This episode of Marketing Smarts delves into the world of revenue attribution in B2B marketing, with insights from Revenate Marketing CEO and Senior Strategist Tish Millsap.
Calling on her extensive experience in transforming marketing organizations to be revenue-focused, Tish sheds light on the complexities of revenue attribution in B2B marketing.
She discusses the pitfalls of relying solely on vendor-specific views and emphasizes the importance of a vendor-agnostic perspective to truly understand and implement effective attribution methodologies.
Tish suggests starting with the tools you already have, such as HubSpot or Salesforce, to build basic attribution models without hefty investments.
The key to success is to ensure your underlying data is clean and organized; that's foundational for any attribution strategy.
The success of any attribution model also hinges on cross-departmental buy-in, particularly from sales and finance teams, Tish explains. She stresses the importance of involving all stakeholders early in the process to ensure the reports generated are trusted and acted upon across the organization.
Tish concludes with three critical considerations for embarking on the revenue attribution journey: ensuring your technical infrastructure is ready, aligning business processes with technical needs, and securing buy-in by involving stakeholders early and often.
Those guiding principles can help marketers not only implement attribution models but also use them to drive strategic decisions and organizational growth.
Check out the video for more details, and the full podcast (link below the video) for the entire insightful conversation.
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Episode Details, Guest Information, and Referenced Links
Episode No. 73
- Live date: March 4, 2024
- Episode link: youtube.com/watch?v=c523lPtAg20
- Original podcast episode: Mastering the Revenue Attribution Puzzle: Tish Millsap on Marketing Smarts [Podcast]
Guest's social media profiles:
- Twitter: @tishmillsap
- LinkedIn: Tish Millsap
MarketingProfs resources referenced in the show:
- Back-to-School Marketing Attribution 101: Four Lessons
- How to Build Out Your Marketing Attribution Strategy
"In B2B News" article referenced in the show:
"From the #mpb2b Community" links referenced in the show:
Transcript: Mastering the Revenue Attribution Puzzle, With Tish Millsap
Hello to all my Marketing Smarts Live viewers today. I'm super excited to bring you yet another episode of the Marketing Smarts Live show.
This week's topic is all about Mastering the Revenue Attribution Puzzle.
So, if you're ready to get your learn on, buckle up and let's get ready to rock and roll.
Hey, I'm your boy George B. Thomas, speaker, trainer, catalyst, and host of this here show, the Marketing Smarts Live show, as well as the Marketing Smarts podcast found on your favorite podcast app.
Our guest clips today are brought to you by none other than Tish Millsap.
Tish Millsap is the CEO and senior strategist at Revenate Marketing, a consulting firm that shows CMOs and marketing directors how to connect B2B marketing spending directly to revenue.
She has over 20 years of experience with a large range of marketing functions, including strategy, demand generation, marketing automation, product marketing, brand messaging, and creative management.
Her consulting business focuses on helping traditional marketing organizations become revenue-focused marketing organizations by building the processes, infrastructure, and skills marketing teams need to drive qualified leads and ultimately business results for their companies.
Now, remember the clips of Tish Millsap today are pulled from the full Marketing Smarts podcast episode, and if you want to listen to the full interview with Tish Millsap and myself, make sure to tune into the Marketing Smarts podcast, link to the full show will be in the description below after the live show ends.
Now, in this episode, again, I'm talking with Tish Millsap about Mastering the Revenue Attribution Puzzle.
In this first clip, I wanted to ask Trish, what are the challenges that most B2B marketers face around this topic of Mastering the Revenue Attribution Puzzle.
Here is what she shared.
Tish: It is a tough challenge for a lot of organizations. I think one of the problems out there is that all of the vendors out there kind of have their own flavor of cake on this. When you're trying to ingest information and learn more about attribution modeling, if you're going to the vendor sites and reading their content, it's very much about their philosophy. I like to give a vendor-agnostic view of how to think about attribution methodology, and that's kind of what I'm doing at the upcoming MarketingProfs event, because I feel like it's really important for you to look at things just from what your business needs and your business requires.
The other tip is that you probably already have something in your tech stack that does attribution. If you have HubSpot, if you have Salesforce, if you have PowerBI, or something like that, you already have the tools to do basic attribution models and it's probably a good place to start. Not everybody needs to spend between $50,000 and $100,000 out of the gate to get a tool when you can do some of the basics in-house with what you already have. So, that would be my other tip.
Be conscious of what content you're ingesting and who it is coming from and look at your own tech stack and see if there is something you can use that you already have.
Do you have the tools to do attribution reporting?
Are you?
If not, I hope that the list of tools is a resource for you.
I'm curious, what has stopped you from doing attribution reporting in the past?
Put the answer to that in the chat pane or let me know on Twitter using the hashtag #mpb2b and, of course, tag me using @georgebthomas.
We'll get back to Tish Millsap and her thoughts on Mastering the Revenue Attribution Puzzle, But first, I have to ask...
Are you part of the MarketingProfs community? If not, become part of the MarketingProfs community by heading over to mprofs.com/mptoday - That's mprofs.com/mptoday.
Now, it's time for one of my favorite sections...
In The B2B News - Where we talk about breaking B2B news or really important tips we find on the Google news tab related to you and your B2B business. This week, the title is...
Mastering Revenue Attribution With Dreamdata's Steffen Hedebrandt
Which marketing strategies truly drive precious sales? As a B2B marketer, you always have this question on your mind.
Revenue attribution is an answer you may not have considered. It shows how your potential customers navigate their way to conversion and how each touchpoint contributes to your bottom line.
But where do you start your revenue attribution journey, and how should you go about it?
To read this article, check out the link below when the live show is over.
So let's get back to Tish Millsap and her Marketing Smarts podcast episode.
In this clip, I wanted to ask Trish, ho can B2B marketers get started, how long it takes to get started, and what we need to pay attention to along the way.
Here advice is golden, so take a listen.
Tish: It certainly can be challenging. A lot of these vendors will say, "I can have you up and running in 30 days," or something like that. That is true, they're not saying something that isn't true, but only if your underlying data is clean.
That is probably the number one thing that I go in and help organizations with. How do we normalize your data so that when it's ingested by the tool, it makes sense? Are you using the same kind of campaign methodology? Are you using the same kind of form submissions? Is all of this stuff cleaned up and organized in your system? Because garbage in, garbage out. That is probably the biggest challenge that you have to overcome in order to make these models work.
I want to say the other side of the coin, to your point, the yin and the yang of this. Just as important is how do you get buy-in in your organization? Interestingly, this last engagement that I worked on, I was brought in by the CFO. I'd never been brought in by the CFO. It's always been the VP of marketing or the CMO or whatever. I was like this is going to be interesting because the CFO is really focused on how we're spending our money and what's the ROI on that money. He's been a great advocate in the organization to get the buy-in across the board for how we're doing this attribution work.
If you're coming in at this from marketing, the first thing is you have to get your sales ops team onboard. They have to agree to the methodology. Whatever model you choose, whatever inputs you choose, the sales organization has to be onboard or they're never going to believe what it is that the model puts out. I think the buy-in is something you cannot underestimate how important that is. Again, you'll implement this fancy tool, you'll do all of the hard work, and then nobody believes the reports once they come out.
Do you have a strategy for your attribution reporting needs?
Do you have the buy-in you need?
Are you understanding what you and your organization need to know about attribution reporting success?
We will get back to Tish Millsap in a few minutes, but first, it's time for some...
Dope B2B Learnings From The Vault of MarketingProfs Articles
That's right, It's time to dig into the treasure trove of valuable information and pull out two pieces of gold to help you be a better B2B marketer.
Article one this week is: Back-to-School Marketing Attribution 101: Four Lessons by Jeff Zwelling
By mid-summer, a little voice inside almost every consumer—no matter his or her age—says, "Go buy a Trapper Keeper. Get a cool backpack. Find a new pencil sharpener. Go. Now."
Back-to-school shopping is such an ingrained tradition, one might think it should be an easy win for marketers.
Today, however, consumers have far more products from which to choose, and marketers have many more channels through which to deliver their messages.
How can a brand be sure that its investment in television, Internet, radio, or other media is paying off at the checkout counter?
Companies must follow the entire customer path and attribute the sale correctly. Otherwise, marketers can flunk one of the most profitable sale seasons of the year.
Article two this week is: How to Build Out Your Marketing Attribution Strategy by AdRoll
All brands want to tell relevant, engaging stories that create a seamless customer experience.
Through digital marketing channels like advertising, email, social media, and more, direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands are competing for the attention and business of their customers.
It's more important than ever that they develop a comprehensive understanding of what is working and what isn't.
Their messaging needs to be effective, and its impact across channels needs to be measured in a holistic way.
Too often, the complicated nature of advertising and marketing online results in disconnected data among multiple channels, making it difficult to track the customer journey and understand which channels or marketing activities are influencing buyer behavior.
Want to keep learning more? If so, check the links in the description below after the live show to get access to both amazing MarketingProfs articles.
OK, back to Tish Millsap... Let's dive back into this conversation of Mastering the Revenue Attribution Puzzle
In this clip, I wanted to ask what does attribution reporting success look like?
Here is what she had to say!
Tish: I think it comes out in two ways. One is that you are having formal discussions where you are looking at the attribution reports and making decisions on it. You're like, "It looks like SEO is performing really well. Let's go ahead and hire that SEO agency who is going to help us improve in that area. Let's invest money in that," or, "That tradeshow really didn't deliver any opportunities last year that become closed. Let's not do that tradeshow again."
The other part of it is on an informal basis. You're in a conversation and people randomly bring up the tool and say, "Let's look and see how that whitepaper performed. It was on this specific topic, and I'm wondering if we could enhance that, change it, or use it again, or something like that. Let's see what the attribution to that particular whitepaper is." That's when you've really engrained the attribution tool into your organization, when it's being used both formally and informally.
Are you making smart decisions based on the data you are reporting on?
Are you doing things that contribute to your future success?
Are you leveraging formal and informal input, questions, and data, to measure your attribution usage and success?
We're going to get some words of wisdom from Tish Millsap here in a few minutes but right now, it's time to turn the spotlight on you, the MarketingProfs community. Yep, time for...
From The #MPB2B Community
We searched far and wide in the #MPB2B universe to find amazing information and conversation to bring to the masses.
So, first, make sure you are using the hashtag, and second, make sure you have fun and add value to the community.
Then, we'll spotlight you or your crew on the show. This week, it's...
Alek Irvin Public Relations & Content Marketing
His post goes a little something like this…
I'm so excited to attend #CMworld this year. Will I see you in San Diego?
Tell me which events you're attending (or considering) this year. I can update our post if you have favorites you think should be on there!
And to be honest, it was a share of this post from Erika Heald a B2B Content Marketing Consultant | Fractional Head of Content Marketing | Gluten-free Blogger
And her post went a little something like this…
What #marketing industry events will you attend this year? I've already got my ticket for #CEX. And #MPB2B, #MAICON, and #CMworld are three that I am excited to attend (and hopefully speak at) this year.
But you need to check out the description and click that link to check out the post and read or learn more!
Marketing Smarts viewer, I have to ask... are you going to be next to get the spotlight?
Remember, community, use the hashtag #mpb2b on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter and get the light shined on your awesomeness in the next episode or a future episode of the Marketing Smarts Live show!
Pro-tip, it won't hurt if you tag me in your post as well; I'm @georgebthomas on LinkedIn and Twitter.
OK, let's kick it back to Tish Millsap and some words of wisdom around this topic of Mastering the Revenue Attribution Puzzle.
Here is what Tish Millsap wanted to leave us with...
Tish: I think that when you're about to go on this journey, there are three things to think about.
Is your technical infrastructure ready? You need a readiness assessment before you even look at a tool.
What are my business processes that support that technical infrastructure? Is everybody creating campaigns in the same way and doing the same kinds of things? Data likes to be uniform.
The third thing is preparing for that buy-in, having those conversations even before you've gotten a tool. Nothing irritates people more than for you to say, "I bought this tool, I implemented it, and here's the report," and you didn't bring them along on the journey. Tell them early on, "This is what we're thinking about," and get their thoughts up front and make sure you accommodate for what kinds of reports you're going to develop. That will save you, later on, the problems with getting buy-in.
Are you thinking about the tech? Are you ready for the tool?
Are you thinking about your business processes?
Are you thinking about the runway you need to get internal buy-in?
Are you making sure to build the reports that serve your team?
Have you enjoyed today's journey? Let us know. Use that hashtag #mpb2b on whatever platform you are joining us on.
