The following is a fictional story (shoptalk). Enjoy!
3 years ago...
Mia came in early to demo a prospect she qualified through an outbound call earlier that week. After downing her first coffee of the day, she set up her demo, popped on her headset, and dialed. With a 60% close rate (highest among her peers), Mia was confident throughout. She tailored the features towards the pain points of the prospect and wowed them along the way.
At the end of the call, what else was there to bring up other than pricing. She explained every detail of their pricing plans fully expecting the deal to close. After flowing through her formulated pitch, we finally arrived at the moment of truth.
The prospect was blown away with the demo. Yet, they seemed to be holding back and weren't able to commit at that moment. A disappointed Mia stared at her close rate rankings on her other screen, thanked the prospect for taking the time, and booked a follow-up a week later to discuss.
One week later, the prospect no-showed.
Fast forward to today,
Mia is now accompanied by 3x the amount of account executives and sales has become a more competitive environment. Not only is she fighting for sales, but she also noticed more people coming in early, and when she walks into the kitchen her colleagues would already be standing there with a full cup of hot coffee:
With that said, the company is growing. Marketing is starting to build an established brand and data is starting to become a priority for the company. To fully understand their data, the company implemented the Goliath software that is Salesforce and built-in leads, opportunities, and campaigns for marketing to leverage. It was perfectly implemented (told you this was fictional). To simplify their B2B data, they decided to work with a last-touch attribution model as it was the simplest starting point for them.
Sitting back down after waiting 15 minutes for the 3rd pot of coffee to finish, Mia opened Slack. They have a #deals channel that feeds in all of the closed won opportunities that come into the business. It was the end of the month and Mia was 90% to target with a now 35% close rate, she was pushing to get demos booked and couldn't keep her eyes off of the channel.
As she was about to take a sip of her now lukewarm coffee, she saw a deal come in. It didn't mention that she was the AE assigned to it, but it looked familiar. After opening up the opportunity in Salesforce and doing some digging, she quickly realized that this deal was that same prospect she demoed 3 years ago. It was a DUPLICATE!
She quickly gathered all the information she needed to inform her manager. She wanted credit for the deal which would push her past 100% of target for the month. Her manager took a look and agreed with Mia. Not only did her manager agree, but they also needed this deal as they had an outbound target they were falling behind on, and attributing this lead to 'Outbound' would get them closer to their lofty goal for the month.
After getting back to their desks, they saw a thread on this specific deal in Slack.
"This is from the Marketo conference! They came by our booth, and bought on their own later that day!"
"How awesome!!! 💪"
"MARKETING! MARKETING!"
Mia reacted appropriately:
With a last touch attribution model, the deal was attributed to marketing and the Marketo tradeshow. Not only is Mia not getting credit for the deal, but her manager is also not getting the deal attributed to outbound. The predictable argument began:
"So Mia does all the work, demoing the prospect, showing the value.... and this goes to a tradeshow just because they stopped by a booth and entered a contest for free AirPods?"
"That was 3 years ago, marketing reengaged this prospect and was the last touch channel... I don't see the complication"
"How do we not attribute our teams hard work into this? Our sales cycles are long! Will anything be attributed to outbound with all the webinars, campaigns, and trade shows marketing runs!?"
After the debate, no action items were taken (obviously). The last touch remained the source of truth and Mia went on to miss her target alongside a missed target for outbound.
Out in the distance, companies with multi-touch attribution models were watching on. They smirked while their Segment infrastructure routed information throughout their tech stack.
As the months went on, the company started its investigation into these multi-touch attribution models. Their heads spun while reading about linear, time decay, U-shaped, and W-shaped models. Arguments between departments continued as managers looked to protect their channels acquisition metrics.
Meanwhile, the same prospect that started all of this....churned 2 months into their subscription. And at that moment, marketing saw their churn rate associated with trade shows move up.
And the never-ending debate of attribution continued...