Podcast 🎧: How To Map The Customer Journey and Attribute Revenue 💰
Connect the dots between your marketing activities and your revenue using attribution models. But which model should you choose? 🧐
A big challenge all marketers face is connecting marketing activities with revenue.
To do that, you need attribution.
Edward Ford from the Growth Hub Podcast interviews Steffen Hedebrandt (Chief Revenue Officer at Dreamdata) on which attribution model B2B SaaS Marketing teams should consider using. Listen to other episodes of Dreamdata’s Attributed Podcast here.
How To Map The Customer Journey & Attribute Revenue 💰
The Growth Hub Podcast with Edward Ford and Steffen Hedebrandt
In this podcast episode, we’ll dig into:
The benefits of mapping out the customer journey
How to map out the customer journey in a B2B SaaS company
What the customer journey looks like once you finish mapping it
How the customer journey translates into a demand generation engine
How to attribute revenue between the different teams that are involved in customer journeys
How to attribute revenue across different marketing channels
How to attribute revenue to marketing that’s difficult to measure (e.g. brand marketing)
Which attribution model is recommended for B2B SaaS companies
How to use your attribution model to make informed business decisions
How Dreamdata maps the customer journey and attributes revenue
Bonus content: Steffen’s personal recommendations and advice for fellow marketers and growth hackers. 💡
1. The benefits of mapping out the customer journey
When it comes to the customer journey and attribution, it’s all about understanding what paths led to a sale and how you can repeat that success. In that sense, it’s almost like finding the cheat codes for a computer game. No more getting stuck on the same level; you get to go straight to the good stuff.
Furthermore, from a growth hacking perspective, you want to try and repeat the things that drove your revenue. Because if you can repeat it, the next thing you try to do is double or triple that success, so you can drive even more revenue.
The challenge that remains is fully understanding the customers’ buying journeys. Marketing people love to talk about funnels, but buying journeys are a lot more complex than that, as they’re not linear.
2. How to map out the customer journey in a B2B SaaS company
Dreamdata works with B2B companies, and a lot of the customers we talk with start off in a B2C mindset when it comes to attribution. But B2B is a lot more complicated, as the variants are so much bigger than in B2C.
For example, say a person wants to buy a pair of running shoes. A B2C marketer shows them a Facebook ad, then retargets them on Google Display, and in the end the person buys the shoes.
That’s all fine and well for B2C, where a simple data-driven approach suffices (“I do A, B, and C, and then D happens”). In B2B, you want to track all the journeys and then apply a more qualitative methodology so you can start seeing patterns. No more guesswork, no more gut feelings, and no more generalization.
If you generalize the journey, you end up with an average journey.
Attribution used to be more a probabilistic discipline where you’d estimate your marketing impact. What we’re measuring at Dreamdata is deterministic: you actually clicked that ad, you actually clicked that email, you got a phone call, and so on. We want to understand everything that has a digital touch.
3. What the customer journey looks like once you finish mapping it
You should end up with a logbook of the customer journey that includes every single stakeholder, every single touchpoint, and every single tool. Once the journey is mapped, you can apply the attribution model of your choice.
At Dreamdata, we use something called “Time to revenue”: the time it takes from the first time someone visits your website until the account is closed. This metric usually takes 2-3 months longer than what most marketers expect and is an essential part of knowing the true length of the customer journey.
4. How the customer journey translates into a demand generation engine
In B2B, marketers start the journey, but the salespeople usually land the deals. Traditionally, B2B marketers have been measured on MQLs or SQLs, but you should take it to the next level. If you hit your target of 100 MQLs, which of the 100 targets led to closed deals and revenue?
If you know the valuable leads, you avoid vanity metrics. More importantly, you don’t waste the salespeople’s time and your company’s money.
5. How to attribute revenue between the different teams that are involved in customer journeys
If you want to be good at attribution, your company has to go through a digital transformation.
In order to do this, you need to map the whole customer journey and know what each team is actually doing. Each action taken by each team needs to have a digital touch or it won’t be traced. In the end, all of the actions made by all your teams need to have a digital reflection.
How? By moving all your work into platforms that can store data and be traced. If the picture is incomplete from a digital perspective, the entire discipline of attribution breaks.
6. How to attribute revenue across different marketing channels
This is the million-dollar question. Assuming the data set is correct you need to align on two things in your company:
What attribution models do we find meaningful? Do we only care about what starts the journeys (first-touch model)? Do we care about what they did just before they converted (last-touch model)?
Agree on a return on ad spend. Does the content lead to deals that become revenue? What is the cost sensor when producing these articles?
7. How to attribute revenue to marketing that’s difficult to measure (e.g. brand marketing)
You can’t measure the feeling that a brand or good piece of content gives you. But you still need to have a point of view on attribution. What are you actually trying to accomplish with brand marketing? Do you want to understand 100% of everything that has an impact on your deals, or do you want to increase your understanding from 20-30% to 70-80%?
A classical way to measure touch is with a linear model (each touch gets an equal value):
You wrote a great blog post → you shared it on LinkedIn → people came to your website from LinkedIn → people read the blog post on your website → a few months went by → they purchased your product.
That buying journey gets a digital reflection and provides revenue insights.
8. What attribution model is recommended for B2B SaaS companies
Steffen’s background is in marketing, so in the early days, he was more interested in what started the customer journey and highlighted the places that would drive new revenue. These days, as the CRO of Dreamdata, it’s a different story altogether.
Today, Steffen thinks that first-touch is unfair from an investment and ROI perspective. However, it does help you to highlight what drives new revenue. But he recommends looking at all the attribution models that are available because they represent different parts of the truth.
In the end, your reflection of reality is based on the attribution model you pick.
9. How to use your attribution model to make informed business decisions
We live in a world where last-touch in Google Analytics is still considered the truth. But it couldn’t be further from the truth in B2B.
You need to train your whole organization about the holistic journey. It’s not the last touch that is the ultimate truth. We need to understand:
where the demand comes from
the actions that drive revenue
Steffen recommends having that discussion in your company, so people understand that revenue is not the result of a single department: it’s all the departments’ efforts that matter.
10. How Dreamdata maps the customer journey and attributes revenue
We assign an ID to every anonymous device on the website. We store that ID in the database. When we can connect a real person to the ID, we look into what organization they belong to and what actions they’ve taken on our website. We then also integrate the data from every tool that your company is using.
This creates an understanding of the moving parts of an account and a holistic reflection of everything we know an account is doing (activities in the CRM, customer success efforts, the calling data, etc.).
Ultimately, we can help you:
Get all the digital touchpoints sorted by the account they belong to (a logbook of everything that took place)
Look at the revenue component and divide it into different places
Check this article to learn more on Dreamdata tracking.
Bonus: Steffen’s personal recommendations and advice for fellow marketers and growth hackers
What book would you recommend?
Not a book, but a newsletter! Sign up to growthhackers.com’s newsletter and read the weekly digest of the best blog posts on their site.
SaaS company you love and why?
Intercom—their great content has positively shaped Steffen’s opinion of them.
Favorite place to read about marketing online?
Growthhackers.com’s newsletter is a pot of gold for growth people.
Most important growth metric?
Revenue (or the closest proxy to revenue that you can find).
Best piece of advice for fellow marketers?
Constantly talk about whether what you’re doing is leading to more revenue or not (“We do these things because we expect A, B, C, D to happen”). Don’t do things unless you can justify them as being on the path to more revenue.