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Aligning Attribution with Modern Buying Journey Realities · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:15
  Matt Heinz: All right, we're back live on the show floor at Forrester, B2B Summit.
• 0:20
  Thank you again to the Forrester team for making this possible.
• 0:22
  We've had some amazing interviews with Forrester analysts with some B2B ROI award
• 0:27
  winners and, here now with Ed Grossman.
• 0:30
  I'm just reading your LinkedIn profile, Ed.
• 0:32
  It says, yeah, that could have been a mistake.
• 0:33
  Chief Data Nerd.
• 0:34
  That's your title that you gave yourself at NavigateIQ also co-founder of Activate,
• 0:39
  illustrious career in B2B go to Market.
• 0:41
  Ed thanks for being here.
• 0:42
  Ed Grossman: Thank you.
• 0:43
  Thanks for having me.
• 0:44
  Appreciate all the work you do and this is great to see this podcast here.
• 0:46
  Matt Heinz: It is fun to be here.
• 0:48
  And I'm glad we are to make this work that we get you on here as well.
• 0:51
  I asked you what you wanted to talk about, and you had one word that could
• 0:53
  take us somewhere between three and twelve days, and that's attribution.
• 0:56
  And there's so many different angles on like attribution in terms of like, why is
• 1:00
  it a problem, why are we getting it wrong?
• 1:02
  But what fascinates you about attribution as a problem in B2B?
• 1:07
  Ed Grossman: It's a great question, Martha Schwartz and I founded Activate
• 1:10
  a few years ago, 15 years ago.
• 1:12
  And part of our philosophy of what was driving us then was this idea, this kind
• 1:18
  of risk abatement that we saw in markets.
• 1:20
  Every marketer wants to de-risk their marketing budget.
• 1:24
  They want to make their spend more productive, more useful,
• 1:27
  and over time, moving away from.
• 1:29
  You know, banner ads and billboards to demand gen and nurture and things
• 1:34
  that have a knowable return has been very popular with its own risks.
• 1:37
  Of course.
• 1:38
  Yep.
• 1:39
  But the motivation there is one around risk and efficiency.
• 1:44
  And one of the things that we think about and that is measurement how
• 1:49
  do I know if I'm making progress?
• 1:51
  Right?
• 1:51
  And one of the biggest barriers for people to be a kind of maximally efficient
• 1:56
  across their entire marketing budget is they can't today reliably measure
• 2:01
  the effectiveness, the influence, the attribution, whatever words you wanna use.
• 2:06
  Yeah.
• 2:06
  They don't really know as well as they would like, how well the various things
• 2:11
  I'm doing are affecting not just opens and clicks and cost per acquisition
• 2:18
  but following through to opportunity creation, opportunity wins and revenue.
• 2:23
  And so that's just fascinating from the same motivation for Activate is
• 2:26
  here at NavigateIQ and that is to help people be more efficient with their
• 2:31
  spend so they can be more productive.
• 2:34
  Matt Heinz: I would argue that in many cases we're measuring the wrong things and
• 2:38
  that we're trying to tell the wrong story.
• 2:41
  And I've talked to a lot of companies that struggle with attribution
• 2:43
  that can't even articulate to me like what data they're prioritizing
• 2:47
  or what story they're telling.
• 2:48
  When we talk about data and narrative do you agree that those are important?
• 2:53
  What are the components of the foundational elements that you need
• 2:56
  to have in place to have a chance at a strong attribution story?
• 3:01
  Ed Grossman: I have a couple of minds of this.
• 3:02
  So one of the, I don't know if I'll win this overall argument or this, or where
• 3:08
  our industry will go, but yeah, I actually think attribution is the wrong thing
• 3:13
  to measure and we all talk about it.
• 3:15
  I don't know if we'll ever displace it, but what we're trying
• 3:19
  to do is we're trying to, with attribution, we're trying to assign
• 3:21
  a dollar value to the thing I did.
• 3:24
  I did this thing, how much was it worth?
• 3:26
  And I wanna know that dollar so that I can then go make decisions around that
• 3:30
  so I can move my money to the places that have the most productivity per dollar.
• 3:33
  Right?
• 3:34
  But you don't actually need to know the dollar value of the action to
• 3:39
  know whether or not it was useful.
• 3:40
  And I think if we look to other areas of science, we see they're not,
• 3:45
  you know you can't determine today running, what the value of that on
• 3:51
  your health outcomes will be, but you do know is valuable or conversely.
• 3:55
  Eating too much sugar or drinking whatever health activities or even your
• 3:59
  genetics, we know they have a fact.
• 4:01
  We don't have to assign a number to know that there's a
• 4:03
  difference in your risk profile.
• 4:05
  There's a difference in your outcomes if you have these things.
• 4:07
  And so I think we can learn from the other sciences to say, even if we don't
• 4:12
  attribute a specific dollar value to that marketing activity, we can know
• 4:16
  whether some activities are more highly associated with producing the positive
• 4:21
  outcomes we wanna see versus others.
• 4:23
  And certainly we can, rather than argue about how much dollar it was and
• 4:27
  whether sales actually is worth more or marketing is worth more, we could say,
• 4:31
  why don't we just stop doing the things that are clearly not producing revenue?
• 4:35
  Right?
• 4:36
  That'd be a great first step, right?
• 4:37
  If we could do that, and maybe then we'll come back to the
• 4:39
  revenue attribution dollar amount.
• 4:43
  Or conversely, let's look at the things that are clearly moving the needle.
• 4:47
  And let's do more of those.
• 4:48
  And so again, I don't know that I'll move the industry or even really trying
• 4:53
  to move us off this discussion of attribution, but I ultimately, I do think
• 4:56
  it's the wrong thing to be looking at.
• 4:58
  Matt Heinz: I think it's a great way of thinking about it.
• 5:00
  'cause if you could take that off the table too often we associate attribution
• 5:04
  with credit and it becomes a political exercise inside an organization.
• 5:08
  I think a lot of companies that are here at Forrester, they are big
• 5:11
  companies selling complex products.
• 5:13
  Mm-hmm.
• 5:13
  And so we're talking about months, quarters, if not
• 5:15
  years of sales cycle length.
• 5:17
  Let's not pretend we can narrow this down to, oh, that digital channel or
• 5:20
  that whitepaper download that day.
• 5:23
  Almost all the people in this room have to have a body of work mentality.
• 5:26
  Right.
• 5:27
  So trying to figure out what gets credit, like unilateral credit is ridiculous.
• 5:32
  Ed Grossman: Absolutely.
• 5:32
  We've launched NavigateIQ, we build dashboards.
• 5:35
  We aggregate customer data to understand this.
• 5:38
  Yeah.
• 5:38
  And we purposely do not show an attribution dollar.
• 5:41
  We could, we've got it.
• 5:42
  We could choose the, is it 1/10th of revenue or whatever
• 5:46
  number you'd want to choose.
• 5:47
  But we avoid that.
• 5:48
  Yeah.
• 5:48
  We don't wanna get caught in that trap of credit, as you know.
• 5:50
  Right.
• 5:51
  But we can begin to see, oh, look at that.
• 5:54
  Deals are not closing unless they have certain buyers on the journey, or if,
• 5:59
  unless we have a certain set of touches.
• 6:01
  Mm-hmm.
• 6:02
  Or we're not seeing accounts really qualifying themselves for conversion.
• 6:05
  Unless we see, you know, 15 people from the account.
• 6:10
  We can learn a lot about how to improve our effectiveness as marketers without
• 6:15
  having to get into argument with the sales person about the value of the credit.
• 6:19
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
• 6:20
  One of the other challenges companies have often when they're trying to
• 6:23
  figure out their attribution story is a culture change to get there.
• 6:27
  Mm-hmm.
• 6:28
  To realize it's not gonna be like marketing versus sales,
• 6:31
  sales versus marketing.
• 6:32
  That body of work and thinking about it holistically requires an organization,
• 6:35
  not just the go to market teams, but the executives, the board, all the people
• 6:40
  that are overseeing where the money comes and how the money gets displayed.
• 6:43
  It's way more complex than people want it to be, and I think
• 6:45
  that's an inconvenient truth.
• 6:46
  That is just a reality in marketing.
• 6:48
  How does that cloud or maybe help focus the attribution story
• 6:52
  companies are telling internally?
• 6:54
  Ed Grossman: You know, I do think it's a cloud in part because marketers are
• 6:57
  walking in saying, I want to know the value of this so I can argue for budget
• 7:01
  to go, if this is worth a dollar, then I should be able to spend a dollar on it.
• 7:05
  Right?
• 7:06
  So that's where they're starting and they're getting clouded.
• 7:08
  I think conversely, we know that if A CMO can go in and say, Hey, look, here's
• 7:14
  the top 10 deals, to the salesperson, to the financial person their CFO, their
• 7:19
  CRO, and say, here's how I supported that deal over the past two years.
• 7:24
  Here's how that name got in the database.
• 7:25
  Here's all the times I touched it.
• 7:27
  Here's how many of those people you spoke to and how many more you didn't speak to.
• 7:31
  If I could do that for the top 10 deals, I'm part of an
• 7:34
  effective conversation about.
• 7:36
  Why and how we're helping to support what you're doing as opposed to
• 7:39
  an argument about what it's worth.
• 7:41
  We wanna talk about where am I supporting you.
• 7:44
  I think the other piece is the promise of AI that will help us with this.
• 7:48
  And I don't mean it's gonna help us figure out the attribution number 'cause
• 7:51
  I'm gonna stick with my guns on not wanting to focus on a dollar value.
• 7:54
  Yeah.
• 7:54
  But rather if you can look at every deal, at every account and
• 7:59
  every touch and every buyer title.
• 8:02
  And you can pass that to a large language model and begin to ask questions like
• 8:08
  what marketing activities should I stop?
• 8:10
  Matt Heinz: Right,
• 8:10
  Ed Grossman: right.
• 8:11
  Well, we know the data's in there.
• 8:12
  We could look at every deal every webcast, which webcast, which lead
• 8:16
  gen provider has the least number of deals associated with them.
• 8:20
  Let's just cut them off the bottom.
• 8:22
  Right?
• 8:22
  That's the place to start.
• 8:23
  Right?
• 8:24
  And I think AI will help us begin to find those trends.
• 8:29
  Not because it's, impossibly complex, just because it's a huge
• 8:32
  amount of labor to go through all that data and look at it.
• 8:35
  Can I look at the topics of content that tend to be more highly
• 8:39
  associated with me winning deals.
• 8:41
  So that I could see if account's dealing with this content.
• 8:43
  Yeah.
• 8:43
  I'm probably gonna close them.
• 8:45
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
• 8:45
  I think the way you guys are thinking about attribution is
• 8:47
  refreshing and I'm excited to see you guys grow this opportunity.
• 8:50
  Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio live from the Forrester B2B Summit Marketplace
• 8:55
  Floor with Ed Grossman, the Chief Data Nerd, his title, not mine for NavigateIQ,
• 8:59
  Chief Strategy Officer to Activate.
• 9:00
  And I think what the world really wants to know Ed.
• 9:03
  How does a philosophy and music theory major end up doing all of this?
• 9:06
  Like, I did not know that until this morning , that's what
• 9:09
  you studied at Boston College.
• 9:10
  You are studying towards a PhD in philosophy of religion as well.
• 9:14
  A lot of us in B2B didn't necessarily study B2B in college,
• 9:18
  but that's a unique set of stuff.
• 9:20
  I'm very interested.
• 9:21
  Ed Grossman: No one reads LinkedIn that far down you scrolled all the way down.
• 9:25
  I have no idea.
• 9:27
  No.
• 9:28
  I think that taking apart complex problems which happens in music.
• 9:33
  Yeah.
• 9:34
  And it happens in philosophy.
• 9:36
  Mm-hmm.
• 9:37
  Is important for business.
• 9:39
  Yeah.
• 9:40
  And I am just, by nature, a curious person.
• 9:42
  Mm-hmm.
• 9:43
  And so when someone says to me, I have this problem I want to know more.
• 9:47
  Yeah.
• 9:47
  And helping marketers get to the bottom of these questions.
• 9:52
  What's working?
• 9:52
  Yeah.
• 9:53
  Is this moving the needle?
• 9:54
  Can I tell if, for instance, what does my idealized buyer team look like?
• 10:00
  I'll give you another one.
• 10:01
  What real correlation does intent have to an account becoming an
• 10:08
  opportunity or a deal closing.
• 10:10
  We know what maybe an intent provider hopes it does and they
• 10:12
  will have some good case studies.
• 10:13
  Yeah.
• 10:14
  But if we looked across every deal, what would it actually correlate to?
• 10:17
  Yeah.
• 10:17
  Yeah.
• 10:17
  I'm curious about these things.
• 10:19
  And I think that by exploring them with customers, not with a goal.
• 10:24
  NavigateIQ doesn't have an ax to grind.
• 10:25
  Yeah.
• 10:26
  We're not trying to push leads or webcast or intent or Yeah.
• 10:29
  We just wanna know what's happening and try to get to the bottom of it
• 10:32
  the best we can and we think that'll be a real way to help marketers.
• 10:35
  Matt Heinz: That analogy I think is really fascinating 'cause I think about
• 10:38
  philosophy and think about music and just how complex both of those get.
• 10:41
  Like for anyone that loves music, like you can experience something
• 10:45
  that really tugs at your emotions and can change the way you feel.
• 10:48
  Music theory is incredibly complex.
• 10:51
  Ed Grossman: I have a friend who studied computer science in college
• 10:54
  and is a programmer engineer.
• 10:57
  He's a bit older.
• 10:59
  When he was getting outta college, there really weren't computer
• 11:02
  science majors in most universities.
• 11:04
  Yeah.
• 11:04
  But the computer science jobs were typically recruited
• 11:07
  from music theory majors.
• 11:09
  Mm-hmm.
• 11:10
  Because the music theory structures, can be a little mathematical.
• 11:13
  Yeah.
• 11:13
  But they also flow over time, like program needs to, and so there's
• 11:18
  a lot of complexity there in music if you like that kind of stuff.
• 11:22
  And so for me it's very connected.
• 11:23
  It's complexity moving over time, and it's actually I'm not gonna say music
• 11:27
  theory and marketing attribution are the same thing, but they're pretty close.
• 11:31
  Matt Heinz: I, well, they're not the same thing, but I think the analogies in terms
• 11:34
  of complexity are fascinating to me.
• 11:35
  And it's not surprising, given that you said that, like why
• 11:38
  trying to find some like.
• 11:40
  Insights and direction outta that complexity is interesting to you.
• 11:43
  So sitting here at Forrester so far today, I feel like this conference has
• 11:46
  talked about buying journeys, buying groups, a little bit of AI, a lot of
• 11:50
  sales, marketing, product teams, creating better alignment amongst each other.
• 11:54
  If we're sitting here in two years, the same conference, what
• 11:56
  do you think we're talking about?
• 11:57
  What do you think the focus areas from the content?
• 12:00
  Ed Grossman: Well, I hope that we're talking about the non-trivial
• 12:06
  impact that AI is having.
• 12:07
  Yep.
• 12:08
  Beyond you personalize an email and you changed a quarter of my webpage and an
• 12:13
  agent that had some interesting ideas, but I hope we're talking about the way
• 12:17
  that AI is truly identifying actions for us, to change is replacing or improving
• 12:24
  some of our own actions and outcomes.
• 12:26
  I think AI is a huge boon for our entire industry and will
• 12:30
  not take away jobs but add jobs.
• 12:33
  So I hope that, but I don't know I remain unconvinced that the use
• 12:37
  cases, the actual use cases that I see real marketers engaging with AI
• 12:42
  remain pretty few and far between.
• 12:46
  Matt Heinz: I'm with you on a number of those fronts, including
• 12:47
  you like I have no freaking idea.
• 12:49
  I remember, I think we're both old enough to remember Mary Meeker, right?
• 12:51
  Yeah.
• 12:51
  Who used to write the Internet Trends Report and there was one year she
• 12:54
  came out and said there will be a time not far from now when mobile is
• 12:58
  where people start, where that will be the primary device, and we need to
• 13:00
  start having a mobile first mentality.
• 13:02
  I remember reading that and thinking like.
• 13:03
  Yeah.
• 13:04
  That's nuts.
• 13:05
  There's no way.
• 13:06
  And now she's a hundred percent right, but we take it for granted.
• 13:09
  And I think AI two years from now is going to be somewhat similar.
• 13:11
  It is gonna be revolutionary and it's gonna change a lot about how we interact
• 13:15
  with the world and in the workplace.
• 13:16
  And in two years we will take it for granted.
• 13:18
  We will be onto the next thing and those that lean in on it will be better
• 13:21
  employees, will be better professionals, will be better humans as a part of it.
• 13:25
  Ed Grossman: Yeah.
• 13:25
  I think you're right.
• 13:26
  And I think about the things that, to your point about Mary Meeker the things
• 13:30
  that mobile and the internet combined enabled that we didn't even conceive of.
• 13:35
  And we think about Uber mm-hmm.
• 13:37
  And Airbnb.
• 13:38
  The, this, yeah.
• 13:39
  It, the houses existed.
• 13:41
  The cars existed.
• 13:42
  Cab company, all these things existed.
• 13:43
  But yeah, this moment happened when you could carry that device with you,
• 13:48
  and you could communicate with anybody who had a car, and so Uber was born.
• 13:51
  Yep.
• 13:52
  There will be entire new industries, ecosystems, software platforms, tools that
• 13:59
  we use, ways of marketing that we have not even really conceived of yet if AI can
• 14:05
  deliver on this promise, I hope it does.
• 14:08
  We'll see.
• 14:08
  Matt Heinz: Well I think, you know I would argue AI has already
• 14:11
  delivered just in terms of helping us understand like what's possible.
• 14:13
  Mm-hmm.
• 14:14
  And I think about the people that have created some of those leaps in innovation.
• 14:17
  Mm-hmm.
• 14:18
  And they're exponential thinkers I mean, Mary Meeker among them to be
• 14:21
  able to see what's in front of them and say, this is leading to something that
• 14:24
  very, very few other people can see.
• 14:27
  Now what we forget is that many of them are wrong.
• 14:29
  Right.
• 14:29
  Yeah.
• 14:29
  For every Mary Meeker talking about that, there's other people that
• 14:31
  thought other things were gonna happen that we're not talking about here.
• 14:33
  Yeah.
• 14:33
  'cause they didn't happen.
• 14:34
  And so we don't remember their names.
• 14:36
  We remember Mary's name, right?
• 14:37
  Yeah.
• 14:37
  Ed Grossman: Survivor Bias for Mary Meeker on that one.
• 14:39
  Yes, exactly.
• 14:40
  So you're right.
• 14:41
  And sitting right around us, there are a number of booths that say, in fact, almost
• 14:45
  every booth says AI somewhere in it.
• 14:47
  Yeah.
• 14:47
  And so, there will be some survivors and we will agree that they were brilliant
• 14:52
  in their time, but we'll probably forget about the 80% of people who missed it.
• 14:55
  Matt Heinz: Well, and there's so many different angles of it.
• 14:57
  Like I'm staring across at a booth that says that they are the very first casual
• 15:00
  AI marketing intelligence platform.
• 15:02
  What is casual AI?
• 15:04
  I don't know.
• 15:05
  Maybe we'll find out someday.
• 15:06
  Maybe.
• 15:06
  We'll, I'll be like, I'm sitting, maybe this is like the, my
• 15:08
  2025 version of mobile first.
• 15:10
  It's like everyone's gonna be talking about casual AI.
• 15:12
  I hope not.
• 15:13
  But it could be.
• 15:14
  We don't know.
• 15:15
  It could be.
• 15:15
  I'm happy we're not talking about social selling anymore.
• 15:17
  It's just part of selling.
• 15:17
  It's better, it's better now.
• 15:19
  Yeah.
• 15:19
  Yeah.
• 15:19
  Yeah.
• 15:19
  Ed, thank you so much for joining us today, Ed Grossman.
• 15:21
  Where can people learn more about NavigateIQ?
• 15:23
  Ed Grossman: NavigateIQ.ai.
• 15:26
  Mm-hmm.
• 15:26
  Sorry to say that there.
• 15:27
  That's alright.
• 15:28
  Whole discussion but yeah.
• 15:29
  www.navigateiq dot a i and Matt, thanks for having us.
• 15:34
  Matt Heinz: Awesome.
• 15:35
  Shout out to Martha over here making sure we're saying the right things.
• 15:37
  Ed Grossman: Martha co-founder of both Activate and NavigateIQ.
• 15:39
  Matt Heinz: Awesome.
• 15:40
  Thank you, Ed, for being here.
• 15:41
  Ed Grossman: Thank you.