The guide to messy lead attribution
The guide to messy lead attribution
Let’s put an end to those Marketing/SDR arguments
Hey, Toni from Growblocks here! Welcome to another Revenue Letter!
This weekly email is my way to share knowledge and build a community of people who love to learn more about growing revenue in a data-driven and scientific way.
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Before I get into this week’s letter, I’ve been getting a lot of requests from RevOps folks lately to see Growblocks. So I figured, why not just show you? I’m going to host a live demo on October 18 at 1 p.m. CET. Sign up for that here.
I recently got an email from a reader with a question I hear often.
What’s the approach when it comes to attributing deals between Inbound (i.e. marketing folks) and Outbound (i.e. SDRs)?
Who hasn’t been in an organization where Marketing and SDRs fight for credit on Opps?
In today’s multi-touch sales environment, marketing and sales tend to work in the same field.
For example, a webinar lead might be seen as an easy win for marketing.
But at the same time, an SDR might have to do significant follow-up with the prospect to get a meeting booked.
Both can argue for it. So who gets the credit?
The way I’ve solved this in the past, put your Opps in separate buckets.
The “hot” bucket
These are your hand raisers. The ones with demo requests or a conversation about their needs.
These are easy to pick out and 100% marketing.
The “lukewarm” bucket
These are the non-handraisers. Think webinar attendees or ebook downloads.
The lead may have been created by marketing, but oftentimes, for it to become an Opp, they need a lot of SDR intervention.
No email nurturer program would have gotten that meeting booked. And marketing will admit this (usually).
I say split them 50/50 on departmental attribution.
But since these tend to be still a lot of work for the outbound rep, I would pay the SDRs in full (or else they will neglect them).
The “cold” bucket
This one is clear. 100% SDRs
The revived leads
Now on to a topic many people confuse with the above buckets: revived leads.
And it is probably the most complicated of the bunch. The real solution here are strong Rules of Engagement (ROE).
Rule 1: if the Opp is created later than 30 days after their last (real) marketing activity (real as in demo requests as opposed to non-real like “email open”):
Then it belongs to outbound.
Doing it like this incentivizes SDRs to go through older inbounds and work them again.
Rule 2: if the inbound happens on an account that was in the SDRs procession less than 90 days ago:
Then it’s an outbound deal.
It’s really tough to attribute anything here. But it’ll probably be a rare case anyway.
Rule 3: if an inbound Opp close loses, but an outbound Opp on the same account is opened within 90 days?
That’s an inbound deal.
I’ve seen some cheeky gamesmanship like this done by AEs to help their SDRs. It’s potentially rare, but make sure you keep an eye on that.
What kinds of ROE do you have in place? Does it work?
Send me an email and let me know. I would love to hear about it.
P.S. Sales Forecasting only covers a tiny part of the full end-to-end GTM funnel. If you are tired of choppy results and low predictability, consider checking out Growblocks for GTM Forecasting.