more of those ads that actually go to sales qualified lead, not just a marketing qualified lead.
And we've seen a lot of examples where it kind of the agency of our customer says, yes, we did a fantastic Facebook campaign because we got a 1000 emails signing up to this lead form or something like that. And then we switched from the lead stage to a sales qualified lead. Then none of those actually made it across. And then it's just a waste of time.
Another I think extremely relevant metrics that will help you with this is understanding how long does your journeys actually take? We call it time to revenue, but you can call it lever. What companies know quite well right now is from deal creation to deal closed. But there's a long stage before that, which is all the research that the account is doing. And we typically see that that phase is two or three X of the known deals created two deals one stage.
Gwen Lafage:
That's Amazing. I love this because I think there's like a... I can see an expectation on marketing. It's a given that the sales cycle, right? At the moment they start looking into like-
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. The sale cycle is form [crosstalk 00:16:45].
Gwen Lafage:
Six to 12 months, but still they expect marketing to deliver leads in three. And I'm like, well, this doesn't match up, right? If a sales person takes 12 months to close a deal and you really think about the time it takes for someone to research the company before they even get in touch with a sales person.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. So this matters-
Gwen Lafage:
It's never really tracked properly I feel like.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
It mattes a lot just in terms of budget. If you need to reach this amount of sales next year, and the true cycle is actually eight months, then you cannot start in September trying to impact the year's budget. You need to start a lot earlier. But it's also important to notice when you're in marketing, we're constantly running experiments and you can not judge an experiment that will in the month you make it.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
If you know that the journey is going to be eight months, 12 months. So you end up making the wrong decisions if you don't understand those dynamics of how long, is this the research phase normally before it becomes marketing qualified and sales qualified and the deal is closed.
Gwen Lafage:
Do you feel that by doing this better tracking in a way it pushes to doing more bottom of the funnel type of activities, rather than top of the funnel, maybe awareness activity? It puts your efforts maybe closer to the cell cycle, because is the nature of attribution, right?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I think this is kind of where when you get that... Become a more experienced marketer kind of that. Yeah. Obviously, the way I approach it myself right now is that we need to find every place on the internet where there's high intent for tool like ours.
Sometimes that's an LinkedIn thread. Sometimes it's on a podcast like this. Sometimes it's in Google Search that is easy to measure, but the most important thing is capturing intent. You don't have to measure anything if everything if it just intuitively makes sense for you.
Gwen Lafage:
Yeah. I mean, I totally agree.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I think you're right. Overall, I think it's so easy to steer towards these low funnel stuff because the measurement gets easier, but I can give you a stupid example of something I did myself. In my old company we were running a lot of Facebook ads across all the U.S. and Europe and because we was so eager trying to optimize every dollar spent, I switched off all advertising on mobile phones because people were convert converting on desktops.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Right. That's pretty logical, but most of don't know the numbers, but the consumption of Facebook and the seeding on Facebook today takes place in mobile. As people scroll fruit, they click in and click out. And then the day later they come and buy.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And what happened was that kind of, I didn't feel the impact initially, but then a few months later we didn't have enough leads in the pipeline anymore. And that's when you kind of when you're cut off those... You need to keep stuffing thing in top funnel as well that will trickle down later on.
Gwen Lafage:
Well, because I think marketing of course plays a big role in pushing people on the funnel and making that kind of last marketing mile before it goes to sell. But it also plays a big role before, right? I mean, we talked about intent and of course I think measuring marketing qualified lead is a waste of time because of course you kind of capture a lot of email of people that have no intent to really buy your product.
Gwen Lafage:
But at the same time, marketing should also be there to create that demand and create in a way that intent. So that's when I'm ready or where I have the need, then I will think about such and such company. If I've never heard about them before, I will not think about them. Right. So it's like you need to kind of create that awareness and that top of mind and have this part before the intent is there, right?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I think that's very true.
Gwen Lafage:
And that's countermeasure.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. Because when do you intended is they're going to go for the brand that they know.
Gwen Lafage:
Yep, exactly. It's like I see brands all the time. Right now I have some top of mind, I might not need... Let's say I don't need like attribution model tool right now. Right. But then the day I need it, if I've seen you and your company before even if I don't need it right now, then I will think of you first, right? So it's building-
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Or part intuitive if so if you see somebody else asking for something that can do something like attribution thing.
Gwen Lafage:
Do you take that into account into your attribution model? Like how far out of the deal do you go right because-
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. We don't have an opinion out of the box. We don't have an opinion about how far back you go. So what'd you get from us is there's two components. One is that we connect to all your tools like CRM automation, CS, et cetera, pull over all over that data. But we also give a script to that goes to the website that assigns anonymous IDs to every visitor.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
If Gwen visits... As you being anonymous visit our website five times, we'll keep an anonymous log book of every visit. And at the point of time where you identify yourself through downloading an ebook or booking a demo, we can actually see when was when on our website the first time. And that might be six months back or even more.
Gwen Lafage:
Okay. So you keep an anonymous track, but then when the person sign in, they become non-anonymous from before that anonymous tracking becomes.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yes, exactly. And that's also why we can say something about how long is the research phase actually. Then you can have an opinion about stuff that happened more than six or 12 months before the deal created. You don't want to attribute any value to it, but the most important that's why like I said, it's so important to capture all the data, and then you can apply to your opinion afterwards, whether it's important or not.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And as you as a marketer, it might be that you have like initiative kind of a big play towards certain keywords. We've produced eBooks, we've done podcasts, et cetera. This is actually what I saw in my old company, I went from... We were heavily driven by ads. We were selling a screen sharing devices to schools and businesses, but we were also seeing that we couldn't win the fortune 5,000 companies because there was no trust in our brand.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So I started just establishing a brand and content team where we had two writers, a videographer, a designer, and a manager for that team. And all I had to show for that performance was that Google organic traffic was going up and you cannot pay any salary with the Google organic traffic going up. But what we actually see when I met my two cofounders agreed that it was that all of these pieces of content were quite good at starting the journeys.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And then it took six to 12 months before the journey was close to one. But without knowing how those two dots connected, you just say, a content is nice, but it's they kind of keep a head count of five people producing ebooks or something like that.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
But what we can say is that the very first touch of this account was, let's say this ebook or whatever, and then you want it a $100,000 dollars 12 months later. Then you can have an opinion about whether it's valuable that the first touch was an ebook, but you want to be able to see that the first touch was this channel or source.
Gwen Lafage:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
That was a lot of talk.
Gwen Lafage:
Yeah. No, that makes sense. And that's like... It's somehow about proving the value of a lot of those different touch points, even if they not directly linked to generating a direct lead straightaway, right. It's the lag as well between brand.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And I think most important of all this, do you apply the common sense and use your intuition? We did this and now we feel like this is happening. In many cases, that might actually be true without you having the data to prove it. Then afterwards you can start to inspect. Okay. How strong is the correlation and causality between the things? But a lot of times kind of, I know when we did this thing, months later, we have a lot more deals or a lot more leads than as we thought. That's your attribution tool. That's your own brain and your own intuition.
Gwen Lafage:
Yeah. I like what you said before. And I think that's what I will... One of the learning I think from this call is that somehow this attribute attribution model or putting attribution in places to validate some of your gut feeling. And I think that's the key, right?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Exactly. All the initiatives you do, you want to see if some of them blinks a little bit more than the others when you look at revenue and that would be a good second opinion about what you should do in next year then.
Gwen Lafage:
No, exactly. Perfect. Well, fantastic. Thank you so much for all these insights. And I hope you'd get more people to think about attribution model in the right way and how it can help because I think it's more about aligning team than separating them, right? And it's mostly the entire lens of the funnel rather than focusing on one piece. So I think that's the key learning.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. Now, maybe we can switch it around and you can learn more about brand the next time.
Gwen Lafage:
Yeah. Let's do that next time. Thank you so much, Steffen. And then let's keep in touch. Thanks.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
It was a pleasure, Gwen. Thank you.
Gwen Lafage:
Bye. Thank you for listening to this episode of THE TECH MARKETING PODCHAT. I hope you had a good time. I know I did. If you learn a thing or two, feel free to share this episode and also let me know. I'm on LinkedIn, please connect, share your thoughts and I'll see you there. Bye-bye for now.
