Picture this: It’s the quarterly executive meeting, and the room is tense. Marketing, Sales, and the Channel team are all presenting different numbers, each insisting their data is correct. The meeting derails into a debate over whose figures are accurate, leaving little time for strategic discussions.
This scenario is all too common in the world of B2B marketing. Data discrepancies between departments lead to confusion, mistrust, and inefficient use of valuable meeting time. The root cause? Significant gaps in B2B marketing analytics.
But there’s hope on the horizon. Forward-thinking marketing organizations have found a way to shift the conversation from arguing about data validity to focusing on performance optimization. How? By addressing the critical gaps in their analytics approach.
In this blog, we’ll talk about the six biggest gaps in B2B marketing analytics and how addressing them can transform your marketing strategy, align your teams, and drive real business growth.
Fixing Six Gaps in Marketing Analytics
01 Your CRM Doesn’t Think of a Buyer as an Account
This is the most common problem we see companies struggle with, and it has big implications.
Salesforce’s approach to organizing contacts, accounts, and leads has created significant reporting challenges in B2B sales. The separation of people into different objects makes it difficult to accurately report on activities during an opportunity. This issue is particularly in B2B sales, where multiple individuals from a single account are often involved, causing campaign and sales activities to spread across various objects. Leads, in particular, exist in isolation, with their campaign data often excluded from reports. Even with tools that attempt to link leads to accounts, achieving accurate multi-touch attribution without a specialized customer data platform remains challenging.
To address these issues, companies have tried various solutions. Some require sales teams to manually attribute source campaigns when creating opportunities, but this approach is flawed due to inconsistencies in how salespeople assign sources. An even more cumbersome method involves manually reviewing each opportunity at the end of a quarter to distribute credit among channels, marketing, and sales.
Two potential solutions exist: eliminating the use of leads or automating the immediate conversion of leads to contacts. However, completely removing leads may not be feasible due to existing integrations with various tools and the risk of creating duplicate accounts. The most effective approach combines automatic data enrichment with sophisticated matching algorithms to associate leads with accounts automatically. This method should be supplemented with a review process to handle exceptions, especially in complex, multi-level corporate structures where selecting the correct account may require additional logic.
02 Your Company Thinks 1 Campaign Activity = 1 Sale
You may remember our favorite diagram:
Linear thinking in B2B marketing often leads to organizational conflicts and misunderstandings. The reality is that B2B marketing is a complex, non-linear process involving multiple touchpoints and stakeholders. Before a sale is finalized, numerous individuals within a single account interact with your company in various ways.
Attempting to attribute the “credit” for initiating or closing an opportunity to a single interaction is an oversimplification that many companies still pursue. This approach typically results in chaos for marketing operations professionals and end-of-quarter disputes. It’s crucial to recognize that linear thinking fails to account for the nuanced influence of campaigns on in-progress deals, the dynamics of buyer committees, and the actual complexity of buyer behavior. Relying on single swim-lane campaign reporting invariably leads to underestimating marketing’s true contribution to the organization.
While some companies attempt to address this issue by determining sourcing through committee decisions or monthly reviews to pinpoint each opportunity’s origin, these methods are not scalable and remain highly subjective. The real solution requires a more comprehensive approach.
The next crucial step is to introduce and promote multi-touch attribution reporting. This approach becomes more palatable for executives when they can visualize buyer journey examples, helping them understand why multiple factors should be considered when assigning “credit” for a sale. To further enhance the effectiveness of this approach, it’s recommended to either use attribution reporting to evaluate campaign effectiveness or incorporate sales and channel activity data when reporting on marketing contribution. By including activity data from multiple departments, you can eliminate the perception of marketing bias in reporting and reduce potential friction between teams, acknowledging that opportunities are won through collaborative efforts across the organization.
03 Bad Data Hygiene
While this may seem like a repeat of number one on our list, bad data hygiene speaks specifically to duplicates and missing information. You can have good data hygiene (no duplicates or missing information) and still struggle with leads vs. contacts.
Bad data hygiene can also encompass belated campaign member uploads, improper integration setup, and missing activity data.
Data quality is crucial in analytics, as the saying goes: “Garbage in, garbage out.” Reports rely on structured data tables, and if the data is missing or improperly formatted, it becomes impossible to generate meaningful insights. While hiring interns for data cleanup is a temporary solution, it’s not sustainable in the long run.
A more effective approach involves leveraging third-party enrichment tools for data collection, although this may become challenging as privacy laws evolve. Organizations should focus on improving CRM data entry practices and seamlessly integrating web forms, chat tools, and other data collection software. Collaborating with a marketing operations professional can help automate lead collection processes. For scenarios where automation isn’t feasible, such as event-provided scanners, it’s crucial to establish a protocol for promptly uploading campaign lists, ideally as close to the event date as possible.
04 Data Silos
The average marketing organization has over two dozen tools in their tech stack. Want to guess how many of them are integrated?
Your marketing automation platform categorizes people as email addresses. Your website looks at IP addresses. Social media can be largely anonymous until a form is filled. Direct mail is a name and address. And the list goes on.
The ability to align all of your program data against your CRM is crucial for proving your marketing program’s value to the organization. Without this alignment, marketers struggle to justify their budget requests to CFOs and executives who want to know the precise investment required to generate leads, opportunities, and closed deals. The challenge lies in demonstrating the ROI of each marketing channel in a way that financial decision-makers can understand and appreciate.
Currently, many marketers are resorting to time-consuming manual processes to compile reports, with the average marketer spending two to three days per month on this task. Some even dedicate more than four days to piecing together data from various sources like CSVs, Excel, Google, CRMs, and marketing automation tools. While executives might view this as an acceptable expense, it often negatively impacts employee morale and productivity.
To address these challenges, marketing departments have typically taken one of two approaches: either hiring specialized personnel like database administrators or data scientists to manage their information or collaborating with their IT department. Both solutions involve significant time investments in learning the data and developing methods to merge information from different sources. Additionally, these approaches require data enrichment tools for both account and personal information, as well as IP address enrichment.
It’s important to note that each time a new tool is added or replaced, additional development work is needed to map the new data correctly. An alternative solution is to use a customer data platform like CaliberMind, which handles the data transformation layer automatically, potentially saving time and resources while providing more accurate and timely insights for marketing decision-making.
05 Oversimplified Campaign Reporting
Years ago, the best practice in marketing for B2B was mapping the single buyer journey. This resulted in many people adopting the Sirius Decisions waterfall and configuring their systems to more or less conform to this worldview.
Don’t get us wrong. We love the waterfall and still recommend using these data points to improve your hand-offs between sales and marketing. And it’s still a good way to measure a campaign’s ability to drive name acquisition.
Understanding the importance of comprehensive marketing attribution in B2B is crucial. Most B2B transactions have extended sales cycles, often lasting six months or more, with numerous interactions occurring before a deal is closed. Traditional single-pane reporting fails to capture the complexities of committee buying behavior, in-flight opportunities, and the multiple touchpoints involved in even simple purchasing decisions.
To address this, companies must invest in multi-dimensional campaign reporting. While some may resort to reporting only on available data and accepting an incomplete picture of campaign value, this approach falls short. The true solution lies in investing in skilled personnel and the necessary technology to fully demonstrate marketing’s ROI. Without this investment, businesses risk making decisions based on incomplete information, potentially undervaluing their marketing efforts and missing opportunities for optimization.
06 Salesforce Is Your Source of Truth
We’re glad everyone has agreed on a single data source. But unless you’re piping your data out to a data warehouse, running transformation code, and piping it back in, you’re still hitting every snag we listed above. If your reports have to be in Salesforce for people to look at them, you’re also limited on the number of joins and whether or not you can do trending.
Salesforce offers numerous features, but its reporting capabilities are limited due to data structure issues rather than visualization tools. This limitation becomes apparent when trying to analyze sales activity against campaign members or access influence data that includes lead campaign information – tasks that even SFDC Einstein struggles with. Many organizations resort to reporting on available data, accepting an incomplete picture of their campaigns’ value. However, this approach means making decisions based on partial information. The optimal solution is to invest in skilled personnel and appropriate technology.
This investment is crucial for comprehensively viewing and demonstrating marketing’s ROI, as anything less results in decision-making based on an incomplete narrative.
Need to get in touch about your marketing analytic gaps? Or just have general questions about marketing analytics, reach out to CaliberMind today!
