Today, we welcomed Steffen Hedebrandt, Chief Marketing Officer at Dreamdata, a Revenue Attribution Platform to the Data Beats Opinion Podcast. Steffen is a subject matter expert in connecting marketing activities with revenue. He has an exceptional growth mindset, is data-driven by heart and loves all parts of scaling the commercial side of a business. A notorious growth hacker with a successful track record of scaling businesses and building teams at Upwork and Airtame, Steffen knows firsthand the pain points of rapidly scaling marketing and growth. One of the most amazing things I learned during this interview is that it takes an average of 32 touches from first touch to a deal being won in the B2B space. That's a lot of wiggle room for attribution error, and why it is more critical than ever to be able to see accurate data through the customer journey. In this interview with Steffen Hedebrandt, you will learn: How the nature of b2b marketing differs from traditional marketing strategies The differences between typical CRM attribution models and deeper analytics Potential blind spots in your marketing that you may not even know exist The shockingly low number of b2b companies that use a genuine data-driven model Steffen's new Go-To-Market Benchmark Report for 2022 And so much more!
Potent Quotes:
Steffen Hedebrandt: No. Even just for ourselves, I know, obviously, we do multi-touch tracking all itself, and just for a demo call to be booked on our website, normally, it takes five sessions. And that typical pattern will be the true referral source initially, which could be an ad or something else, then it could be an organic visit, and then maybe you see three direct visits afterwards. And if you want to look at the original source fields in your CM system, it'll tell you, "Oh, this is one converted from a direct visit."
But, what you're not seeing is that you actually spend money on starting that journey, which means either you're growing a lot slower than you could do, or you're just wasting a lot of money because you can't really connect your spend to the business outcome that you're trying to achieve.
Keith Perhac: Right, exactly. And what I've seen in a lot of ... Because I think CRMs are starting to ... They want to have the bullet point of, "Oh, we track attribution," right? When they have the bare minimum that they need to be able to say that. But even something like ads, where you're looking at, now, branded search where ... Essentially, the Google tax. You have to be spending all this money in order to be ranking high in Google, and the CRMs are attributing that as paid traffic, even though, really, it shouldn't be paid traffic, because it's not, right? It's a tax. So, that's something where a system like yours, or what we do, becomes more important because you need to be able to drill into that more than just the top level, like, "Oh, it was an ad."
Steffen Hedebrandt: Yeah. But I think we can at least see, typically, when we look at, for example, the paid channel, there's 3 to 5x difference in terms of you understanding the world as a last touch world, or the true first touch, which means if you can invest 5x the amount of money into your marketing, then you're going to completely outgrow your competition.
Steffen Hedebrandt: And we just released some benchmarks from our own customers now, and we can see that, on average, there were 32 touches involved in an account from first touch to a deal being won, and you know, I really, honestly don't think that one touch makes a difference except that, actually, I think if there were one touch, it would be the first touch that you are actually able to get in front of the person who started that journey with you.
Steffen Hedebrandt: Forget about that funnel and just focus on getting quality touches in front of people every week. Do high-quality content, do high-quality calls, do high-quality meetings. Just pegging those high-quality touches along the way. It would be nice if there were such a thing as a data recipe for what to do, but I fear you would end up in a too-average place to say something smart.
Keith Perhac: I think that's always the challenging part about analytics, especially in the agency world, because there are always 800 ways to slice the data. And whether consciously or not, you tend to go towards the one that makes you look better.
Steffen Hedebrandt: I think there's a lot of things that are interesting, but one of them is an average journey from the first touch to a B2B deal being won is 192 days.
Steffen Hedebrandt: Yeah. There's nothing as dangerous as a pretty graph.