Accurate First-Touch/Multi-Touch (FT/MT) Attribution Reporting on Existing Opportunities

[Dan_Stevens_]

As marketers, we play a significant role in influencing existing opportunities, pipeline and sales.  Often time, we're not the ones generating the initial lead (especially for those of us in large organizations who primarily market/sell to existing accounts).  At the same time, it's important to demonstrate marketing's impact on the business.

Currently, we're struggling to report accurately on MT attribution - specifically for those leads that are attached to existing opportunities.  For example, at event, one of marketing's primary objectives is to move existing opportunities along our multi-stage opportunity process.  The way we track these types of event attendees in Marketo is first, we upload the full attendee list to the event program after the event.  And then we change the program status to "Marketing Influenced Opportunity" (a success step) for those applicable leads, send an alert to Marketing Ops, who then attaches the contact record in CRM to the existing opportunity.  Here's where the problem arises: for MT attribution to work, success must happen BEFORE the opportunity is created to get pipeline credit.  In this case, the opportunity already exists - all we're doing is attaching this contact record to the opportunity - and therefore the activity does not appear in our MT attribution reporting.  I'd be interested to learn how some of you deal with this situation.

BTW, we use MS Dynamics as our CRM platform.  Not sure if this even matters in this case.

[Anonymous]

There should definitely be some more flexability in Marketo to solve this as noted above. Or even develop a seperate set of program progressions designed for lifecycle measurement.

My thinking keeps coming back to the bigger picture processes and philosophy...."If someone wasnt part of a past oppty, why should their new activity get credit for influencing a older deal?"

The reasoning is the new event had little to nothing to do with the success of that previous won deal. Of couse, if that person then renews after the event, it should count.

If you truely want to give credit, this could become more of a process issue of enforcing reps to add people to the opportunity earlier in the Sales process. This doesnt help w net new but it does help w existing people.

Above being said, maybe your measurement isnt influence in the traditional sense since the event didnt "influence" the past deal. Maybe it's a "money in the room" measurement or whatever you want to call it. Thats extremely valuable for events where your focus can be to get Oppty value to events as opposed to people. Sounds like a good ABM feature. A few third party event platforms are thinking in this area too.

On another note, I see you have Dynamics. Wanted to ask you a few questions on that at the Summit.See you next weekq

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hey Jeff - thanks for chiming in here.  In our case, we have very long sales cycles (often > 6 months).  We also have a complex opportunity process that consists of 5 stages.  Someone could be in one of those early-mid stages and our role, as Marketing, is to help progress those leads to closed-won business.  Let's say we have a digital transformation opportunity, which includes a complete website redesign using a new CMS (e.g., Sitecore) and integration with best-in-class marketing platforms like Marketo.  We may choose to to invite them to the Marketo Summit and host them at a client workshop/dinner.  These activities are very relevant to help move this customer of ours to later opportunity stages.  This is actually very common with a lot of our deals.  We are also very event-heavy - and not big conferences/tradeshows, but rather client intimacy events, full-day Innovation days, etc.

Look forward to connecting with you next week in Vegas!

[Kenny_Elkington]

We have the change program success flow step for this reason.  It allows you to change the success date of your program status, to adjust your attribution.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

This idea would be welcome:

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Agreed

And you will have to go through a smart campaign for the moment, since you cannot use the flow step manually...

FYI, I just ran a test with a custom field named "Pgme Success Date" and the following flow:

But the results show no change to the success date of the lead in the program. This means that a token cannot be used that way

So we also need this idea:

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

Uugh.  Thanks for testing Greg.  I was in the process of changing up our program templates to now include a token to be used just for this.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

I also changed the field type to datetime, to no avail.

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Here is the SC result log:

As you can see, not change success, and yet it is in the flow.

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

Did you run this with the date hard-coded or just via token?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

I tried both. The hard coded date works fine in the past and in the future.

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

Ideally, I was hoping to set this value using Munctions.  Basically take the "opportunity create date" (if it was created prior to success) and subtract 1 day to modify the success date.  Something tells me that's not going to work though.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Kenny, thanks for this.  How should this be used in the overall scheme of things?  For example:

• If the opportunity was created 6 months ago and the program wasn't even setup until last week?
• How does this flow step work in relation to existing/prior program statuses?  You wouldn't change the success ("attended") to be dated prior to someone registering for an event.

[Kenny_Elkington]

There's really no one-size-fits-all approach here, as it's designed specifically for out-of-band changes to attribution

>If the opportunity was created 6 months ago and the program wasn't even setup until last week?

Configure a campaign to change the success date of the program to reflect the reality of when "success" was achieved in this cases.

>How does this flow step work in relation to existing/prior program statuses?  You wouldn't change the success ("attended") to be dated prior to someone registering for an event.

Typically, no, but it's entirely dependent on the reality of what you're trying to record.  If you're backfilling the real record of a registration, after the event has taken place then it would be totally appropriate to change the success date of attendance to before the creation date of the registration record.

[Dan_Stevens_]

What if we have multiple success steps?  Will this just impact the first step or all of the steps?  For example, in an event program we have the following program statuses (we don't use them all for a single program - but they're available for the three main event programs we build in Marketo (traditional registration, RSVP with no registration, and registration with approval/denial capabilities):

[Kenny_Elkington]

Program Success in Marketo is absolute, so the success is part of the membership relationship to the program.  The flow step alters the relationship, success true or false, and/or the date of success, it doesn't alter the status in the program.  It doesn't influence the success value of a given status(unless you specifically do so by changing a lead in a non-success status to have success = true).

[Dan_Stevens_]

Got it.  So this idea is still very relevant:

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Dan,

If I understand correctly, you are talking here of recent Marketing actions that occur during the opportunity life?

If so, shouldn't it make sense that this marketing action/program influences the revenue but not the pipeline created ?

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hi Greg - no, in our case, we report on marketing-influenced pipeline as well.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Dan,

To make sure we are on the same page:

Here's where the problem arises: for MT attribution to work, success must happen BEFORE the opportunity is created to get pipeline credit.

Are you talking here about the way Marketo computes MT or how MSD or even a third party reporting tool does it ?

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hi Greg - that statement is how Marketo computes MT attribution.  These are the FT/MT rules for Marketo: