Ruth P. Stevens consults on customer acquisition and retention, and teaches marketing at companies and business schools around the world. She is past chair of the DMA Business-to-Business Council, and past president of the Direct Marketing Club of New York. Ruth was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in Business Marketing by Crain's BtoB magazine, and one of 20 Women to Watch by the Sales Lead Management Association. She is the author of Maximizing Lead Generation: The Complete Guide for B2B Marketers, and Trade Show and Event Marketing. Ruth serves as a director of Edmund Optics, Inc. She has held senior marketing positions at Time Warner, Ziff-Davis, and IBM and holds an MBA from Columbia University.
Ruth is a guest blogger at Biznology, the digital marketing blog. Email Ruth at ruth@ruthstevens.com, follow her on Twitter at @RuthPStevens, or visit her website, www.ruthstevens.com.
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But I say that in B-to-B, these are the junior questions, and just building blocks to the bigger issues. Sure, we business marketers want to know where to invest our precious dollars. But what we really want to know is: 1) How do my prospects buy, and how can I make their journey easier, faster, and more likely to result in a sale for my company? 2) What's the ROI on the sale, meaning how much sales and marketing investment do I need to close the piece of business?
I've been looking into this attribution discussion recently, and find it pretty frustrating. In the purely digital marketing world, marketing attribution analysis actually makes a lot of sense, and the various methods that are being talked about are worth looking at. To summarize, they boil down to 4 general techniques:
Some very good work is being done on this subject by thoughtful and experienced B-to-B marketers. Have a look at the Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics produced by Marketo's VP of Marketing Jon Miller, where he shares the attribution methods Marketo uses for its own marketing efforts. And the slides from a recent talk at SES by Rob Cataford, a very smart analyst at the San Diego agency BusinessOnline. I also appreciate the 5-step "pipeline influence" process outlined by Michael Brenner in his B2B Marketing Insider blog. And Target Marketing wrapped up its virtual conference on Integrated Marketing with a lively discussion on attribution, where I was pleased to be a member of the panel.
My conclusion: A successful B-to-B go-to-market process operates in so many media channels, with so many individual contacts and so many touches, performed by so many sales and marketing functions—internal and external—that worrying about which touch should get the credit is a relatively minor detail in the scheme of things. When B-to-B marketers seek to justify their investments and make better decisions, it's really about optimizing the entire process from initial contact to a sale.
I would argue that B-to-B marketers should put aside the question of credit-for-a-touch for every single marketing initiative. We know that a zillion touches are going to go into the selling process, and we have access to fairly sophisticated lead management systems that allow us to track an inquiry to a sale over time. In B-to-B, attribution analysis should be applied to two more important concerns:
A version of this post appeared in Biznology, the digital marketing blog.
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