Attribution for Salesforce means going beyond MQL’s.  It means including all stages of the sales pipeline in attribution models like trials, demos, calls and of course “Won Opportunities”. B2B companies take note: attribution requires a tight integration. 

We are at an historical point in B2B marketing history. Marketing attribution enables marketing teams to deliver incredible value to sales. With this, the opportunity to bring marketing and sales together, and to create a generous competitive advantage, is well within reach. Attribution for Salesforce is something you need to consider.

Many marketers use first touch attribution to identify the channels that bring new leads. It’s a great start, but only a small part of the puzzle. It’s time to take the next step. Connect Salesforce with your marketing attribution tool, and sales will soon love marketing. Who knew that was possible?

Tech integration drives commercial success

Transparency and alignment between sales and marketing starts with integrating technologies. But that is where many marketing departments fall short. 42% of marketing executives say their technology is “fragmented” or “piecemeal.”

Better integration between tools enables sales and marketing to get the best out of their solutions. 83% of integrated best-of-breed marketers rate their companies’ ability to leverage the full power of their tools as “good” or “excellent.”

Companies who manage to integrate tech and align sales and marketing see commercial performance surge, creating 36% higher customer retention and 38% higher sales-win rates.

The stats are crystal clear. Better technical integration between sales and marketing increases alignment, which leads to better commercial performance. But where should you start?

Welcome to Enterprise Customer Acquisition

Most sales funnels are based on some variation of the AIDA model, Attention – Interest – Desire – Action.  But because marketers mostly use first touch attribution, or the last touch model as provided by Google Analytics, full analysis of the sale funnel likely isn’t happening. These models work well if you want to get an impression of performance for the top funnel stages like Attention and Desire. But what about Desire and Action further down the funnel? What about trials, demos, Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs), calls, sales pitches, chats and deals Closed/Won? This is where attribution for Salesforce comes to light.

Bare in mind, reporting to the boardroom is always done from the standpoint of sales, or should we say “Salesforce”. This sells marketing short. Can you recall conversations with sales about who brought in the lead? Did last week’s aggressive sales contacting seal the deal, or was it the steady marketing nurturing efforts over the last two years? Or a combination of both? Who knows?!

Use multi-touch attribution to see what produces a customer

In the world of B2B sales and marketing, it’s important to remember that winning new customers is a cooperative effort. Marketing gets the ball rolling by creating a compelling company positioning and by promoting products and services through various channels. As qualified leads come into the funnel, the sales team takes over and moves prospects through well-defined phases with the ultimate goal of closing a sale and earning a coveted, “Won Opportunity”.

When using attribution software, many marketers stop their analysis at the MQL stage, or when the qualified lead enters the sales funnel. But isn’t the real goal more Won Opportunities? Consider a different approach to attribution; one that continues to follow prospects all the way through the sales stages to the final goal. Use multi-touch attribution modeling to see which content and programs get prospects from one sales stage to the next. To do this requires a tight integration between your attribution software and systems like Salesforce. This requires attribution for Salesforce.

“Integration” means more than just passing prospect data from one product to another. For attribution models to work properly, it also means incorporating selective sales stages as conversion points in your attribution tool so you know what’s delivering mid-funnel results. For example, you may have a sales stage called “Request Quote” where a prospect has learned enough about your product or service to request a formal price quote. Think about this as a conversion and see what marketing efforts resulted in this event. Sure, we all want more Won Opportunities, but getting to earlier stages like Request Quote are also noteworthy.

Attribution with Salesforce in mind also means looking at pipeline value. The question is, how much pipeline value is marketing delivering with their efforts? Are you getting a Return on Ad Spend at mid-funnel stages that is noteworthy?

On one side, you track marketing touchpoints in your marketing attribution tool. On the other side, pipeline phases need to be fed by Salesforce.

If you integrate your attribution tool with Salesforce you can map all the pipeline stages using powerful attribution models. You can run full multi-touch attribution analyses to learn which combination of actions produced a customer. It allows you to take a deep dive into how you built a customer relationship over time.

You can create a log of which marketer or salesperson did what in which stage of the customer journey. You’ll end up with performance figures for all touchpoints and marketing activities, including the most effective lead capture forms, trials, whitepapers, sales chats, et cetera.

Generating more revenue is all about being able to identify the strength of links in the customer journey. When you know which marketing materials are most or least effective in different journey stages, you can start to experiment – removing materials that don’t convert, and expanding those that do.

When Salesforce is integrated with a marketing attribution tool, marketing and sales can join forces and steadily iterate towards perfection in all journey stages. Over time, you’ll be able to plug ever smaller holes in your sales funnel to guide more people towards the bottom of the funnel.

Integrate Salesforce and marketing attribution now

When the right tech aligns marketing and sales, sales people will be handed perfectly nurtured MQLs. But to go a little further, attribution for salesforce is an important consideration that requires a tight integration between your attribution software and Salesforce. 

To discover how quickly you can integrate your marketing attribution tool with Salesforce, have a look here.