Where do your customers come from?

In very basic terms, do you know where all your sales leads come from? Attribution Tracking or Lead to Revenue tracking is simply your ability to confidently attribute the income generated to specific marketing efforts. I.e. Website, PPC, Social media, Banner ads, Out of Home, Referrals, Telephone, face-to-face (or virtual) networking or some other channel. For B2B companies and marketing agencies alike, this is a critical measure; to know what is driving your sales in hard data terms and not just gut feelings.

Lead to Revenue Attribution Models

There are a number of lead to revenue attribution models, but for us they boil down to two basics:-

When a prospect first engages with a brand (the first-touch), and;
What made a prospect Sales Ready - The touch points immediately before a prospect entered the sales funnel (Marketing Qualified Lead - MQL).

First Touch Attribution

With first-touch attribution, we’re measuring what first got a prospect interested in the brand. This could be PPC, Social Media, Organic Search, Inbound Telephone Call, display advertising, social media, etc. What we’re measuring is the success of your various tactics and strategies at raising awareness. This is vital to determine future marketing spends - what works and what does not. Critical for marketing agencies to prove the value of their efforts to clients but just as critical for businesses needing to ensure the maximum value from their marketing budget.

Seems simple, right? But it’s actually difficult to execute without deploying a marketing automation platform. This is because you’re left with a gap in your data between a prospect’s first engagement (the first touch) and the moment they turned into a marketing-qualified lead. If you’re not tracking users on a granular basis, you can lose track of individuals or are suffering from Attribution Leakage and that means you’ll find it difficult to repeat successful campaigns or curtail unsuccessful ones.

The MQL Attribution Model

MQL lead attribution measures what got the prospect to convert – in other words, what made them a “qualified lead.” The campaign messaging, webpages visited, assets downloaded, company size, market vertical. This draws a more direct path down to the sales funnel and forms the basis of a Marketing Qualified Lead. In your alignment discussions between Marketing and Sales, you will have previously agreed what an MQL or sales ready lead looks like. Creating an MQL is about a prospect’s interest changing to a buying intent and ultimately a sales conversion.

Attribution Leakage

As well as considering all the places you can accurately measure a First Touch point, you should brain-storm all the places you are not currently tracking. ActiveDEMAND, a cloud-based platform can track most of these for you, i.e.

Inbound telephone calls
Banner Ads
Billboards
TV/Radio
Offline events

Networking
Trade Shows
Referrals

Here is where Marketing and Sales platforms must work together. Networking and referrals are notorious sources of attribution leakage but should none the less be tracked in CRM (The Sales persons’ input point) and pushed into a marketing automation platform for nurturing until they are MQL sales ready. And, of course, this can only be achieved with a marketing automation platform that will fully integrate with your CRM.

Attribution Tracking: Data Hub

The most important part of Attribution is to have a single source point for tracking the first touch which is available to both Sales and Marketing. This can be either the marketing automation platform or the customer relationship management (CRM) software. Either way, it needs to be able to accept inputs from both directions – your marketing tools, and the sales team.

MQL Attribution

The MQL conversion point is easy to track. Every click and interaction with your brand is tracked automatically. Whatever the tipping point or events (A form fill + x page visits + asset download, etc) that makes the lead qualified for you, sales ready, the MQL is automatic, no other work is required.

First-Touch Attribution

Without a Marketing Automation platform like ActiveDEMAND, tracking a prospect’s first touch of the brand can be difficult. ActiveDEMAND supports First Touch Attribution out of the box using their forms embedded in your landing pages. For most B2B’s this alone is worth the £180 starting price.

Making Lead to Revenue Tracking Actionable

The goal of lead to revenue tracking is understanding where your best leads come from (i.e, sales you’ve won). This is not just about marketing proving its value (but nice none the less). The real function of Attribution is proving what’s working so it can be repeated.

And the easiest way to do this is through our custom reports feature. Automatically, every day, every week or every month (as your business needs it), you simply run an automated report on new deals. And this report is created using a simple drag and drop widget from the ActiveDEMAND report library. No need for spreadsheets or analysis – it’s all done for you.

Need a hand setting up a lead to revenue tracking system? Or want to generate more leads to track? Make an appointment for a system demonstration with one of our experts.