Oh hey, LinkedIn, quick question for the community of marketers and rev ops folks here. Jon Miller, and I were on a panel at Pavilion CMO Summit (with the awesome Ray Rike) recently talking marketing financial benchmarks, which, naturally, led us to double-click on measurement. Jon (as he does) dropped a little one-liner that hit just right: “Attribution should inform your decisions, not justify them.” It echoes something I often say in same spirit, using different words: Marketing (and our partners in ops+) needs to evolve from grading to guiding. Yes, we all track attainment, ROI, CAC, LTV by channel, the usual lagging indicators of growth. Sound familiar so far? But what about the early signals? The ones that tell you something’s working before the dashboard does. If so, here’s my ask: 👉 How do YOU define a “signal”? 👉 And what’s one piece of signal tech or process you can’t live without to stay ahead of shifts in your market, audience, messaging, or channel mix? Appreciate anyone who helps make me become a little smarter than I was yesterday. Talk to me! Humbly, This CMO #MarketingAttribution #CMOlife #RevenueOperations #B2BMarketing
🌱 Allison Munro (spoiler: could be controversial but shouldn't be) To me, an MQL is a signal if the account it belongs to is the right fit. Not a signal for Sales to engage but a signal to add the account to the TAL if not there - or to monitor it closer & engage it more. Now, the devil is in the detail here: your MQL should be VERY tightly defined with account fit criteria baked into the MQL qualification filters.
The one liner is actually even more concise: “Use attribution to IMPROVE your marketing not PROVE it”. And I love your focus on guiding not grading!
To me really early indicators is generating engagement within your ICP. For example if you are just launching a paid strategy, I would look at things that tells if audience is consuming my content. For me that is best shown within the ad platforms themselves, as things like dwell time, engagement rate, view rates etc. lives on the platforms. Content consumption is to me the first indicator that the marketing is working. But to be able to attribute things like views, engagements etc. you need a strong revenue attribution tool like Dreamdata, a personal favourite.
"Signal" like you mentioned is an early-indicator of interest and this is usually a combination of 1. ICP Fit 2. Persona Fit 3. Technology Fit 4. Timing Fit (shameless self-promotion here) I use Abmatic AI for these signals
I was an early customer of 6sense (and still a fan Latané Conant (she/her)). Their ability to work with me on early signals drove the success in engaging the cohort in our funnel (with its constant experimentation Jon Miller). DM me if you would like to go deeper.
What a powerful and insightful yet simple quote: "Attribution should inform your decisions, not justify them.”
🌱 Allison Munro This is probably why most marketers are disappointed with attribution. Measurement should inform where to invest, not be a game of credit and justification of spending.
Your session at CMO Summit was powerful. Great followup share!
The thing about signals is that raw signals usually need to be acquired and processed to become useful indicators of anything important. To know if your buyers are in market, there are literally thousands of signals that we collect and process via AI to create one useful signal of which are in market and where they are in their journeys. But that also means that the tactics you're employing, and all the touches you have with buyers are subject to the same rules. It's really unlikely that any one tactic or touch point is going to have a meaningful impact on its own. When buying groups have 100s of interactions with you in each buying journey, and when the people who make up that group have had multiple journeys over time, you're just not going to get a nice answer that says, this tactic gave us X lift.