Studies have shown Sales-Marketing alignment can generate 32% higher revenue, retain 36% more customers and achieve 38% higher win rates.

But how do you bring about a more unified approach to marketing and selling while respecting the necessary boundaries?

In this digital age, data is king and it’s what these teams need to look at to make their approaches align like never before.

And attribution, specifically revenue attribution, sets them on the right track. In this post, I’m going to show you how.

What really matters for Sales and Marketing alignment?

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All the discussions over the years for better alignment of Sales and Marketing has ranged from the superficial, moving desks and running joint meetings, to the deep, strategy and goal alignment.

Now, these suggestions may be useful, but they fail to get to the source of the misalignment. Data.

To find the missing link, we need to be looking at the data and tools.

And this becomes MORE important as the teams work closer together.

To illustrate this, imagine you have two people writing a book. Person A writes the first half, and Person B writes the second half.

Now imagine these two people haven’t communicated at all during the process and they also can’t read what the other person wrote.

What do you think this book would be like?

EXTREMELY confusing! The dots wouldn’t connect and the entire story would go off the rails.

Now imagine this same scenario, but Person A is your sales team and Person B is your Marketing team. It creates absolute chaos and there’s almost ZERO chance for success.

Now going back to the book example, to fix this issue, the two people simply need to get on the same page. They need to communicate and work together based on the same timeline, idea, and create a game plan together that will allow both their ideas to intersect seamlessly.

Now how can you implement this within your sales & marketing team?

Here are the three key elements that need to come together:

1. Have a single source of truth
2. See the customer journey as a unified process
3. Measure success with the same yardstick (revenue and pipeline generated)

It’s crucial that both teams are singing from the same hymn sheet. That is, their data needs to be the same one.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they need to be operating from the same tools. Marketing can continue using their ad programs and automation tools, and Sales can plough ahead with their CRM.

In essence, they will be singing different harmonies, but the sheet is the same one.

A unified customer journey

Similar to relying on a single source of data truth, the customer journey needs to be aligned and systemized within the sales and marketing teams.

Sales and marketing can’t be separated when it comes to customer acquisition because for example, a retargeting ad might impact an account that’s already engaging with sales.

Now, in order to align the journey, there needs to be a system in place that the team understands to a fault, so there isn’t any overlap between sale and marketing when it comes to prospecting, selling, and closing leads.

To create this system, you must first understand the difference between marketing and sales.

Marketing is the act of finding a potential customer and building interest for your product or service.

Sales is taking those potential customers or prospects and attempting to convert them into buying customers.

Now that you understand the difference, you can create a system that allows the marketing and sales team to work together seamlessly within one customer journey in order to successfully take a prospect from a stranger to a buying customer.

Measuring success with the same yardstick

As with any strategy, your activities need to be measurable in order to demonstrate success (or failure) and to enable optimization moving forward. By extension, when looking at a unified customer journey, with all your activities - marketing and sales - you need to be measuring against the same metrics.

The metrics can only really be revenue and pipeline generation.

Attempting to optimize sales by using different metrics is like trying to write a book with two different people without any communication or idea alignment between the two.

To close the circle, this measurement can only be done when you’ve got that single data source of truth and when you’re looking at the customer journey holistically.

The B2B Revenue Attribution solution to Sales and Marketing alignment

So how can you bring these elements together and finally be in a position where Sales and Marketing can align where it matters?

Attribution.

B2B Revenue Attribution bringing your customer journey data under one roof

Attribution is the process of tracking, analyzing, and measuring touch points across the customer journey.

It’s true that so far it’s been marketers who have been the primary users of attribution. Using it to track, measure and optimize activities in their funnel.

But its value beyond the marketing department is just as great - I’ll get to the benefits for Sales in a sec. That is why the wider category of Revenue Attribution has emerged.

Revenue attribution recognizes that B2B deals are closed through months-long team effort consisting of quality ads, thought-provoking content, impactful product demos, and killer sales meets. And collect and analyze the data accordingly.

And because it does, revenue attribution delivers on each of the three elements mentioned above.

How does B2B Revenue Attribution achieve this?

Let’s take a look under the hood.

1. Multi-touch

The most defining feature of revenue attribution is, like most dedicated attribution tools, that it applies multi-touch attribution modeling.

This basically means that it tracks and takes into account all the touches users (and accounts - more on this in a sec) are making with your site/activities. So that’s both sales (phone calls, social media messaging, emails) and marketing (ad clicks, content views, form fills) - and Customer Success, but we’ll leave that for another time.

It achieves this by the previously mentioned process of tracking and integrating with the tools your team uses through the customer journey.

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The multi-touch attribution models then allow you to attribute credit to any and all the activities that are associated with the account’s journey. How much credit and where depends on the models you apply.

2. Multi-stakeholder

We know that the typical B2B customer is not a single individual but a company consisting of multiple stakeholders.

Each of these may interact with your activities in different ways and help drive the deal down the funnel. For instance, the person in need of the product is not necessarily the one who will be signing the check, nor is she likely to be the person implementing your product.

A B2B revenue attribution solution is therefore configured to accommodate all identified stakeholders. This allows the success of activities to be measured on an individual and account basis.

3. Multiple and customizable attribution models

Finally, an effective revenue attribution solution will be able to run the data through different attribution models.

Multi-touch attribution models, unlike single-touch, distribute value across the account’s multiple touches. 

Sales efforts with revenue attribution

So, revenue attribution makes getting a trustworthy and singular overview of the end-to-end customer journey possible. From this, Marketing and Sales alignment will flow seamlessly.

But how will this help a sales team in practical terms?

Here are three broad ways:

Inbound efforts

Going into conversations without a clear picture of how the account came through the funnel and what they’ve interacted with can make it very difficult to adequately tailor the conversation.

Let’s use a hypothetical example.

A number of contacts within an account may have read a blog post on one of your product’s features. They also attended a webinar on the same topic and looked at the same product feature page on your site.

Not only is this particular feature going to be the segue for your conversation, but you’re also going to assume some knowledge on their part, meaning you can dive deeper into some of the less well-known details of this feature and how this interacts with other killer features.

In summary, with what in effect should be a much more qualified lead, you’re going to be closer to closing the deal.

Outbound efforts

Having an overview of how accounts have progressed through the funnel, inclusive of all the juicy data on each contact’s touches, will go a very long way in fine-tuning personas, sequences, and messages.

Say the data shows that Ops people in most of your journeys have engaged with a particular blog post. Sending a cold message to an ops persona that includes a link might prove more successful.

Performance

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At its core, attribution is about identifying what’s working and what isn’t. In having all revenue-generating touches thrown into the modeling, you can start to unpack where your activities are falling short.

Let’s say an account goes cold and your emails and calls are going unanswered.

But, out of the blue, the account reheats. With the touches mapped on the customer journey, you’d be able to identify that it was in fact a retargeting ad that brought the account back to life.

You want to be seeing and accounting for these episodes.

If it’s recurring, you want to evaluate what your activities might be leading to accounts going cold.

Conclusion 

Sales and Marketing alignment is proven to enhance revenue generation, customer retention and win rates.

Yet the remedies prescribed by thought-leaders for aligning these teams largely fail to tackle the most fundamental obstacle to alignment: data.

Without a single source of truth, unified customer journey, or common measurement, Sales and Marketing can’t work more cohesively.

The solution? B2B Revenue Attribution.

By connecting with all relevant data sources - all tools and on-site tracking - the revenue attribution platform establishes a single source of truth.

Similarly, in capturing all the touches taking place on the customer journey, revenue attribution maps a complete customer (account) journey - from the first touch to the last.

Revenue attribution achieves the holy grail of linking all activities to revenue and pipeline generation. No more squabbling over the quality of leads or impact of efforts.

So, if you really want to gain the many benefits that come from Sales and Marketing alignment, leave the desk swapping and meeting sharing to one side and focus on getting your data sorted out with B2B Revenue Attribution.