Multi-touch marketing attribution is an essential practice for any good marketing professional. It provides a complete picture of the customer journey, in addition to clarifying where the marketing spend is going and proving ROI for different channels and programs. But I found myself wanting to know more about the personal experience of managing marketing attribution and hear about it straight from individuals in our marketing community.
I set out to find someone with deep experience in marketing automation and measurement who could walk me through the top challenges of marketing attribution. I wanted to choose someone who has worked with measurement and reporting in many different marketing automation instances.
About Ajay Sarpal
Ajay Sarpal has proven knowledge of marketing attribution. He runs the Bizible User Group and has extensive experience both in-house and as a marketing automation consultant. So I sat down (virtually) with Ajay Sarpal, 2020 Marketo Champion of the Year, to discuss the challenges of marketing attribution and how he’s tackled them throughout his 20 years of experience. Sarpal is a marketer with experience both in-house and as a consultant. He is also 2x Marketo Champion, 5x Marketo Certified Expert, completed 9 advanced specializations on Marketing Automation, and one of the Fearless 50 top marketers.
It’s exciting to dig in and find out what the challenges are that his clients are facing marketing attribution, and he had lots to say about the subject. In the interview, we covered several key issues that marketers face today: top challenges with marketing attribution, proving the ROI of marketing channels, visualizing the customer journey, and improving marketing and sales alignment.
Q. What are the top challenges with marketing attribution?
A. “Lots of marketers don’t know which channels are generating the most revenue, so they’re qualifying people on soft metrics like opening an email 3 times or five times, and secondly, they’re not following a process or best practices in terms of attribution. With these issues, the leads sales receives can be of low quality, which frustrates them [sales]. It hurts the relationship between marketing and sales”. “Many marketers aren’t even aware that they can solve these challenges—especially with proving out ROI”.
Q. How can marketers start to show return on investment?
A. “Marketers need to evaluate the tools that they are using and how they work with their tech stack. Some tools work better than others. Marketing also needs to get sales stakeholders onboard to get proper access on Sales CRM and also understand the environment (processes).”
Q. How can marketers visualize the customer journey?
A. “Marketing attribution has various touchpoints – like the first touches, and the last touches, but with Bizible, you can capture all your touchpoints. It’s proprietary technology in Bizible that can capture that data and tie it back to Salesforce as well”.
Q. How can marketing and sales better communicate?
A. “If we want to tie marketing and sales together, marketers have to speak the language of sales. We need to add dollar values to what we’re quoting, we need to speak about revenue and velocity (time to convert a lead to close). We need to talk about timelines.”
Marketers face key challenges with proving the ROI of their activities, and every-touch marketing attribution through Bizible is here to help. If you want to accurately capture and measure your marketing activities, you need to implement a marketing attribution solution that can grow with your company. For more discussion on multi-touch attribution, check out the Bizible user group or speak directly to one of our experts at Bizible.
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