The dire state of B2B marketing attribution

It’s rather… embarrassing.

Lenny recently published a fantastic article on B2C attribution, which made me feel a twinge of sadness for the sorry state of B2B attribution. The post is packed with so much sophistication around B2C’s use of multi-touch attribution, marketing mix modeling, and incrementality testing—it all sounded dreamy. Yet most B2B companies are reduced to:

1. Non-existent attribution efforts: With companies having vague ‘direct’ or ‘channel’ as the sources of pipeline.

2. Measuring attribution on the pipeline level: Yea, I’m talking about those Hubspot or Marketo pipeline attribution reports that tag some emails or sales forms as ‘sources’ with ambiguous ‘product’ categories. 

3. Tracking attribution on a last-click basis: Squarely stuck in 2010 with SEO, SEM, or ‘product’ scooping up all the credit, causing divestment in all other channels. 

4. Measuring attribution on a self-reported survey basis: That dreaded ‘‘How did you hear about us?’ question that assumes that customers will remember, even though they …