Stop attribution fights once and for all
Stop attribution fights once and for all
Why Sales and Marketing have a collaboration problem
👋 Hey, Toni from Growblocks here! Welcome to another Revenue Letter! Every week, I share cases, personal stories and frameworks for GTM leaders and RevOps.
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In my career in SaaS, the biggest fights I ever witnessed have always been between my marketing and sales folks - and most revenue leaders will probably agree with me here.
And they were almost always talking about one thing: attribution.
Who gets credit for the meeting booked?
Who gets blamed if it doesn’t close?
Was it the rep that sucked? Or was it another “bad lead”?
And I totally get it.
Everyone wants a piece of the revenue, because their jobs depend on it.
Who gets the commission? Who gets promoted?
What part of the funnel do we invest in? What part do we cut away?
This attribution question is such a problem that many fantastic companies have popped up trying to solve exactly that.
But I think this whole debate is flawed.
It mainly tries to answer: who should get paid? Not what really generated revenue and therefore should get more funds.
That’s not to say we don’t need to think about things like commissions - but honestly that’s more of a finance issue.
Answering who gets paid commission is an admin question.
Determining where revenue comes from is a GTM Leadership question.
We don’t have an attribution problem. We have a collaboration problem.
The real question should be how can you maximize all of your demand gen efforts.
So let’s do a quick thought experiment: what would happen if your SDR team reported to the VP of Marketing tomorrow?
I’ve never done the full thing, but I did move my inbound SDR team under the marketing team.
The result?
First, we had a clearer understanding of why leads weren’t being picked up fast enough - meaning we were clearer on what out actual blockers were.
And second, our marketers started to look at webinar leads, their conversions, and realized they can’t complain about it anymore - because working through these mostly useless leads was now part of their team.
So let’s just stick with the thought experiment for a minute longer.
We saw quite some change just butt putting inbound SDRs under Marketing. What do you think would have changed if we did this with the whole SDR team?
Suddenly instead of us vs. them, it’s only “us”.
Meaning whoever is responsible for ALL the top funnel activities now suddenly stops caring about who on the team gets credit and starts caring A LOT about what can be done across the team to get more demand going fast.
This is the mindset you will want to achieve.
Once you go through this way of thinking, you realize very quickly how unimportant revenue attribution for commissions is.
Combining inbound and outbound
Let’s say you agree with me so far. What would that new world really look like? What would that “VP DemandGen” do with all of those resources?
I would take a page out of Harrisson Rose’s playbook at Paddle.
Essentially, it goes like this:
You have different channels and mechanics (SDR, SEO, Inbound, etc. etc.) that can reach one account list.
Let’s just say you’re in the SMB mid-market space, and you’re able to create a good list.
For some of you, that list is 1000-2000. For others, it’s 10k-100k accounts.
But you’re able to create that list.
Yo,u as a top-funnel demand leader, need to figure out (with the least amount of work) how can we get most of those accounts to convert?
Maybe there’s some prioritization that needs to be done. There’s some lead magnets that you need to think about. And overall, you need to figure out how you can deliver your messaging to them.
And someone picking up the phone and making calls to your prospects? That’s just one of your channels.
But back to your list.
Out of your 10k list, I would split them into A, B, C and D accounts - and you’ll want to work on the A accounts first because they’re the lowest-hanging fruit.
You’ll probably end up with 2000 A accounts.
And you know there are probably 3-4 people per account that you might be relevant for.
But for someone to take action, you’ll need to hit them 5-7 times on average.
That could display ads, search, phone calls, emails, etc.
When they inevitably book a meeting, they’re going to list just one of those tactics on the form.
But the ugly reality is, it was more likely a combination of every channel they were targeted with.
So while you will still have some Rules of Engagement (ROE) in place to make it easier for everyone to pay commissions - you will also start realizing that those ROEs are not the same as real attribution.
And since you wanna use all kinds of tactics to target the same accounts - your attribution is going to be wildly difficult.
Separating Accounts by Channel
If you are now thinking, easy, let's just use different channels for different parts of the list…
I’ve been there myself. And I can tell you it’s fucking silly.
You are now making it harder for yourself just to get one side-problem solved.
You can and should do this as a test.
McKinsey does this sometimes to test channels. E.g. increase spend in one geo, channel, tactic etc. and see the results.
But for this to work you need to be a lot bigger and once you conclude the experiment you need to reverse the change and use the insights.
Do not use this as an ongoing tactic to make your attribution easy.
While unspoken, the above sadly is sometimes how sales & marketing teams think they can get along. Not realizing that they are screwing up even worse than before.
So to finish this letter up:
Don’t be stupid about revenue attribution.
Don't get confused that this is really a side-problem.
And therefore, don't optimise to solve this side-problem.
The real question is how the F can you get more Demand?
That’s the only thing that counts.
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