Attribution is one of the most misunderstood concepts in B2B marketing for three reasons:
- With all of the systems marketers use, it’s complicated!
- Every model answers a different question.
- How we instrument attribution doesn’t always align with how we intend to use it.
The simplest definition of attribution is assigning opportunity value (dollars) to touchpoints to estimate what works best. With multi-touch models, the theory is that the kinds of touchpoints that are assigned the most dollars are the most effective at generating pipeline or bookings.
This means that attribution is only as accurate as:
- What we capture digitally, whether that’s a manual tradeshow badge scan upload or a web page form fill.
- How closely we align the touchpoints we’re including with the ability to answer our most important questions.
- How closely we align the model and included touchpoints with the questions our business leaders care about most.
Let’s dig into how Salesforce, HubSpot, and CaliberMind tackle attribution modeling.
Salesforce Models
Salesforce has three models commonly used in the B2B space, and each model has restrictions:
Lead Source (First Touch Model)
The First Touch model is intended to answer the question: Which tactics are the most effective at getting accounts to first engage with our brand?
Salesforce has a standard field on the Lead or Contact record that maps to Lead Source, which is the activity that added a person to the database. It’s important to ask your administrator how this field is used today and double check how your marketing automation field integration functions. The best practice setup is a static snapshot of how the name was first acquired.
When it comes to attribution, Salesforce simply pushes the Lead Source to the Opportunity record—as long as a salesperson selects a Primary Contact on the Account. Without a Primary Contact, this field will default to “User Input” or blank/null.
Pro Tip: If you’re having trouble getting sellers to enter a Primary Contact on an Opportunity, remove the “opportunity create” button from the Account page layout. Now, sellers must create Opportunities from the Contact they work with the most on that Account.
Opportunity Source (Last Touch Model)
Many organizations pull reports and give credit for new revenue based on which department “generated” an Opportunity. This model depends on whether the salesperson creates the Opportunity from the “right” Primary Contact.
Some organizations take this logic further and use custom fields to determine a department source. Did an inside salesperson create the Opportunity? Was the Opportunity generated from a deal registration? Did the Opportunity result from a marketing-qualified lead conversion? Without these sources, companies usually assume that sales self-sourced the Opportunity.
Pro Tip: Ask key stakeholders how they define the Primary Contact and socialize this definition with the sales team. Chances are high that you’ll get multiple definitions and need to work on aligning the organization around a single definition.
Opportunity Influence
Salesforce’s multi-touch attribution pulls Campaign Member records related to Opportunity Contact Role Members into a Campaign Influence object. The success of this model relies on your sales team’s discipline with data entry. It also makes it hard to track partner influence that isn’t associated with campaign activity.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as you aren’t trying to use a multi-touch model to estimate how much pipeline and bookings marketing should get “credit” for. That’s because other departments’ efforts aren’t factored into the model, so it should be used exclusively as a marketing campaign optimization tool. In other words, this model is only as good as your campaign adoption and the willingness of the sales team to use Opportunity Contact Roles for more than just the Primary Contact.
Pro Tip: We recommend running a regular analysis of how many Contacts are associated with Opportunity Contact Roles versus how many Contacts are engaging with your brand at the Account level. This will help you understand if there are significant gaps in your model.
How Does Salesforce Attribution Compare to Attribution Platforms?
Attribution platforms like CaliberMind can resolve several of the issues that come with using an attribution model within Salesforce, including:
- Incorporating touchpoints from all Account-related Contacts and Leads that can be matched back to the Account.
- Incorporating touchpoints from multiple departments and systems.
- Operating without being dependent on Opportunity Contact Roles.
- Operating without being dependent on Campaign Member records.
- Supporting many multi-touch models like custom and chain-based (machine learning).
Hubspot Models
Hubspot has all of the attribution models that Salesforce offers, plus several other models, such as U-Shaped and Time-Decay. However, significant limitations exist regarding which interactions (touchpoints) are incorporated into these models:
- You can only associate up to three contacts with a deal.
- If interactions are taking place with a contact not associated with a deal, you need to manually update the records to connect the contact to the deal.
- You need to pay for an enterprise-level license of Hubspot.
- You need to enable the interaction types you want to include.
- You have little control over which marketing touchpoints are included.
The big benefit to Hubspot is its ability to automatically associate people with company records. We can skip leads altogether. If you use HubSpot CMS for your website or leverage their landing pages, their UTM tracking is pretty reliable.
There are significant drawbacks, though. Hubspot will automatically incorporate website visits and email clicks and opens into your attribution reporting. This can skew activity in marketing’s favor and at sales’ expense. It’s also really hard to know whether those email clicks and opens reflect a human intentionally interacting with an email—or a security bot.
There also isn’t a great way to integrate partner influence unless their activity is manually logged and associated with the opportunity. Finally, one of the biggest limitations is that the number of contacts associated with a deal is limited to three people. B2B buyer committees often include eight to ten people, which means you can’t report on most of your brand interactions with the account.
How Does HubSpot Attribution Compare to Attribution Platforms?
Attribution platforms like CaliberMind tackle many of the issues that come with using an attribution model within HubSpot, including:
- Incorporating touchpoints from all company-related contacts, not just deal-related contacts or deal-related touches.
- Incorporating touchpoints from multiple departments at your organization and systems beyond Hubspot.
- Allowing you to control what kind of touchpoints are included in your attribution models
- Supporting many multi-touch models, including custom and chain-based.
What Makes CaliberMind Different From Other Attribution Vendors?
CaliberMind integrates with both Salesforce and HubSpot, automatically incorporating all touchpoints with any account, even if those touchpoints were with a person still floating out as a Lead record in your CRM. This also helps marketing teams bypass the need to ask salespeople to use Opportunity Contact Roles in Salesforce.
If your organization wants to use multi-touch attribution to prove marketing is responsible for a portion of pipeline and revenue, you can incorporate touchpoints from other departments or in-app signals. We also offer best practices around what should and should not be included in your model.
CaliberMind isn’t just for marketing touchpoints. Our “virtual campaigns” incorporate successful sales calls, meetings, and email responses into your attribution model without blowing up the campaign table in your CRM.
Learn more about how CaliberMind can deliver more than CRM-based attribution modules and improve attribution at your company.
