The attribution enigma - why we started Dreamdata
Do you work somewhere in the sales and marketing funnel in a B2B SaaS? Have you ever found yourself in discussions like this:
Sales leader: “We missed our target by 15% We didn’t have enough leads...” Marketing leader: “We delivered 250 MQLs last month...why didn’t you follow up?” Sales leader: “They were all bad leads...we couldn’t sell to any of them” Growth guy: “What about the 85 product qualified leads we delivered?” Sales leader: “The PQLs never work when we call them...they are too [insert your own problem here]”
Well, we have been part of those discussions.
The Trustpilot challenge
Dreamdata.io was born out of our own experience as senior leaders in engineering and product in Trustpilot, a fast-growing tech B2B SaaS company.
We were part of driving Trustpilot forward to achieve high revenue growth, and in Trustpilot - as in many other B2B SaaS companies - growth was driven as a mix of marketing, product and sales activities. The challenge was that marketing and growth were concerned with producing the number of leads stated in their OKRs but often didn’t know the actual monetary value of their leads.
No data - no shared truth
To get marketing, sales and growth to play harmony requires that you can build a shared truth. We struggled to create a common understanding across the business of the impact from the different parts of the organization. This meant that when we wanted to know what drove revenue we always ended up in silos.
This was essentially a data and tooling problem. If we wanted to know what drove our revenue we had to join data from our product and website tracking, from our marketing tracking, and from our CRM. All department had their own systems and tools they used to do their day to day work as you see in most companies. It makes it hard and technically challenging just to combine the data and even harder to make an actual analysis that shows what drives growth.
And so - the enigma of attribution
Where does the money come from - that is the million dollar question! Basically we were struggling with attribution. When we tried to understand how we generated revenue it was impossible for us to explain the value of each team’s contribution. Also inside the departments it was hard to measure what actually had an impact on revenue. In marketing we would run CPC campaigns but nobody really knew if they worked and which ones worked the best. Similarly in the product department we did not understand how well our free product generated revenue.
Oh where art thou magic tool
We wanted something that enabled us to look at our data from a holistic point of view and show how sales, marketing and product influenced revenue. And create a foundation to optimize all areas towards revenue.
We searched for a product that could do this but did not find any. The tools we found focused on only one of the big silos of sales, marketing or product. Or they did not handle the complexity of the B2B customer journey where companies buy products and services but they are represented by multiple users. This goes for all the tools in the consumer space that don’t handle the account concept.
Very often tools that looked outside sales did not incorporate revenue - a crucial component when you want to know if your product and marketing activities are actually working and contributing.
Enter dreamdata.io
A crucial problem can not be left unsolved. So in the end, we built our own tool to handle all the data and to be able to create holistic attribution models and lead scoring that looked across data. That tool became Dreamdata.
The truth about our buyer journey
With Dreamdata we built the ability to analyze the impact of all touchpoints across the buyer journey. And suddenly the truth was revealed to us: for example the length of the buyer journey was a lot longer than what we imagined - more than 12 months on average. We found the impact on churn from the early buyer journey. Most importantly we learned that more than 70% of our new business revenue originated from our consumer-facing marketplace.
No more disharmony
With the insights from Dreamdata, we were able to refocus our growth strategy. We started investing heavily in product-led growth by putting more resources into our free product. We were also able to put to rest those endless discussions that are so common between sales, marketing, and product because we created a way for everyone to see their contribution in the light of new business deals, revenue and churn.
“The insights we got from Dreamdata really drove a transformation of our business. We started seeing our consumer platform as a key component of our buyer journey. We created a common language between sales, marketing, and product where everybody could focus on their contribution to revenue.”
Be truly data driven
That is our mission: we want to make sure that all B2B companies can have deep insight into how their marketing and sales funnel actually work so that they can make better decisions that drive growth. We want to enable our customers to find those 50% of their go to market that doesn’t work and optimise the hell out of the 50% that does.
You might be interested in: CEO Lars Grønnegaard shares Dreamdata’s product story and vision