How Marketing Attribution Can Revolutionize Your Sales Funnel

How Marketing Attribution Can Revolutionize Your Sales Funnel

In today’s competitive business landscape, marketing and sales teams must work in harmony to drive revenue. But what happens when leads generated by marketing efforts fall through the cracks, never making it to the sales funnel? This is where marketing attribution becomes critical, helping businesses understand the true value of their marketing efforts and improving sales performance. In my recent appearance on the Remarkable Marketing Podcast with Eric Eden, I shared insights into how businesses can use marketing attribution to stop lead leakage, bridge the gap between marketing and sales, and increase ROI. If you want to transform your sales funnel and maximize the impact of your marketing spend, keep reading!

Understanding the Disconnect Between Marketing and Sales

I started Cultivize after identifying a significant gap in B2B businesses: many companies excel at lead generation but struggle to convert those leads into sales. As I discussed on the podcast, companies often have no systems in place to track and evaluate the quality of the leads they generate. For example, one of our clients in the veterinary industry believed that trade shows were an effective way to generate leads. However, after implementing a CRM system, we discovered that most visitors were simply after the free swag, not potential buyers.

This problem isn’t unique. Another client in the roofing industry was spending heavily on marketing campaigns—direct mail, yard signs, and radio ads—but had no way to track which of these efforts was driving real revenue. This lack of visibility is a widespread issue, and without proper attribution, companies risk wasting marketing dollars on ineffective strategies.

The Importance of Marketing Attribution

Marketing attribution identifies which touchpoints in a customer’s journey contribute to a lead’s conversion. There are several models to choose from, including first-touch, last-touch, and multi-touch attribution. Eric and I discussed in the podcast how businesses often focus on just one attribution model. However, for a complete picture of marketing’s influence on sales, it’s crucial to look at both first-touch and last-touch attribution—and even consider spreading credit across all touchpoints, a model we playfully called the “peanut butter” approach.

Businesses can better allocate their marketing budgets using a comprehensive attribution model to the channels delivering the highest ROI. For example, many companies attribute conversions to the final touchpoint, such as a Google ad, without realizing the customer’s decision may have been influenced by a trade show or an email campaign weeks earlier. Proper attribution ensures businesses give credit where it’s due, allowing them to optimize their marketing spend.

Tracking Marketing Success with the Right Technology

It’s not enough to recognize the importance of attribution; businesses need the right tools and processes to track and analyze marketing performance effectively. During our conversation, I highlighted the importance of CRMs like HubSpot and SharpSpring, which can easily integrate with other marketing tools and provide valuable insights into what’s driving conversions.

At Cultivize, we help businesses set up these systems to track their marketing activities and lead journeys. For instance, we recommended that the roofing company we were working with create unique QR codes for each of their marketing channels. By tracking which QR codes customers used to access the company’s website, they could finally see which channels were driving the most traffic—and which were underperforming. This simple solution allowed them to focus their budget on the marketing efforts that delivered results.

If your business struggles to track and manage leads, it might be time to evaluate whether your CRM system is working for you. According to a study by the Harvard Business Review, over 70% of businesses aren’t fully utilizing their CRM capabilities, missing out on opportunities to improve their sales funnels.

Leveraging Data to Improve Marketing ROI

Marketing attribution is more than just tracking the source of your leads—it’s about making data-driven decisions to improve your marketing ROI. One of the points Eric and I emphasized is that businesses should think of their marketing budget as an investment. You wouldn’t hand over thousands of dollars to a financial advisor without knowing how your investments perform. The same principle applies to marketing. If you don’t know what’s working, you could be throwing money down the drain.

During the podcast, I shared a story about how we helped a client shift their focus from trade shows to geo-targeted Facebook ads. By serving ads to attendees of a trade show without physically attending, the client could save on travel expenses while still generating interest in their product. This pivot resulted in more qualified leads, as they could engage with prospects digitally rather than wasting time on visitors who weren’t serious buyers.

By analyzing the data from this campaign, we proved that the new strategy was far more cost-effective than attending the trade shows in person. This is the power of marketing attribution—it allows you to make smarter, more informed decisions about where to invest your marketing dollars.

Best Practices for Effective Attribution

If you want to maximize the value of your marketing efforts, there are a few best practices you should follow: