Lessons Learned from Rolling out Multi-Touch Attribution w/ Jeff Kew

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During this episode we talk through some of the key things to make sure you have in place if you are considering building out a multi-touch attribution model at your organization. In some ways, it felt as if we only scratched the surface on the topic. 

Some key elements to look for to give your organization a better chance of success:

• Culture of collaboration and comfortable with “fail fast”
• Alignment on definitions
• Clarity on what questions you are trying to answer

Thanks to Jeff Kew for his insights.

Recorded live August 11, 2021.

Hi, I’m Michael Hartmann, I’m Naomi Lou, and I’m Mike Rizzo. And this is ops cast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros raided by the MO Pros. The number one community for marketing operations. As professionals tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you in your marketing operations career.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 21 of OpsCast. But to you by the MO Pros, I’m Michael Hartmann. And I’m joined today by my co-host Mike Rizzo, Mike Saeilo. Hey everybody. All right. So today we are excited to have with us Jeff cube, director of global marketing operations at magnitudes software. He and he’s here today to talk to us about lessons that he’s learned from rolling out multitouch attribution.

I know we all. R, uh, talk about that kind of daily. Probably Jeff has a seasoned professional in marketing operations and marketing technology. He has a particular passion about the data governance, part of marketing operations and how, um, they could be strategic levers to support revenue growth. So with that, Jeff, thank you for joining us today.

Well, thank you for having me appreciate it. And that’s a great intro. All right. Well, let’s just dive right into this. Um, so Jeff and I know we traded some conversations before, but. You know, we have talked to other folks about, uh, attribution reporting. Um, but I don’t think we’ve talked specifically about multitouch.

I think we’ve probably touched on the different types of attribution methodologies, if you will. So, so for the folks who are either new or just to guide the conversation really late, Put some definition around it. Like how do you define multitouch attribution and you know, how does that compare to other types?

I guess there’s usually first touch. Last touch, maybe some others thoughts. Yep. Yep. So for the uninitiated, let’s, let’s start with a description of attribution, right? In that it identifies a key activity or event that led to a conclusion. Right. And I’m keeping that very vague. Right. And I’ll give you some examples.

So a couple of examples in real life could include, you know, a butterfly flaps, its wings, and a few days later, a tsunami rolls in on a beach somewhere, or you plant and, you know, that’s extreme or you plant some apple seeds and years later you’re picking apples from a tree, right? So in marketing, we’ll refer to different types of attribution touches.

Right. And which is simply when a prospect or a hand waver or a lead. Engages with us the business. Right. And, you know, I use prospect hand Waverly hand waver lead loosely because different businesses use those terms in very different ways. Right. So SAP is going to be a hand waver as someone who’s just filled in a form to get a P an asset.

Right. Um, but in a smaller business, that may be an MQL. Um, So I just want to make that, that’s why I use these terms loosely of prospect hand waver lead a as well, prospect and lead are used very differently in, in different platforms as well. All right. In Marquetto it used to be a lead now Marquetto calls them persons, um, a par dot calls them a prospect, uh, and Salesforce has leads and contacts.

So getting back to. Touch points, right? And attribute multi touch attribution. There’s different types of touch points. There’s a single touch. You, you might hear that term single touch, and often that refers to the first touch or the last touch before opportunity before an opportunity is created. There’s also U shaped w shaped full funnel there’s ML for machine learning.

Uh, and then there’s a custom model, right? And with the U shape and w shape, they have specific weighted weights to the weightings applied to those touches, but the full funnel machine learning custom, these get into more complex weighting issues. Right. Uh, and by waiting, I mean, A percentage out of a hundred percent goes to that activity.

Uh, but we’ll get into we’ll come back to that. So single touch only gives credit to one marketing touch point. And generally, like I said, that’s the lead create, uh, lead creation or last touch before opportunity creation. But. That first touch for example, or a single touch could be an ad click or in the past a trade show, a trade show booth visit, right?

Multitouch assumes that all touch points play some role in driving a conversion, and that can include first touch. Like I said, via a search term and a browser display ad clicks. And then the next touch could be the lead creation occurring on a form later, there could be an asset, download a webinar registration, or a view on the website and within.

Multitouch journeys. There are four clear touch points identified. Now, one to point out I’m rev because I worked with Bizible. Uh, I’m going to be referencing terms used in Bizible. There are other platforms out there for multitouch attribution. Dream data is one on, uh, I think episode six or 16. I can’t remember what it was, but you had on, uh, some folks from there as well, talking about the.

They’re multi-touch attribution platform and I’ve checked that out. And I really like it. Uh, uh, they are building out their Marquetto integrations. I don’t know where that’s at yet. Uh, but it looked pretty good. And I think there’s bound to be more people, more, more companies, startups developing these types of solutions.

Yeah, totally. I think, you know, the world of a multi-touch attribution, uh, providers, and like trying to give you like the visibility into multitouch is like such a hot market. I think it has been a long time. I remember when I first checked out Marquetto actually, they were championing that they had like this really strong analytics package that would like help you with multi-touch.

And when I checked it out, Like it’s there, but it’s still like, not really giving me it’s, it’s pretty manual. Right? Like, you’re like, you can pivot data around and like, get a sense of what’s going on, but it’s not really telling us anything. And then like at the end of the day, like I don’t like, is it right or wrong to use w you first touch last touch?

Like, I don’t, I don’t think anybody’s established that. And I think a lot of these providers are going after. At least right now, from what I’ve seen, like the dream datas and the, in the visible is like, they’re just trying to make it easier for you to interact with that data, right. To try to make a decision about multitouch, which I think is critical.

Cause like this is really complex. Like you just laid out a bunch of super complex, like models that like, for those of us who are not overly familiar with, you know, this, this landscape of multi-touch attribution, that’s overwhelming. Right? I mean, we’re, a lot of us are very familiar with those terms, but.

I’m like picturing a U shape and a w shape attribution model. And I’m like, where’s the weighting? Is it at the top or the bottom of the w well, you know, that’s a really good point. Like you shaped really is simple. Looking at the first. So you can go single touch where you pick either the first or the last touch, or you can go U shaped, which is just the first and last touch, right.

And weighting them equally or waiting, giving them a certain weight. And then the bottom of the, you really just represents these very low value touchpoints that can occur that are webpage visits or. Email clicks, right? Uh, w is the exact same thing. And w w does first touch. Leave creation and opportunity creation.

Right? So essentially a first touch, middle touch, last touch, and then full funnel is really just adding another line to that w called, you know, as if it, and I don’t, you know, that’d be a double V, right. Which is funny because in French, w. Right. Kind of ironic, but, uh, you know, it’s, um, you essentially get four, you get four tops, right.

And, uh, that fourth one is closed one. So if you choose full funnel, you’re actually working on, you could argue that, uh, you are working with w shaped. Uh, and until the deal until the deal is closed, right? So when you look at your touch points, if you’re working on full funnel, You’re actually getting a hundred.

And if the lead came in through, it was marketing converted, lead through a marketing source. You’re actually getting a hundred percent contribution at the beginning, but then once the deal becomes closed, one, it drops to say drops to 77.5 points. Of marketing contract month because the opportunity creation that is the last one, you know, it’s a marketing event that occurred before opportunity creation and that could have been, they attended a webinar.

They, you know, downloaded a white paper PR um, uh, any activity you define really right as, as a key activity, but that closed one. Then become, you know, goes from w you know, I know you guys can’t that you’re not recording video, but you guys can see my hands and moving in the camera, obviously. Right. But, um, for the visual learners, like it, you know, just picturing a w is very helpful.

And I think even the double V makes sense. Right. And, and that last touchpoint, like, to me, that sounds like you’re saying, Hey, we’re going to measure things like we actually showed them or. Um, put effort or money behind, you know, getting them in contact with a current client, or we showed them case studies or something like that that were produced by marketing.

And they might have sunk costs to those marketing assets, but we’re going to attribute that last little. Push over the edge for this closed one opportunity, at least in the B2B world, you know, Hey, the, uh, the case study that we presented to this person actually should get a little bit of credit for this too, at this, at the final throes of signing the deal.

Yeah. Kind of what you’re saying. Yeah. There, I’m careful. I’m very cautious about the word credit. I don’t think the word credit should have a place that’s nice. Right? Because credit to salespeople is, is very different right there. It’s like, no, we brought that deal in. We talked to those people, we sold it to them.

And the key thing that, you know, the thing with attribution. It’s influence. We have influenced the, we have influenced the opportunity in some way. And so I want to give a real life example. Of because sometimes it’s tough for people to imagine these marketing touch points, because they’re just a bunch of electrons.

In most cases, they don’t exist. Right. We can’t see them, they don’t exist. So let’s give an example of something that’s real. And I like to use an example of gardening and I’m no gardener. Um, but, uh, Yeah, I, I, I know gardeners and, and it’s a lot of work, right? Like you could have gone to the store and paid two bucks and bought some vegetables or grown them in your garden for a lot of effort.

But let me get to the point, uh, in gardening, you have to do some steps. You have to prepare the ground. You have to add soil. So preparing the ground, you remove rocks and weeds, but you add soil. If the soil needs fresh soil, you’re going to dig a trout. You know, maybe it’s just a trial with your finger, creating a little path, and you’re going to add some seeds to it for whatever vegetable you’re going to grow.

And you’re add some fertilizer, perhaps some powder that helps, you know, it’s full of nutrients for the dirt to go into the soil. Then you’re going to watch this, this little bud little plant grow and you’re going to nurture it and you’re going to nurture it by clearing the weeds that may grow. You’re going to water it regularly until eventually all these physical touches, physical efforts have led to success.

You have some products to eat. Which one of all those activities is, you know, led to the success of this vegetable growers. It’s not a single one. Right? You put some seeds inside the, inside the dirt. Well, if the dirt, you know, wasn’t rich, um, it, the seed wouldn’t have taken. It wouldn’t have grown, right. If you didn’t water and you had a heat wave, like we’ve had recently.

You know, your seeds will die. They won’t germinate. Uh, if you didn’t remove weeds or if you didn’t create some little boundaries to keep, you know, little animals off of, uh, getting into your garden, um, all of these things together led to the creation of this. Oh, that would be that seed wasn’t ready to grow.

And it was just a bad seed for all those, uh, all those leads that come through the funnel that are just not ready to that. That’s a great, you know what, and, and I believe that happens. I believe, you know, when you buy a pack of seeds, let’s say there’s a hundred seeds in there, or whatever. Some of them are going to be duds.

They just won’t, they just won’t germinate. I know. Right. So I garden and I like, this is all relating to me and Michael’s like, yes, I have a question, Jeff, that, um, it’s kind of hit me. And I think been thinking about a lot and maybe ties in with the whole concept of revenue ops too. Right. So where you’re looking across the full.

Yeah, the customer journey, buying cycle, whatever term we want to use. And that is like, should these attribution models be focused on, I know that kind of started with marketing, but I’m wondering, like, should do, do you think that they should include both marketing and ACOM sales in general, but it could be like BDR outside sales would I like those touches as well?

And I think there’s, and I, I, I’m asking this particularly for. B2B world in when, when you have a long sales cycle on a big deal size, right? So typically there’s sales activity and at the, underneath it, or over the top of it, whichever you want to think of, there’s probably a marketing activity. That’s either.

Yeah, just air cover kind of stuff. Or there’s, you’ve got a thing where, you know, marketing is doing specific things to support the sales efforts that are going on with those, you know, you know, active opportunities, if you will, like, do you think, like, are you seeing more people wanting to look at, at all the touches or use, or are you still seeing mostly people focusing on the marketing touches as part of the attribution modeling?

So it depends. And it, I believe what I’ve seen in my experience, right? So I don’t want to generalize for the industry. I can only refer to what I’ve, what I’ve seen, what I’ve read now, visible is designed to leverage the entire marketing and sales cycle. You can bring in your CRM stages and track those as weighted values as well.

And. But general in generally what I’ve seen as visible is being paid for by the marketing team. And so there’s a focus on showing attribution to marketing. Um, and what sales does is what sales does. I think we’re a few years away from having that marketing and sales alignment, where they work together.

Like I’ve seen businesses where BDRs role are, um, Uh, roll up to marketing or BDRs, roll up to sales. And it’s very interesting because you know, you’re driving your leads to the BDRs to then find those top quality leads, route them to sales. Uh it’s it really depends on the structure. There is it’s the wild west when it comes to marketing and sales, uh, uh, there is no generalize.

There’s no. Rules to follow different. It, it, you know, is it this, you know, what does it, where does the CMO come from? Is your CMO a brand strategist or designer by education? Or did your CMO come, come up through the ranks as a data professional, right? That that’s going to define. Well, what you’re reporting is like, same thing with your salespeople.

Did your sales come up through a BDR? Who’s always been in sales or were they a BDR belonging to a marketing department? You can have companies where you have some companies where you have a chief revenue officer and you have customer success. And marketing and product to them. And you have some companies where the CMO and CRO are different people, completely different business units.

That really don’t talk. So I can’t, there is no answer to your question. My experience has been, it’s very, been marked, been very marketing focused. Um, it just means we’re under leveraging the, the, the information that’s in there and I’m going to get to that. Uh, there, there, there’s some other things we can talk about and I’ll get to that later because I have some thoughts.

Um, the, the, um, I know the, the, the different types there’s, uh, we talked about how different type there’s different types of attribution, right. And you know, how, how they should be used. You know, you got to think about, when do we use these. Right. When do we use single touch? When do we use, when is it appropriate to use single touch or when is it appropriate to use full final?

Um, and you know, I think it depends on who you need to tell the story to. Yeah. That’s where I was going to go next. It’s like kind of following suit on Michael’s question is like the idea of what’s the impetus for the design. To look at multi-touch, right? Like, but someone somewhere is selfishly trying to answer a question.

I, you know, usually it comes from a bit of a selfish place, right? Like in selfish might be a strong word, but like, we’re trying to figure out where to spend more money. And if only one group is. Uh, interested in this like that can of course create bias in the way that you want to measure your multi-touch funnel.

Um, but if you have a nice, you know, uh, collaboration happening between perhaps like CRO CMO or sales and marketing, or all three then, or even just within the marketing team itself, the different departments inside marketing, whether it’s kind of top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of the bottom of.

Then I, hopefully the stories you’re trying to tell as it sounds like you’re where you’re headed, Jeff are going to, um, paint a picture that isn’t just totally biased, right? Like to like, oh, like I need to prove that I, or disprove that we’re spending money in the wrong places or, or what have you. Um, but usually it sounds like there’s a question that you’re trying to answer.

And then sometimes you have to tell the story of like, let the data, tell the story. And I think, I think that. One of the things that I’ve always been afraid of with this like multi-touch model is, uh, did somebody ask the wrong question and then try to try to answer it in their own way. Right. Which we see.

Yeah. We see it all the time. Cause you don’t, if you don’t know what data’s available, you don’t know what question to ask sometimes. Uh, the, you know, there’s a line here it’s uh, I have a thought of show you show or hide the touches depending on the audience. Right. So that’s interesting to give you to give some context to that.

Let’s think about where multitouch really. Really benefits people. And that is for the growth marketers. If you, when you, if you’re, if you choose a go to market approach that is based on a quarter or a half year, you know, as opposed to sort of ad hoc one-off campaigns and you keep things organized, you can really leverage multi-touch attribution.

You can start to see how many, how many, how many, you know, let’s say we call our campaign. Um, Uh, if you have a single product or say you have a conference and you’re going to Sapphire, it’s a good example, right? For, for B2B, as DP puts on Sapphire every year, insight, Vegas, and a lot of people, their entire lot, some small companies that do a lot of small little niche products or SAP customers, their entire lead gen comes from going to Sapphire.

Right. Um, And totally lost my train of thought. Make sure to turn this one out. No, no, I think you’re headed down. So that’s the storytelling piece, right? Like there’s only like this there’s this like big effort. These growth marketers are heading to this, like this big event and they’re like, I’m going to wait everything towards this thing or.

There’s actually other events that took place that helped bring this business in. Right? Correct. Yeah. And so within those, but now you don’t have trade show, so everything has changed. Right, right. Um, and so that’s not true. I’m at one Michael’s in Vegas right now. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. I just would not do that.

Like. There’s the meetup, you know, there’s, uh, there’s the Vancouver, uh, you know, uh, MO Pros, uh, uh, meetup at the end of the day, today as like 10 to 14 people going. And, and I, even though it’s an outdoor patio, I. MJ everybody’s, everybody’s got their, uh, their view on it, but kind of risk tolerance, but Hey, so, all right.

So let’s, let’s do that. Yeah. So getting back to the success. So let’s use se Sapphire as an example. So SAP Sapphire is one big event. But within Sapphire businesses, we’ll put on many sub campaigns, there’s going to be the trade booths. There’s going to be the private, you know, when it was in real life, there’d be the trade booth.

It’d be the, um, the different presentations. There would be the private dinner. There would be the private appointments that you have. You know, that are running on that on another floor where all the CEOs are there and you can meet the CEOs, right? Like if you go to Adobe summit or when it was Marketo summit, before Adobe bought it, you know, you could meet Steve Lucas and get a meeting with Steve Lucas with your sales rep.

This is interesting. Like, so you’re saying like, even at an event, I never even thought of it this way. Right? Like breaking down these micro moments at this event to try to understand, like what might help close a deal or bring a deal in. Cause we certainly did that when I was at Mavenlink. I got us to, and from our conferences in the early days, and we certainly did like dinners and, you know, private rooms to have discussions, even back at the office in San Francisco, during Dreamforce, we would do.

But like, we never went so deep as to say like, Hey, which one of those little micro moments at Dreamforce was the thing that might’ve helped us. It was just Dreamforce. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, what, if you’re, if you ran a couple of dinners, a breakfast and you know, you spent 15, $20,000 on those and those and those people who attended and never turned down opportunities, um, or, you know, you hosted some private, some, just some private seminars, you know, you want to be able to identify which of these touch points.

Actually engaged with people who later bought. So that next time round, you can say, you know what, this really didn’t, wasn’t worth the time for, you know, the 80 20 rule. This wasn’t worth the effort that we got out of it. Um, we could, we should have spent more. We, instead of doing the dinners, we should have done more meet and greets kind of thing, or a social, perhaps, you know, we’re, you know, we could see, we did this open house, open bar, social hour.

That was way turned out to be way better when we invited more people. Um, compared to the dinner. So you need to be able to identify these, these sub campaigns out of the overall go to market campaign. So now let’s relate this to digital, right? And so what happens now with sour was happened to Sapphire.

The last couple of years is now you had webinars. Now you had private business meetings, right? Like essentially, uh, business matches. You know, you can go to conferences that you can go to conferences, which are just business match conferences, where you get matched to a company that can help you with.

Help support your business, right? Uh, these costs money to, to attend. They cost money to, to run, but you want to identify which one of these is having more success. So with Sapphire now it’s all webinars and online, like I said, online business matches and so forth. So you need to be able to identify those.

Yeah, right. So next year, next year, you know, or later on it, because Sapphire next year, isn’t going to be. Um, it’s going to be, I’ll probably be in real life, but there’s going to be a huge virtual component because there are going to be people in businesses who are not going to travel. And so that’s going to necess there’ll be a necessity for like a tool, like, um, like what Hopkins is doing now, right?

Where they, they just bought a com a company that allows you to do event planning in real life event planning. So you’ll start to have, you’ll start to have hybrid meetups where. Conferences where, you know, some people who can go, perhaps the people on the west coast may go to Vegas or central, go to Vegas, and then people in Europe are not going to travel.

Uh, but they’re going to want to join. Um, the virtual, the virtual events. Right. And so, especially like for all of this, sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off. I think for all of this, it’s just like, um, but like what this raises just echoes back to that idea of like, making sure your. Uh, asking the right questions.

Cause like I, like I said, it was kind of a, uh, an eye-opener to me, just now thinking about like micro touches inside of a virtual or in-person events. Like no one anywhere in our organization at the time was asking like, which one of those particular things was the thing that drove it home or drunk, drove it in.

Um, they were, they were simply looking at it as this participation in all up spend at this like event, whether or not we did a bar thing or a dinner was kind of irrelevant. Um, it didn’t mean that we didn’t like have a little bit of a campaign for, you know, sending invites or something like that. But like we, weren’t thinking about.

Rev rec or attribution or anything like that, you were looking at it as sort of an aggregate moderate breakdown. So this like all of this conversation to me, I I’m with you, Mike, right? Like what question are you trying to address with an attribution model is important to be clear, but. And who’s the audience.

Jeff, you mentioned that the thing that I now go to just knowing, because I’ve had conversations with people before who like, um, one of my previous jobs, I did ran this stuff internally, but we sold marketing services to, to other firms. And one of the consultants there asked me, they had a client who was looking at doing reporting like this and.

And because we were in the event business, right. They want to know how to do it for events. But I was like, I always told them, like, you gotta get that right. First on the things that you actually have a lot more control over, cause events typically are the ones that are hardest to do, which so to me, what begs the question is, you know, data and reporting is so dependent on, uh, to me on how that data is generated, right?

How this how’s the sausage made. And so. Jeff from your experience, uh, kind of getting back into like the lesson learned kinds of things from your experiences, what do you think that that organizations need to have in place in terms of, um, you like you like data governance, either data governance or organizational readiness, or like tools like to even be talking about doing attribution where you could actually trust.

The data enough that you could make informed decisions about where to place those bets. Right. If assuming that’s what you’re trying to do.

Yeah. The

let’s start, let’s go, go back a bit and look at prerequisites. Right? So before you even roll it, roll this out. Um, so.

The thing that’s the most important thing is, you know, you’ve referenced this when you were talking, introduce doing the intro for me of that. I’m very focused around data governance and you know, so as I mentioned, well, let me just step back just for a second where I basic, you know, I mentioned that you want to show or hide your touches depending on the audience, because I want, I want people to think about this is that if you.

Have you like, you know, let’s say you spent $400,000 at Dreamforce Mike, uh, and, and you don’t break it down into sub campaigns. You can’t see where that best investment, where the blue, you got your best return on which sub campaign. At the board level, they don’t need to see the sub campaigns. Right? Your COO may want to know what the sub campaigns are, but when he reports to, if you’re using attribution reporting at the board, you’re gonna like, it’s going to go on deaf ears.

Yeah, absolutely. NC, that’s the point of making. Yeah, that’s the point I’m making is that you, for all, they, all they care about is how much money do we get out of that investment. Right? What was the return out of that investment? Now, if you don’t have returns coming out, though, uh, the people at the board level will start to ask about the sub campaigns.

And if you don’t, so, you know, w w you know, if you, so if you don’t have opportunities, Well, how about SQLs? Oh, you don’t have SQLs. Well, how many MQs did you have? Well, where are you spending your money? And you don’t want to have that conversation with your board. You want your conversation to be very focused around this is the return.

These are the opportunities that got generated out of these events. Now at the growth marker level, you want to be able to see those sub campaigns. So you know which what you are going to spend more money on. Um, but how do you then start to actually report on this? How do you report on those sub campaigns?

And that requires a certain type of culture, right? And I it’s, you need a culture that supports data governance. You need to have standard processes. Like, you know, what are your prerequisites before you’re going to have a conversation about implementing multitouch, what do you need? What, what do you have to have in place?

Right. So with the gardening you needed to have good. You needed to have good seats just to start, right. But you have to prepare that soil if it’s not good soil. Um, and so if you don’t have a culture that supports data governance, if you don’t have a culture that supports standardized standardized process standardized processes for lead conversion, and you don’t have standardized naming conventions and you don’t have rules or standardization around UTM pick lists for sources.

Medium campaign and term, you don’t have good soil. You’re not ready to plant seats. This is the, the, what the term I use for all. This is like, you just have to have discipline about this, right? And otherwise, if you don’t have that discipline around you, and it could be data governance, but just how these processes work, and everybody knows what they’re doing.

The outcome is. It becomes less and less reliable, correct? Yes. And it’s more than discipline though, because it’s executive support, right? Uh, if you don’t, if you haven’t sold to the, if you don’t have executive buy-in. On multitouch attribution, uh, or not so much an executive. I mean like your COO or your CDO or your CRO, right.

Just depends on, on the business or your CIO. Um, then depending on the size of the business as well, it could be a director who’s, you know, if it’s a small business, if they don’t understand it, they’re never gonna, they’re never going to be able to explain it right. Um, I would also argue that like, maybe if you’re on your way into an organization, let’s just use that for, for the sake of argument.

Like if you asked that question and it sounds like there’s no culture fit around data governance and reliability around data and reporting structures. Maybe not the best place for you to spend your time as a marketing operations professional, right. Or, or you can provide a ton of value if you’re willing to fight that uphill battle fight and like champion the cause for it.

And you have. The wherewithal, not only the wherewithal, but like the comfort and the confidence to go do that. Because I think like for listeners who are maybe early in their career, right? Like, we’re not saying you need to go like bang on the door of your C level executives and say like, Hey, we need to get aligned on this stuff.

Like, it’s probably not the right way to handle it. Um, and maybe you’re not ready for that, but like, if you’re coming into a role ask, like the culture fit, like point is, is tremendous job. I think it’s totally fair to ask, like, does this organization value like clean, healthy data so that we can understand the pulse and the momentum of this organization?

And like what structures do you have in place to handle? I think, or like, you know, and even if you’re not coming into a new role, right. Those are questions that you can ask today where you’re like, Hey, I really want to better understand like how this company works. Uh, w like, how do we standardize our data process?

Cause like, that’s the key takeaway here, right? Like the UTMs and all that stuff. Like if we don’t have this, the bad data in is bad data out. Right. And so. Like, you know, that that’s huge. I think the culture piece is, is tremendous. And I think we can, like, all of our listeners can take away, uh, you know, a little like action item.

Right? What questions can I ask to to better understand the situation or the problems that were.

Sorry, Jeff. But I, I also like the other one that I run into all the time is, and you’ve kind of alluded to it in a different context, like, like terminology of within certain systems, right? The same, a campaign in Marquetto is very different than a campaign in Eloqua. That’s different, you know, so on. Right.

Um, But one of the things I’ve struggled with is getting calm, like getting agreement and a common understanding about when we say. This attribution number, you know, everybody knows what that means and how it’s built, right. At least at a level that is appropriate for where they are in the organization.

Yeah. How important do you think that is? Like maybe let’s move to this a little bit. Like yeah, if you had, uh, you know, just a couple minutes with somebody, somebody gave you a, Hey Jeff, want to pick your brain about, I think we need multilateral multitouch attribution or attribution reporting in our organization generally.

Like, what are those key things you would say? Like the top five things, three things, whatever the number is. He’s like, you need to focus on these things before, you know, either before or during the whole setup and process to make it successful at the end. Okay. So right off the bat, I would ask a question.

Is this, if the scenario is the scenario. Favorable to multitouch because if the scenario isn’t favorable to Mo to multitouch, don’t do it, uh, find the gap. And then that leads to the question of what. Multitouch is valuable. So how do I roll it out? Well, you need to identify the gaps first and that is, is there a lack of process in places or a lack of standardized, uh, systems and rules around naming conventions and lead conversions and, uh, go to market processes, start with solving those things first, right.

And you also have to decide, determine is the. Ready for it, because if it’s not just don’t bother because the last thing you need to do is get a, say at the beginning of the year you get buy-in and then you roll out dashboards based around multitouch market. Multi-touch reporting at multi-touch attribution.

And all of a sudden someone now, someone new comes in say new VP sales or whatever. And they say, oh yeah, that multi touch attribution. Yeah. It makes sense. It’s all wrong though, because no, we know you didn’t bring that lead in. We did it. So you could, you leadership can change. And the view internally around attribution could change.

Right. So you want to make sure that there’s a clear understanding. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but you, you can search. If, if it’s not, the company is not ready for it. The culture is not ready for it. You can start. Prepare for it, right. There’s a tremendous amount of opportunity out in the market right now.

Um, you know, uh, the Saunders, the C2 marketing, you know, just sent out an email talking about how over the last, the last 18 months, um, there has. Charlie Charlie Saunders. I can remember his first name. So Charlie sent out an email a couple of days ago about how in the last 18 months there’s been tremendous growth, right?

And that there’s tremendous opportunity. You can see it in on LinkedIn. There’s tons of marketing, operations manager, jobs, tons of director of marketing, operation jobs, even a few VP roles. Um, ironically, I did notice a VP role for Goldman Sachs for marketing operation marketing technology. And it’s ironic because they’re one of the first people to say, people need to go back to the office.

And it’s ironic because marketing operations is one of these jobs that you don’t need to be in an office to do. Uh, so we have, we have lots of, lots of, uh, tech, deep technical, uh, remote capabilities to handle that stuff. Right? Yeah. So it’s interesting. That is really, my first thought is, and I don’t want it to be a negative one, but if the scenario isn’t favorable, the multitouch don’t do it.

Right. Find, discover why it doesn’t mean it’s not a good opportunity to go into the company. Lot of these jobs, when you read the descriptions, it’s a lot of companies who have been impacted by COVID. The paradigm shift has occurred and they need to change and they need to change fast. And, um, ironically, some of the salaries are not keeping up with the demand.

Uh, so there. It’ll be interesting to see how that works out. Especially for companies that may have hired people two years ago, paid them, whatever the going rate was at the time. And now it’s two years later and they’re thinking I’m not going to give my employee a 50% raise. It’s like, well, hold, well, you know what you may want to because the market is commanding that.

Yeah, the market’s pretty, pretty hot to try right now, uh, episode with highway to, or the webinar with highway ed, about how, how crazy hard it is to find talent in marketing operations these days. And Charlie was not wrong in that. See us to, for those listeners out there. See us too is awesome. Go check it out.

They have great, great, uh, newsletters and stuff. Um, but yeah, they’re definitely not wrong about how hot it is. Um, but yeah, like culturally, that makes sense. So, so playing it back, I think I heard you say like, make sure the culture’s there. Make sure there’s some alignment on definition, get some, get some clarity around, like what kind of questions you’re trying to answer inside of the organization.

Is there anything else we missed? Those are three things. I think that’s really big. That’s really big. You know, there’s a question I would ask before starting new roles. And I would encourage people to, to think about this when you are looking at new roles. And it’s the first thing you should ask before you start talking about multi-touch attribution in your discovery calls with them is to find out how they treat failure.

Right. Is failure. Is it a company that chooses to fail fast? Or is it a company that has a zero tolerance, zero fault, zero tolerance to mistakes, right? Because with multi-touch attribution, you’re going to have a lot of mistakes as you start to roll it out, you’re going to think you’re there and then someone’s gonna come along and they’re going to say no, that doesn’t count.

Those opportunities don’t count. Right. And it is part of, part of why I was attracted to marketing tech, marketing ops, whatever, um, in my career was, um, kind of the messiness of it. Like, and I think we just all need to like, as disciplined as we are. As much as the culture is, right. You know, the much we focus on data governance, right?

There’s, there’s just something about marketing and sales data that is going to always be like, I would never go. We had exactly this amount of influence over revenue, right. I would always say, this is what, this is the exact number that the, that the algorithm is telling us, but really what I’m more interested in is it, are we moving the needle in the right direction?

Sales and customer success moved where the organization wants to go. Right. That’s to me that’s a more like we have to be open and honest. Like the data in our, in our systems is always going to have some holes in it. Some anomalies, you know, especially when you get to things where, and I think it’s particularly true with like non-digital kinds of tactics, um, where there’s more chance for, for things to get missed.

Let’s do Jeff to kind of wrap things up maybe a little bit, you know, if there was one or two things that you’ve learned along the way that you like, just, um, our audience who maybe is considering doing attribution modeling or is struggling to get it over the finish line or fighting through it with their organization to get that, that culture to support it.

Like, what would you. Yeah. What would you recommend? Uh, and maybe the flip side, right? What have you, like, what would you have done differently in some of the instances where you you’ve gone through this?

So I would say one to recognize that multi-touch attribution isn’t necessarily the right tool for all companies. So determine the com what is the company like that you’re going to, or you’re at? Is most of the business coming in through net new. Or are you more, very B2B B2B enterprise where 80% of your revenue is coming from renewals and only 20% of your net new every year is coming, is slow, slowly coming in.

Um, you know, right now there’s a huge. Huge opportunity for companies like Oracle and SAP to start moving their blue chip customers to, to the cloud. Right. And that that’s where their revenue is going to a lot of their revenues going to come from less around net new and companies that support the SAP customers and Oracle customers are going to experience the same thing, because if your business.

Supports SAP customers or Oracle customers, um, or SAS, SAS customers, then, you know, you’re only going to get a new customer when they get a new customer, if you’re selling support tools that service them. So you have to, you’re getting on something that I think we just didn’t even talk about, which is like, yeah.

And I think, again, this goes back to some of our conversations, Mike, about what are critical skills for marketing. I was because I think it, we didn’t actually talk about this, this last time, which was like understanding what the revenue drivers are. For your co like your firm, right? I think Jeff, that’s what you’re talking about.

Right? ’cause if it’s, if it’s not acquisition, if it’s more about retention and loyalty, like it’s a very different model that you’re going to be thinking about. Correct. Yeah. And if it’s accurate, if you’re very acquisition focused, you’re a new business. And the only on the market a few years, Uh, you’re, you’re focused around you and you’re trying to sell self service, right?

For some of your SAS products, you’re you following this low touch note, touch approach, um, then definitely you want to be able to marketers want to know what channels are performing best. Right. Um, and, and you do that and you build out solid processes. So that’s the, that’s one of those first questions is like, Hey, is this actually right for this business?

Is this going to answer some questions or it really can I do it already on my own in Marquetto by just making sure that I, I manage my acquisition programs well, right, right. That makes sense. And is it not as right for this business, but just in the stage of the business, right? Like, cause I could see, I could see, um, organizations at different stages of their life cycle, right?

Like Mavenlink is a really great example of that. No, no, no, no specific call-outs here, but like early days, of course you talked about, you know, talking about, uh, acquisition numbers mostly. Right. And as the company continued to mature and we were getting longer, standing customers were looking at. What keeps them around.

Right. Is it services? Is it, you know, is it whatever, right. And so now you’re kind of shifting your model and you’re getting more mature and you’re trying to understand, like what, like what parts of the top of the funnel are creating the stickiest. You know, most advocating clients for us, the, the people who are really passionate about that product.

And then, you know, to go beyond that, it’s like, but what parts of their experience with us are like keeping them around. Right. And so like totally different. Ways to think about like attribution and understand the whole concept of like product led growth. So, um, I think, I think we’re going to have to wrap it up here, but, um, and it feels like we just only scratched the surface of this topic as usual.

This is this, I like, this is a great example of why it’s such a hot topic for all of us marketing ops, because I think it’s really easy to wrap your head about around what, what to do when to do it. Um, I do think we’ve got some good nuggets here about really I, the culture fit, you know, alignment on definitions, things like that are really important.

So Jeff, thank you for, for your, for your insights to you. If, uh, if folks want to connect with you and go deeper on this, or just to follow, you can have your thoughts online or whatever, where what’s the best place for them to do that. Um, I have I’m on LinkedIn. I’m so connect through LinkedIn. Uh, I am not very, I go in spurts in terms of how active I am on LinkedIn.

Um, sometimes I, I just kind of want to disappear and focus on work for weeks at a time. Um, and maybe I’ll once in a while, I’ll throw out something and, uh, like a nugget or something like that. And then. Later on. I might think, you know what, that’s not important anymore. And I delete it and I don’t have to gray.

You’re about to get a bunch of recruiting calls, I think, oh, this guy just occasionally pokes his head out, but he stays buried in his work all the time. Watch out. Yeah. So. You know, and, um, yeah, the, the recruiting, I don’t mind recruiting, you know, I don’t mind recruiters quite often. I’ll, I’ll actually, you know, say, you know, she, you should really go talk to my peer.

Right? You should go really talk to this person kind of thing. Um, And, uh, the only thing I really don’t appreciate is when people connect and I’m happy with, I’m fine with connecting with people. I don’t have to know you. Um, you know, connections is an appropriate word to the real value that I learned from a colleague at SAP, uh, in LinkedIn was your secondary connections, right?

Connecting with people who may have connections to the people you may want to be talking to. Okay. So example, if you decide, Hey, I want to get a job when I go, I want to reach out to for re if you’re looking for a job or if you’re looking for a customer, if you want to, if you want to reach out to someone at IBM, but you don’t know anybody at IBM, but if you look through your secondary connections, people, you know, may know those people at IBM.

I need that. What, like, Jeff, you have been tremendous for this show in so many ways, because you just did this like super meta thing where not only did you provide like, like some actual career advice to leveraging LinkedIn, it was also a multi touch attribution comment. So I dunno if anybody else caught onto that, but that was great.

I think that’s great. Just a little touch, a little touch on, uh, you know, the, the nature of the current state of. Finding people and resources in the compensation. So I’d like, it’s all good. Right? I love it. This has been a great conversation, Jeff, thank you so much. Thanks to our listeners, Mike, thank you for, uh, joining as usual.

Um, for those of you who are listening to this again, as always, please continue to provide your feedback. Uh, we, we really look forward to hearing from you. Yeah. What you think of this? The, the episodes suggestions on topics, suggestions on, uh, guests. Uh, we want to continue to bring you that great content with that though.

Uh, until next time, enjoy their time. You rest of your day. Thanks guys. So it was great.