Factors Blog

"Marketing isn't sending us quality leads," "Sales can't close the deal fast enough" – sound familiar?

With conflicting opinions and an ongoing blame game, sales and marketing are always at war, but the only thing getting killed is your chance to drive revenue. 52.2% of sales professionals find that sales and marketing team misalignment results in lost pipeline and revenue. 

We're here to tell you everything you need about B2B sales and marketing alignment to foster healthy collaboration and avoid losing revenue. This blog covers:

• Reasons for Sales and marketing misalignment 
• Why sales and marketing alignment is a must
• Must-try sales and marketing alignment strategies 

First off, What does Sales and Marketing Alignment even mean?

Sales and marketing alignment is the strategic integration and collaboration between sales and marketing teams to boost business efficiency and drive growth. It ensures that both departments eliminate silos by communicating effectively and working in tandem toward common objectives.

While operating in silos would’ve worked in the past, it’s crucial for B2B sales and marketing teams to unify their go-to-market efforts.

Why is B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment Important?

Here are 5 reasons why B2B sales and marketing alignment is important:

1. Deliver a Unified and Seamless Customer Experience

The B2B customer journey is non-linear and complex. With countless marketing and sales touchpoints to analyze and optimize, it’s no surprise that businesses still struggle to understand it. Plus, when your sales and marketing teams are misaligned, it only complicates the situation further. 

Aligning customer engagement across marketing and sales efforts leads to a more holistic view of the customer journey map and allows both teams to execute their strategies coherently while offering a seamless customer experience.

2. Improved Understanding of Your Ideal Customer

Sales and marketing interact with buyers differently, which means they have completely different understandings of their customers. For example, marketers have a more holistic understanding of aggregate buying behavior across a large number of buyers. but sales has more personal knowledge of each buyer. 

Sales understands the major pain points and objections buyers overcome before investing in a product. Marketing uses insights from market research, website analytics, and social media data to craft content aligned with the buyer's journey. By combining these insights, you'll gain a much better understanding of your customer. 

3. Clearer and More Productive Feedback

Let’s say marketing fails to inform sales about a lead they gain from a blog about SOC II compliance. As a result, sales doesn’t highlight the tool’s compliance feature, prompting your prospect to look for a secure alternative. 

When your teams are aligned, it opens doors to clearer communication. 

An open line of communication allows you to focus on refining strategies and keeps the team receptive to constructive feedback. 

For instance, when your sales team receives insight from their sales calls about your competitor's product being too complicated to use, marketing can use this to create content and launch campaigns that highlight your product’s ease of use. 

“Our strategic approach to teamwork entails focused measures at RecurPost. For example, the teams engaged in joint planning sessions for introducing a new subscription plan where such messaging was coordinated making the customer journey seamless.

Using a shared feedback loop in everyday meetings was effective. During a recent content campaign, sales generated customized messaging which ultimately raised lead engagement by 20% after one week.” – Debbie Moran, Marketing Manager at RecurPost

4. Improves Team Performance

When marketing and sales focus on divergent KPIs and metrics (Eg: Marketing focuses on MQLs and Sales focuses on revenue), there's much more room for conflict and blame.

When both teams align on metrics like "pipeline/revenue generation," it's in their interest to collaborate to optimize ROI and pipeline.

5. Higher ROI from GTM Efforts 

When the sales and marketing GTM motions are misaligned, you risk losing opportunities to close deals and create the potential for infighting among teams. 

Alignment between sales and marketing is crucial to executing a successful GTM strategy. According to Forrester when your company aligns on tech, processes, and people, you can see 36% more revenue growth and 28% more profitability. 

This is because smarketing empowers:  

• Better experience for each member of the buying group
• Engagement with more members of the buying committee
• Relevant, aligned messaging across marketing and sales channels
• Better brand recall and perception amongst buyers that your brand is an expert

Why is Sales and Marketing Alignment Difficult? 

While occasional disagreement between sales and marketing is natural, certain red flags indicate misalignment. There are many tell-tale signs for when your B2B sales and marketing teams aren't aligned, such as:

• The sales team repeatedly blames marketing for "low-quality" leads. 
• SDRs disqualify the majority of MQLs right off the bat. 
• Marketing collateral goes unused by the sales team. 
• Your marketing and sales team operates in silos

We believe there are 4 main reasons for this misalignment:

1. Lack of Strategic Function in Marketing

Marketing is often known just to write blogs and create pretty infographics while not directly contributing to revenue. It has always been seen as a service function instead of a strategic one. This is because marketers have a one-track mind to measure success – getting leads. 

Rather than ending their responsibility at leads, where they might not care about what happens after they are passed to sales, marketing must be held responsible for:

• New Customer Acquisition - all the way from getting leads to account engagement, opportunity acceleration and revenue generation
• Expansion and Upsell Revenue - engaging and educating existing customers to get additional revenue
• Retention and Churn prevention - Product Education to help customers realise value from the product and hence drive retention 

2. Misaligned Priorities

Even though sales and marketing have common goals of increasing revenue and improving CLV, they use different metrics to measure success, with sales carrying the major burden of bringing in revenue. An aligned strategy begins with the shared goal of prioritizing customer value. Use this commonality to jointly create campaigns that target the same audiences and accounts while ensuring an overlap in your teams' measurement and KPIs.

3. Ownership of Customer Data

We can access customer data at our fingertips today but said data has minimal value when left in disparate systems. 60% of sales reps say marketing and sales don't co-own customer strategy and data, and 25% say customer data is still owned in silos by marketing and sales. 

For example, if you use CRM tools and marketing automation platforms, ensure they're easily linked. By uniting their data, both teams will gain more insight into the full process and a clearer picture of campaign efforts that drive the most ROI.

4. Operating in Silos

The most common challenge when aligning sales and marketing teams is balancing "healthy competition" and collaboration. 

When deals are attributed as "Marketing" or "Sales," it creates an "us" vs. "them" mentality between the two teams, and each of them is under immense pressure to perform. The elimination of silos and the establishment of a collaborative, cross-functional, and revenue-generating unified team is a key driver for future success as the typical buyer journey continues to evolve.

The best way to break down these silos is by having constructive conversations with both teams to answer the following:

• What does marketing need from sales?
• What does sales need marketing?
• What does the typical customer journey look like?
• What does our ICP look like?
• What does a qualified lead look like?
• What can each team do better?

"Given that many marketing and sales misalignments stem from in-fighting over attribution, a multi-touch attribution model that accounts for sales and marketing efforts can help." Joe Kevens, Director of Demand Generation at PartnerStack and the Founder of B2B SaaS Reviews

▶️Learn more about multi-touch attribution models here.

8 B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment Best Practices You Must Follow 

1. Agree on a Common Buyer Persona

Creating a sales and marketing alignment strategy without a clear understanding of your target buyer is like driving in the dark without headlights. Sales and marketing teams must collaborate to understand their buyers, tailor their messaging, and pitch accordingly to win deals.

"We create buyer personas in Cisco to identify the perfect buyer, the perfect person that we could target with a marketing message based on segments, job descriptions, and based on where a person is currently in the buyer journey." – Carola Van Der Linden, Global Virtual Marketing Manager, Cisco

2. Set Shared Goals and KPIs 

Marketers and sales teams have their eyes on different metrics and short-term goals. Getting them to agree may require a new focus point for both groups. Technically, marketing and sales teams share the same goal: converting new leads. However, this process can seem like two separate stages because of the perceived handoff from marketing to sales. Encourage your teams to think about the sales funnel as one process rather than two different processes.

"Concerning key KPIs for gauging sales and marketing alignment success– revenue growth, lead conversion rate, and customer acquisition cost are amongst the classic ones. To ensure these KPIs truly mirror the impact on revenue and customer satisfaction, I recommend organizations to use tools that track customer lifecycle value and provide a holistic view of the customer journey." Will Yang, Head of Growth & Customer Success at Instrumentl

The new sales-marketing relationship should be guided by shared metrics, which reveal an organization's data agility and ability to hand off real-time data insights. Shared metrics encapsulate the state of the current relationship, alignment initiatives, collaboration technology, and outcomes. They keep everyone on the same page and determine how to redefine the relationship.

3. Prioritize the Right Buyers with Account Scoring 

When you’re scoring leads based on their interest in your business, their current place in the buying cycle, and their demographic fit, you can ensure that your sales reps are talking to the right leads at the right time. Your marketing and sales teams should get together to determine score thresholds—at what score does a lead get sent to sales?

Scoring accounts also helps the marketing and sales team prioritize "sales-ready" accounts and work together to target a focused pool of targets as opposed to casting a wide, uncertain net.

Snowflake has a “one team GTM” with an account-based marketing strategy that combines intent data, personalized touchpoints, and collaboration between sales and marketing teams. This strategy has been successful in targeting and engaging key accounts.

▶️Check out our latest guide on Account Scoring here

4. Promote Clear Communication and Collaboration

Ensuring collaboration doesn't mean creating a Slack channel with SDRs and marketers or sending each other multiple links. There are many ways you can nurture a good relationship between both teams. Some ideas include:

• Joint meetings and training sessions
• A day where marketing shadows the sales team and vice versa
• Collaborative exercises where the teams work together

"A specific initiative that yielded remarkable results at Synthesis AI Studio was our 'Customer Journey Mapping' exercise, where sales and marketing collaboratively analyzed and mapped out the entire customer journey, leading to a more cohesive customer experience strategy.

Our pivotal moment was when we restructured our approach to product launches. By involving both sales and marketing from the inception stage, we ensured that marketing strategies were in sync with sales objectives. This alignment led to one of our most successful product launches, with a 40% increase in lead conversion rates." – Oliver Goodwin, Founder & CEO at Synthesis

5. Use Technology to Bridge the Gap

You must build a solid tech stack to manage your data and progress toward your smarketing goals. Here’s how Factors can help you propel sales and marketing alignment in your organization:

• Identify and engage with anonymous, high-intent accounts engaging with your brand across marketing and sales touchpoints 

• Identify points of friction and optimize conversions with AI-powered customer journey insights 

• Monitor marketing ROI with Revenue Attribution to scale campaigns that get results 

• Complete visibility of customer data and pipeline for sales and marketing teams by integrating with existing tools.

▶️Check out how Factors.ai helped Klenty increase conversions by 34%

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6. Ensure Consistency In Your Messaging

Unclear messaging creates a subpar brand experience–and hampers win rates. Both sales and marketing should understand and reinforce your product's value proposition. 

Your messaging must fall into three sections:

• What we do;
• How we do it;
• Why do we do it.

When what, how, and why are aligned, you have a filter to help you make marketing and sales decisions about your core message. 

"There was one time that our sales and marketing team used different messaging. Once we noticed that, we created this guidebook for a shared language and developed a unified messaging framework. This involved joint workshops to ensure that marketing materials and sales pitches were aligned. Now, we come up with consistent messaging. This has improved customer understanding– we know that as there are as we've observed a drastic reduction in clients seeking confirmation about our offerings." -- Andre Oentoro, CEO of Breadnbeyond

7. Create Useful Sales Enablement Content

Even before talking to a salesperson, a prospect is more than halfway through their buying journey. Marketing teams create lead-generation content and campaigns to drive interest in their services and products.

However, they need in-depth insights from sales on the types of content your prospects care about. Customers aren't impressed by a landing page listing endless features, they want to know how your solution resolves their pain points, and who better to ask about customer pain points than your sales team? 

Encourage your marketing team members to shadow sales calls. While time-consuming, the exercise can provide customer insights for marketing initiatives and new content ideas. Marketing can also suggest improvements to sales call scripts.

Meanwhile, your sales team can also suggest new content ideas. If there's an urgent need for a content piece, request marketing to prioritize the subject in the content calendar.

8. Create a Systematic Process for Working With Leads

Sales and marketing operate on two different levels, with marketers focusing only on obtaining MQLs and sales focusing on closing SQLs. When you have multiple funnels and lead nurturing processes, both teams operate at different paces toward different goals.

Consider these aspects when reworking your process of working with leads: 

Routing: Where do the leads go between marketing and sales? 

Priority: What's the order in which we reach out to our leads?

Timing: How quickly should you reach out to prospects, how often, and over what timeframe? 

For example, leads from review or comparison websites can be contacted within two hours, while leads from lead gen forms can be contacted within six hours. 

It is also crucial to know at what stage each team must engage with the lead to avoid bombarding customers with information overload. To help divide engagement responsibilities between sales and marketing teams, you can use a "Fit & Intent" matrix.

• Fit is how well your product solves the needs of the customer.
• Intent is how motivated your prospect is to invest in your product

Here's the breakdown of how marketing and sales can handle each lead according to each quadrant:

Low fit, low intent: This area focuses on nurturing leads, which can be handled by either marketing or sales, depending on the lead source. 

Low fit, high intent: A lead in this quadrant wants more information to gauge if your product can help them. The marketing team has primary responsibility here, with support from sales as required.

High fit, low intent: This quadrant needs joint ownership and support from marketing and sales. Examples of this can include MoFU content, sharing pricing plans, or demo calls with sales representatives.

High fit, high intent: A lead in this quadrant is ready to buy, so it's time for sales to own the process and drive the conversion.

Align Your Sales and Marketing Team Today

Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither is B2B sales and marketing alignment. Only when sales and marketers work from the ground up to collaborate and understand their buyers while focusing on providing value to prospects – can you see tangible results.

Digital marketing has become increasingly important in recent years as more and more people spend time online. In fact, according to a recent study by Statista, over 5.3 billion people use the internet worldwide. This means that digital marketing is a great way to reach a large and engaged audience.

Content plays an increasingly central role in modern marketing strategies. In the current landscape, 82% of marketers invest in content marketing, with short-form video taking center stage as it delivers high ROI and is the trend that will see the most growth in the near future.

Furthermore, 71% of B2B marketers believe content marketing has become more important to their organizations in the last year. With these statistics in mind, it’s clear that establishing a comprehensive content ecosystem is essential for any brand looking to thrive digitally.

All these digital tools require content. Content in digital marketing refers to any type of information that is created and shared online to promote a brand or product. This can include blog posts, articles, infographics, videos, podcasts, social media posts, and more.

The role of content in modern marketing strategies

Content is essential for promoting your business or product brand in today's digital world. It helps your business to achieve several important goals, including:

1. Increase brand awareness and visibility: When your business creates and shares high-quality content regularly, you increase the chances of being seen by potential customers.
2. Drive traffic to your website: Content can be used to attract visitors to your business's website through search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing.
3. Generate leads and sales: You can use content to generate leads and sales by offering valuable information to potential customers in exchange for their contact information.
4. Build trust and credibility: When your business consistently creates and shares high-quality content, you build trust and credibility with your target audience.
5. Position your business as an expert in its field: By creating and sharing content that demonstrates its expertise in its field, your business can be positioned as thought leaders and attract more customers.

But the creation and distribution of content is not a simple, “click the button and you are done” task. It requires time and investments to make sure that the content is suited to your business and its audience and is relevant over a long period.

For this, you must develop a “content ecosystem” that covers all your products, brands, types of content, content teams, technologies, and distribution channels.

This blog will cover the main elements of a content ecosystem. It will highlight the importance of building an ecosystem, its components, the steps to create an actionable ecosystem, and the benefits of a well-designed content ecosystem.

What is a content ecosystem?

A content ecosystem refers to how the publication of content fits into the broader context of an enterprise. It is a strategic network of interconnected content assets that work together to achieve a common goal such as increasing brand awareness to generating leads and sales.

A robust content ecosystem is built upon five critical pillars:

• Content strategy
• Governance
• Creation
• Distribution
• Analytics​

These components work in harmony to ensure that content is not only created and shared across the right channels but also analyzed for effectiveness, allowing for data-driven decisions to refine the strategy and content offerings.

But where does a content ecosystem fit within broader content marketing and digital marketing strategies?

Content ecosystems enable businesses to create and distribute content to the right people at the right time. They are a critical component of broader content marketing and digital marketing strategies. Here's why:

• Strategic Integration: Content ecosystems integrate with broader marketing strategies, ensuring content reaches the right audience when it's most impactful.
• Holistic Framework: They offer a structured approach, mapping out how different content pieces interconnect and support each other.
• Streamlined Process: Ecosystems streamline content production, promoting efficiency and the reusability of content assets.
• Optimization: They ensure content is crafted for maximum relevance and engagement, ready for multi-channel distribution across diverse platforms, broadening reach and enhancing brand visibility.
• Lead Generation: Through high-quality content, ecosystems attract site visitors, generate leads, and help convert these leads into sales.

Why does your company or brand need a content ecosystem?

Joe Pulizzi, Founder of Content Marketing Institute, says "A content ecosystem is a living, breathing thing. It's not just a collection of content assets. It's a network of interconnected content that works together to achieve a common goal."

What are the core components of a content ecosystem?

The core components of any content ecosystem include:

1. Content Types: This includes both core content like website pages, product descriptions, FAQs, and supplementary content such as blogs, whitepapers, ebooks, social media updates, videos, podcasts, and case studies. The diversity in content types serves various objectives, from customer acquisition and retention to establishing industry thought leadership.
2. Content Governance: These are the policies, practices, and standards that oversee the development, management, and dissemination of digital content within an organization. It ensures content aligns with the brand's messaging, values, and legal requirements, and involves defining roles and responsibilities among content creators.
3. Content Creation: This is the process of generating digital content across different formats, designed to appeal to the target audience and presented in an easily digestible manner.

Did you know that Pepper CMP's Pepper Docs comes with an inbuilt SEO Grader that analyzes your content and grades it? Furthermore, you can use AI Writer to leverage the power of generative AI to improve your content, check plagiarism and readability scores, optimize your content for the SERPs with the SEO Guidelines feature, and more.

1. Content Distribution: It involves the strategic sharing of digital content through chosen platforms like websites, email newsletters, and social media channels, tailored to the audience's consumption preferences.
2. Content Analytics: This aspect refers to the measurement of content's success, monitoring metrics like website traffic, engagement, and conversion rates to inform data-driven improvements in the content strategy.

For example, Pepper CMP's Content Analytics and ROI feature not only helps you track KPIs such as traffic, engagement rate, and session durations, but it also fetches the dollar value of your content with insights such as organic search traffic value and average cost per click (CPC) so you can always stay on top of your ROI game.

1. Content Platforms: Content platforms such as CMS, marketing automation tools, and digital asset management systems are used to produce, curate, and manage content.

How should you establish your content ecosystem?

You need to establish your content ecosystem in a way that supports your goals. The following steps can help you establish a robust ecosystem:

Step 1: Define your goals and conduct content research

Before diving into content creation, it's important to define your goals and conduct thorough research. Answer questions like:

• What values and messages do you want to convey?

Pepper CMP's Content Idea lab, for example, is an excellent tool that will help you with a seamless content ideation process. You can discover keywords, get outline recommendations, generate topic suggestions, and more — all while keeping track of parameters such as search volume, intent, ranking difficulty, etc.

• Who is your target audience?
• What are your competitors doing in the content space?

This will help you understand your target audience, identify relevant keywords, and develop a content strategy that aligns with your business objectives.

Step 2: Develop a Content Strategy

A well-thought-out content strategy is the backbone of a successful content ecosystem. It involves planning the type of content you want to create, the platforms you want to utilize, and the goals you want to achieve. Your strategy should be tailored to your brand's unique needs and objectives.

Step 3: Create High-Quality Content

Whether it's blog articles, social media posts, or videos, make sure your content is of high quality and value-driven. This means it should be informative, engaging, and visually appealing. When creating content:

• Understand your audience’s search intent, that is, whether navigational, educational, commercial, or transactional​.

Here's an example of Pepper CMP's Discover Keywords feature that gives intent and other parameters before you select a few to find topics to get started with.

• Ensure proper formatting, thorough research, fact-checking, originality, and review your content before publishing.
• Invest in creating in-depth posts, which generate 9 times more leads than shorter content.

Step 4: Optimize for SEO

To ensure your content reaches a wider audience, it's important to optimize it for search engines. Conduct keyword research and incorporate relevant keywords naturally into your content. Additionally, focus on creating valuable and shareable content that others would want to link to.

For instance, Pepper CMP's SEO Writing Assistance equips you with all the necessary SEO guidelines such as keyword integration, content grade, readability score, and more to ensure your content is well optimized.

Step 5: Streamline your content marketing workflows

Managing your content marketing workflows is essential to ensure smooth operations. Streamline the processes involved and identify the stakeholders responsible for each task. This will help you maintain consistency and ensure timely delivery of content. Use collaboration tools like the Pepper Content Marketing Platform to organize your tasks into projects for better oversight of the content creation process.

Step 6: Distribute your content across appropriate channels

Once your content is created, it's time to distribute it across appropriate channels. Utilize various platforms such as social media and email marketing to reach your target audience. Tailor your distribution strategy based on the preferences of your audience.

Step 7: Promote Your Content

Creating great content is just the first step. To maximize its reach, you need to promote it effectively. Share your content on social media, reach out to influencers in your industry, and engage with your audience through comments and discussions. The more visibility your content gets, the stronger your content ecosystem becomes.

Step 8: Analyze and track performance to make data-driven adjustments

Lastly, use analytics tools to track the performance of your content. Monitor key metrics such as website traffic, engagement, and conversions. Analyze the data to identify areas for improvement and make data-driven adjustments to your content strategy.

Conclusion

Building a content ecosystem can be a recurring process, but it's worth the investment. By consistently creating and distributing high-quality content, you can achieve your business goals and build a strong and loyal customer base.

Remember, your content ecosystem is a reflection of your brand's voice and values. Invest in creating high-quality, relevant, and engaging content that resonates with your target audience, and you'll reap the rewards in the form of increased brand awareness, customer engagement, and business growth.

Looking for an all-in-one content marketing platform that helps businesses create, distribute, and manage their content? Pepper Content Marketing Platform is here to help!

This guide to creating a comprehensive content ecosystem is a guest post by our friends over at Pepper Content. Book a demo to learn more about Pepper content 

Traditional metrics such as sourcing and influence metrics, while valuable, have their limitations, often leaving a gap in understanding accurate marketing performance. 

This is where engagement scoring emerges as a game changer.

Engagement Scoring Unveiled

Engagement scoring is the systematic process of assessing and quantifying customer interactions with your brand. Engagement scoring goes beyond merely counting clicks or page views; it delves deep into the quality, timing, and relevance of these actions. These interactions encompass a broad spectrum, from ad views, web sessions, content downloads, email engagement, social media activity, event attendance, and more.

The Growing Significance of Engagement

The days of bombarding potential customers with generic messaging are long gone. In an era where buyers have a plethora of options and information at their fingertips, understanding their preferences, intent, and fitment is indispensable. Engagement scoring becomes the compass that guides you through this complex landscape.

Filling in the Gaps Left by Sourcing and Influence Metrics

Sourcing metrics primarily focus on quantifying the revenue that marketing has directly sourced. For example, sourcing metrics, such as win rates, deal sizes, and revenue lift, do not tell you anything about the lead's level of interest or intent. 

Influence metrics, on the other hand, aim to measure the impact of marketing on the decision-making process of potential clients. Influence metrics, such as social media following and website traffic, can give you some indication of a lead's influence, but they do not tell you how engaged they are with your product or service.

These traditional metrics are often rooted in a binary understanding sourced or not sourced, influenced or not influenced.

Engagement scoring steps in to offer a more nuanced perspective. It recognizes that the buyer's journey is not linear but a complex web of interactions and engagements. Every click, download, or event attendance provides a piece of the puzzle. Instead of classifying potential clients into rigid categories, engagement scoring paints a dynamic picture that captures their level of interest, the stage in their decision-making process, and their responsiveness to marketing efforts. Moreover, engagement scoring can enhance your ability to focus marketing efforts on prospects who are most likely to convert, ultimately boosting conversion rates and ROI.

The Significance of Engagement in B2B Marketing

Picture the modern-day B2B business as a bustling marketplace. The traditional approach to B2B marketing can be likened to standing in this marketplace, megaphone in hand, and shouting generic messages to anyone who will listen. In the past, such an approach might have yielded some results, but the dynamics of B2B marketing have undergone a profound transformation. 

Engagement scoring is the need of the hour, especially because it places buyers at the forefront of the strategy.

The Evolution of Buyer Behavior

Buyer behavior is no longer a linear journey. Gone are the days when prospects would embark on a clear, predictable path from awareness to consideration and finally, decision. Instead, today's B2B buyers navigate a labyrinth of choices, resources, and options. It's akin to a journey through a maze, where every turn presents new choices, challenges, and opportunities.

Buyers in the B2B space research extensively, gathering information from various sources, and often remain anonymous for longer periods. They interact with your brand, your competitors, and a lot of content across different platforms. In this convoluted landscape, their level of engagement with your brand becomes insightful.

The Power of Engagement in Driving Revenue Growth

By now, we understand that engagement isn't just a buzzword; it's an important strategy that determines marketing success. Engaged prospects and customers are those who have shown genuine interest in your offerings, interacted with your content, and actively participated in your marketing initiatives. They are the ones who click through your emails, download your resources, attend your webinars, and seek out your solutions.

But why does this matter? 

Engaged prospects are more than just passive observers; they are active participants in their buying journey. They have moved beyond the initial stages of awareness and consideration and are now evaluating their options, inching closer to the decision phase. This readiness to engage signifies their receptiveness to your brand's messaging and an increased likelihood of conversion.

The Basics of Engagement Scoring

Now that we've established the role of engagement in B2B marketing, let’s dive into the mechanics of engagement scoring. This fundamental concept acts as the compass guiding your efforts in nurturing prospects and driving revenue growth.

At its core, engagement scoring is a method of assigning values to various interactions prospects and customers have with your brand. These values reflect the depth and significance of each engagement. By systematically calculating these scores, you gain insight into where a prospect stands in their journey and how to tailor your marketing strategies accordingly.

The Components of Engagement Scoring

• Interaction Tracking
  Every action a prospect takes, from opening an email to downloading a resource, attending a webinar, or visiting your website, is considered an interaction. Each interaction carries its weight in the scoring system, with some being more indicative of intent and engagement than others.

• Scoring Rules
  Your engagement scoring system is governed by a set of predefined rules. These rules dictate how many points are assigned to each type of interaction. For instance, opening an email might earn a prospect a few points, while attending a live product demonstration could carry a much higher score.

• Engagement Tiers
  Engagement scoring often employs a tiered structure. Prospects start in the lower tiers, and as they accumulate more points, they progress upward. Each tier corresponds to a certain level of engagement and readiness to make a purchase.

Types of Engagement Metrics in Scoring

1. Explicit Engagement Metrics
   These metrics are based on direct actions taken by prospects. Examples include downloading a whitepaper, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting a demo. These actions indicate a clear interest in your offerings and are typically assigned higher scores.

2. Implicit Engagement Metrics
   These metrics gauge engagement without prospects taking direct actions. Metrics like email open rates, website visits, or social media interactions are implicit signals that suggest prospects are interested in your content and brand.

3. Behavior-Based Metrics
   Behavior-based metrics are more advanced and analyze the patterns and sequences of interactions. For example, if a prospect follows a specific sequence of webinars and downloads, it can signal a deeper level of engagement and intent.

Setting Up an Effective Engagement Scoring System

To harness the potential of engagement scoring, consider these best practices

1. Alignment with Buyer Journey

Tailor your engagement scoring system to align with your buyer's journey. Assign higher scores to interactions that typically indicate prospects are advancing through the stages of awareness, consideration, and decision-making.

2. Regular Review and Adjustment

Your scoring system isn't set in stone. Regularly review the rules and criteria. As prospect behavior evolves, ensure your scoring system evolves with it.

3. Collaboration Across Teams

Collaboration between your marketing and sales teams is crucial. Your sales team's insights can help fine-tune your scoring system to ensure it accurately reflects the prospects' readiness for a sales conversation.

4. Scoring Automation

Implement automation tools to streamline the scoring process. Many marketing automation platforms offer built-in engagement scoring capabilities that can simplify the task.

5. Progressive Profiling

Use progressive profiling to gather additional information about prospects as they engage more deeply. This enables more accurate scoring and customization of your nurturing strategies.

6. Data Privacy and Compliance

Be mindful of data privacy regulations when collecting and using prospect data for scoring. Ensure compliance with relevant laws and regulations.

Understanding the basics of engagement scoring is the first step in unlocking its potential. In the next part of this series, we'll explore advanced strategies and real-life examples of how engagement scoring can be a game changer in B2B marketing.

Let’s Understand with a Case Study Uni

Uni is a B2B SaaS company that provides a platform for businesses to manage their sales and collections pipeline. They were facing a challenge in identifying and prioritizing high-intent leads. They were using a traditional lead scoring model based on demographic data and website visits, but this was not giving them accurate results.

Uni decided to implement an engagement scoring model. They used a variety of data points to calculate their engagement score, including

• Number of page views
• Time spent on the website
• Number of downloads
• Free trial signups
• Email opens and clicks
• Product usage

Uni then used its engagement score to segment its leads and prioritize its sales efforts. They focused on reaching out to high-engagement leads first, and they offered them personalized outreach based on their interests and stage in the sales funnel.

As a result of implementing engagement scoring, Uni saw a 4X increase in customers and a significant increase in sales efficiency.

The Game-Changing Potential of Engagement Scoring

In the previous sections, we’ve understood the transformative power of engagement scoring in B2B marketing, we've covered the importance of engagement, its significance, and the core components of scoring. Now, let's explore how engagement scoring can truly revolutionize your marketing strategies and elevate your campaigns to new heights.

A Shift from Traditional Metrics

Engagement scoring represents a paradigm shift in the way we measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts. Traditional metrics like click-through rates, open rates, or the number of leads generated provide limited insights into prospect intent and readiness for a sales conversation. Engagement scoring, on the other hand, allows you to delve deeper into each prospect's journey and quantify their level of interest.

Benefits of Lead Prioritization

One of the game-changing aspects of engagement scoring is its ability to prioritize leads effectively. No longer will your sales team waste time chasing cold leads or prospects who are not yet ready to make a purchasing decision. With a well-structured scoring system, your sales team can focus their efforts on prospects who have demonstrated high levels of engagement and are more likely to convert.

Segmentation for Personalization

Effective engagement scoring enables advanced segmentation. By categorizing your prospects based on their scores, you can tailor your content and message to each group. For instance, highly engaged prospects can receive content that delves into the finer details of your offerings, while those in the early stages of engagement might receive introductory material. This level of personalization enhances the overall customer experience and drives better results.

Enhanced Content Targeting

Engagement scoring also amplifies your content-targeting efforts. You can precisely target prospects based on their scores, ensuring that they receive content that resonates with their level of interest and position in the buyer's journey. As prospects move up the engagement tiers, they receive increasingly relevant content, nurturing them towards a buying decision.

Conversion Rate Optimization

Scoring allows for more accurate lead nurturing and follow-up strategies. You can determine the most appropriate moment to transition a prospect from marketing to sales. By doing so, you increase the chances of converting high-scoring leads into paying customers, ultimately optimizing your conversion rates.

Real-Life Benefits of Engagement Scoring

To illustrate the real-life benefits of engagement scoring, consider the example of Company X, a B2B software provider. Company X implemented an engagement scoring system that factored in various interactions, from email opens to webinar attendance and document downloads. By prioritizing highly engaged leads, the sales team saw a significant increase in conversion rates. They were now speaking to prospects who were not only aware of the product but had also shown genuine interest. The result? A boost in revenue and shortened sales cycles.

In this age of data-driven marketing, engagement scoring stands out as a game changer, offering unparalleled insights into prospect behavior and intent. As we continue our exploration of engagement scoring in the next part of this series, we'll delve into advanced strategies for implementation and share more success stories from the B2B marketing landscape. Stay tuned for more insights on how engagement scoring can redefine your marketing efforts.

Implementing Engagement Scoring A Strategic Approach

Now that we've established the potential of engagement scoring to revolutionize your B2B marketing, it's time to roll up our sleeves and discuss how you can successfully implement this game-changing tool. In this section, we'll provide you with actionable strategies, recommendations, and tips for a smooth integration of engagement scoring into your marketing strategy.

1. Define Your Objectives and Goals

The first step in implementing engagement scoring is to clearly define your objectives. What do you aim to achieve with this system? Are you primarily looking to prioritize leads for the sales team, or do you want to improve personalization and content targeting? By setting specific goals, you can tailor your engagement scoring system to meet your unique needs effectively.

2. Choose the Right Engagement Metrics

Selecting the right engagement metrics is a critical step in implementing scoring effectively. While the choice of metrics depends on your specific business and goals, some metrics commonly used in engagement scoring include

• Email Interactions
  Metrics as email opens, click-through rates, and response rates provide insights into a prospect's interest and responsiveness to your messages.

• Web Behavior
  Monitor website visits, page views, and time spent on your site. Analyze which pages or content attract the most attention.

• Content Engagement
  Track the consumption of your content, such as whitepapers, ebooks, and case studies. Determine which assets resonate most with your audience.

• Social Media Engagement
  Evaluate interactions on your social media profiles, such as likes, shares, and comments. These actions indicate engagement with your brand.

• Event Participation
  Measure engagement with webinars, seminars, and events. Attendance and participation reflect a prospect's willingness to invest time in your offerings.

3. Define Scoring Criteria

Once you've identified your goals and metrics, it's time to create a scoring system. Establish clear criteria for assigning scores to various interactions. Define how points will be awarded for each action and determine the threshold at which a lead is considered highly engaged. This step requires collaboration between your marketing and sales teams to ensure alignment on lead qualification.

4. Leverage Automation Tools

Effective engagement scoring often involves the processing of a large volume of data. To manage this efficiently, leverage marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. These technologies can automate the tracking of prospect interactions and calculate scores in real time. Automation tools such as those we have at Factors, also allow for seamless integration with your sales team's workflow.

5. Monitor and Adjust

Engagement scoring is not a one-and-done process. It requires continuous monitoring and adjustment. Regularly review your scoring criteria and metrics to ensure they remain aligned with your goals and reflect the changing behavior of your prospects. The flexibility to make real-time adjustments is one of the advantages of an automated scoring system.

Overcoming Common Challenges 

As with any new strategy, engagement scoring may present challenges. Here's how to address some common ones

• Data Accuracy
  Ensure data accuracy by regularly cleaning your contact database. Implement data validation tools to minimize errors.

• Scalability
  As your marketing efforts grow, you'll need to scale your engagement scoring system. Regularly review and update your scoring model to accommodate new metrics and actions.

• Sales Alignment
  Collaboration between marketing and sales is crucial. Hold regular meetings to align strategies and ensure a smooth lead handover process.

• Data Privacy Compliance
  Be aware of data privacy regulations like GDPR or CCPA. Ensure that your engagement scoring practices are compliant.

• Scoring Model Complexity
  Keep your scoring model simple and easy to understand. Complex models may confuse teams and hinder adoption.

Implementing engagement scoring successfully requires a well-defined strategy, the right metrics, and a commitment to overcoming challenges. By aligning your efforts with your business objectives and prospect behaviors, you can harness the full game-changing potential of engagement scoring in B2B marketing. 

Unlocking Business Potential with Engagement Scoring

Prioritization and Personalization

One of the central benefits of engagement scoring is its role in lead prioritization. No longer do you need to guess which leads are most likely to convert; the data guides your decision-making process. This results in more effective lead nurturing and a streamlined handover to the sales team. Additionally, engagement scoring enables the personalization of content and messaging, enhancing the prospect's experience and boosting your chances of success.

Embracing the Change

Now, more than ever, marketing professionals, CMOs, and CXOs need to adapt and innovate. The dynamic B2B marketing landscape demands a shift towards more data-driven, personalized, and effective strategies. Engagement scoring is not just a tool; it's a mindset that can set your marketing efforts apart.

Explore and Implement

All in all, the future of B2B marketing is about understanding your audience on a deeper level, using data to drive strategies, and elevating your marketing game. Engagement scoring is your key to unlocking this potential. By doing so, you'll not only stay ahead of the competition but also lead the way in this ever-evolving marketing landscape. It's time to redefine your marketing playbook and harness the game-changing power of engagement scoring. 

Onward to a brighter, more engaging future!

Introduction to Sourcing and Influence Metrics

Performance measurement is a dynamic and multifaceted challenge. Across different companies, there exists a wide variation in how marketing's effectiveness and impact are evaluated. This diversity stems from the complexity of modern marketing strategies and the evolving landscape of the business-to-business domain.

Two common techniques for measuring marketing performance at an executive level are Marketing Sourcing Metrics and Marketing Influence Metrics. Both techniques aim to provide insights into how marketing initiatives contribute to business outcomes, yet they do so from distinct angles. Understanding the nuances of sourcing and influence metrics is essential in the pursuit of an accurate and comprehensive understanding of marketing impact.

So, let’s dive right in!

Sourcing Metrics: Rooted in Inbound Marketing History

Sourcing metrics, often associated with the emergence of inbound marketing, focus on measuring how much business was originally sourced by marketing efforts. In essence, they track the leads and opportunities that marketing directly generates. This metric is crucial for quantifying the immediate impact of marketing initiatives on lead generation, a vital aspect of B2B marketing.

Influence Metrics: A Staple of Marketing Practice

Influence metrics, on the other hand, have been around as long as marketing itself. They aim to gauge how much business is influenced or impacted by marketing activities. While sourcing metrics focus on the origin of leads, influence metrics delve into how marketing contributes to the customer journey and decision-making process. These metrics are tracked over a longer period of time, capturing the enduring influence of marketing on potential clients and business development.

The Ongoing Symbiosis of Marketing and Sales

Historically, marketing has enabled sales. It creates awareness, generates leads, and nurtures prospects to the point where the sales team can engage and convert deals effectively. Yet, marketing's role doesn't end there; it extends well into the customer journey, ensuring that the customer's experience aligns with the brand's promise.

So, are they same-same but different?

Marketing and sales differ significantly when it comes to measuring performance. Sales activities are usually more quantifiable, making it relatively straightforward to measure their contribution. In contrast, marketing's influence may not always be easily quantifiable, as it encompasses a wider array of touchpoints throughout the customer journey.

In the C-level meetings at the executive level, where strategic decisions are made, understanding marketing's impact is pivotal. C-level executives seek to evaluate marketing's performance to assess its alignment with overall business goals, determine resource allocation, and make informed decisions. This assessment often revolves around sourcing and influence metrics, as they provide valuable insights into marketing's direct and indirect contributions to business growth.

Marketing's influence is evident in the numbers that matter most to an organization: revenue, customer acquisition, and brand reputation. To translate marketing's influence into measurable impact, sourcing and influence metrics have been serving as tools for the modern marketing professional.

But are these two tools enough?

In the next sections, we will understand both tools in more detail, explore their limitations and propose new strategies that can help marketing professionals move beyond the current status quo of marketing measurement metrics and achieve a more accurate reflection of their impact on business success.

The Role of Sourcing Metrics in B2B Marketing

Traditionally, sourcing metrics are harnessed to evaluate the immediate and tangible outcomes of marketing efforts. B2B marketing strategies often involve content marketing, advertising campaigns, email marketing, and social media engagement. These activities are strategically designed to draw the attention of potential clients and encourage them to take specific actions, such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading a whitepaper, or requesting a product demonstration.

Sourcing metrics come into play by measuring the efficacy of these marketing tactics. They help determine how many leads and opportunities are sourced directly from these campaigns, providing marketing professionals with a clear and quantifiable understanding of their impact on lead generation. 

The metrics often encompass:

• Lead Generation: The number of leads generated through marketing initiatives.
• Conversion Rate: The percentage of leads that successfully convert into opportunities.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The cost incurred to acquire a new customer.
• Return on Investment (ROI): The return generated for each marketing dollar spent.

Limitations of Sourcing Metrics

While sourcing metrics offer valuable insights into the immediate impact of marketing initiatives, they have inherent limitations when used in isolation. These limitations can hinder a comprehensive understanding of marketing performance, particularly when it comes to B2B marketing.

1. Short-term focus

Sourcing metrics primarily reflect short-term results. They capture leads generated and conversions made but may not account for the enduring impact of marketing on the customer's journey. In B2B marketing, where sales cycles are often longer, an overemphasis on sourcing metrics might lead to an incomplete assessment.

2. Overlooking Influence 

Sourcing metrics tend to downplay the broader influence of marketing on potential clients. They focus on quantifying the immediate lead generation but may not capture the touchpoints that influence a prospect's decision-making process over time. This omission results in a less comprehensive understanding of marketing's contribution.

3. Neglecting Brand Building 

Sourcing metrics often does not adequately account for brand-building efforts, which are fundamental in the B2B landscape. Building a strong brand presence influences prospects even before they become leads. This early-stage brand awareness might not be fully reflected in sourcing metrics.

The Need for a Holistic Approach

The limitations of sourcing metrics become increasingly evident when considering the complexity of the B2B marketing environment. B2B deals often involve intricate decision-making processes, extended sales cycles, and multiple stakeholders. These factors necessitate a holistic approach to marketing measurement that goes beyond sourcing metrics.

Case Study: Why are sourcing metrics insufficient?

Company: HP Inc.

Case Study

HP Inc. is a multinational information technology company that specializes in personal computing and related products. In the past, HP used sourcing metrics to measure the effectiveness of its marketing campaigns. These metrics included the number of leads generated, the number of opportunities created, and the number of sales closed.

However, HP realized that these metrics were not a true reflection of the success of its marketing campaigns. For example, a campaign might generate a large number of leads, but only a few of those leads might actually be qualified or converted into sales.

HP also realized that its marketing campaigns were not aligned with its overall business goals. For example, HP might be running a campaign to generate leads for a new product, but its sales team might not be ready to sell that product yet.

Solution

• HP decided to shift its focus from sourcing metrics to customer-centric metrics. Customer-centric metrics measure the impact of marketing campaigns on customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.

• HP began tracking customer metrics such as the number of website visits, the number of social media interactions, and the number of customer inquiries. HP also began tracking customer satisfaction and loyalty through surveys and other forms of feedback.

• By focusing on customer-centric metrics, HP was able to create more effective marketing campaigns that were aligned with its overall business goals.

In a nutshell:

HP's case study shows that sourcing metrics can be a flawed way to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Companies should focus on customer-centric metrics instead, as these metrics provide a more accurate reflection of the impact of marketing on the business.

Influence Metrics in B2B Marketing

From the above section, it's clear that sourcing metrics, while valuable, do not provide a complete picture of marketing performance. Now, let’s delve deeper into the realm of influence metrics and explore how they contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of marketing performance in B2B.

Why did organizations shift to influence metrics?

The transition from solely relying on sourcing metrics to incorporating influence metrics in B2B marketing is driven by the need for a more comprehensive view of marketing's role. Compared to sourcing metrics, influence metrics offer a more complete understanding of how marketing initiatives influence decision-making throughout the entire customer journey.

The shift towards influence metrics was further motivated by the following factors:

1. Prolonged Decision-Making 

B2B sales cycles are often protracted, spanning several months or even years. During this time, potential clients interact with various marketing touchpoints, each of which contributes to their eventual decision. Influence metrics enable marketers to track and evaluate these extended interactions, which sourcing metrics might overlook.

2. Multichannel Engagement

In today's digital age, prospects engage with marketing content across multiple channels. They might receive emails, browse a company's website, attend webinars, and interact on social media. Influence metrics provide a holistic perspective by accounting for the impact of each of these channels, recognizing their cumulative influence on decision-making.

3. Multiple Stakeholders 

B2B purchases often involve multiple stakeholders within an organization. Influence metrics consider the influence of marketing efforts on various decision-makers, acknowledging the diverse touchpoints that cater to each stakeholder's needs.

Limitations of Influence Metrics

While influence metrics offer valuable insights into the broader impact of marketing in the B2B arena, they also have their set of limitations. Acknowledging these limitations is essential for gaining a more realistic view of marketing performance.

1. Difficulty in Quantifying Influence

Influence metrics, by nature, deal with qualitative data and soft measurements. They can provide insight into the impact of marketing efforts but may not be as easily quantifiable as sourcing metrics. This makes it challenging to attribute a specific monetary value to influence.

2. Data Complexity

These metrics often involve tracking a multitude of touchpoints and interactions across diverse channels. Managing and analyzing this vast amount of data can become complex, requiring sophisticated tools and methodologies.

3. Synchronizing with Sales Data

Aligning influence metrics with sales data can be challenging. Unlike sourcing metrics, influence metrics may not directly correlate with short-term sales figures. This can lead to discrepancies when trying to measure marketing's contribution in terms of revenue generation.

The Need for Balance

As B2B marketing continues to evolve, the consensus is clear: reliance solely on sourcing metrics or influence metrics might not provide a complete picture of marketing performance.

Now that we’ve understood sourcing metrics and influence metrics, it’s clear that both have their roles and strengths. However, the most insightful evaluation emerges when they are used together, along with other metrics that set off their disadvantages, respectively.

Relying solely on one or the other can lead to an incomplete picture of marketing performance. It's not an "either-or" scenario; it's a "both-and" strategy that paints a more comprehensive canvas of marketing's influence.

So, what’s the way forward?

Acknowledging the above limitations has paved the way for exploring alternative approaches to marketing measurement: Engagement Scoring.

Exploring Engagement Scoring

One promising alternative on the horizon is engagement scoring. Unlike sourcing and influence metrics, which primarily focus on lead generation and the influence of marketing touchpoints, engagement scoring takes a different route. It prioritizes measuring how engaged and receptive your audience is to your marketing efforts.

Engagement scoring considers a spectrum of interactions, such as content consumption, participation in webinars, social media engagement, and email responses. It doesn't just stop at identifying whether a prospect is interested in your product; it delves deeper into how engaged they are and what specific content or interactions resonate with them.

For a more in-depth exploration of engagement scoring, stay tuned for our next blog, where we will dissect this emerging approach and its application in modern B2B marketing measurement.

Moving Towards a New Approach

From the above sections, one thing has become abundantly clear: B2B marketing is in a state of constant evolution.

The limitations of the existing techniques have set us on a quest for a more holistic and encompassing approach. It's a journey that's far from over, and it's a journey that demands adaptability and innovation.

Embracing a data-driven approach is the cornerstone of effective marketing performance measurement. Data is the lifeblood of modern marketing, and by harnessing the insights from sourcing metrics, influence metrics, and engagement scoring, we can fine-tune our strategies and maximize our impact.

The path to optimizing marketing measurement is a dynamic one, where change is the only constant. And as you can tell, the world of B2B marketing is ever-evolving, and so must be our approach to measurement. It's not a destination but an ongoing journey.

So, as we move forward, let's leverage the full potential of sourcing metrics and marketing influence, all while remaining receptive to emerging approaches that enhance the art and science of B2B marketing. By doing so, we not only meet the challenges of today but also prepare for the exciting opportunities of the future. 

Amplitude has been around since 2012 and has thus been a pioneer in the product analytics market. Its biggest selling point is that it allows companies to track user flows and journeys. It is also easy to use, so any employee can easily note the behavioral patterns of a company’s website users. 

Heap is also a similar tool to Amplitude. However, the major advantage of Heap is that it can readily capture user actions through automatic event tracking. It allows for a better understanding of user behavior without a dedicated understanding of background coding for companies. This article helps you decide which tool is better in aiding your company to achieve its goals for growth. 

tl;dr

• Amplitude is allowing data leaders to experiment with their data through a product called Amplitude Experiment. 
• Amplitude provides granular user segmentation and greater event tracking flexibility compared to Heap.
• ContentSquare, a leading digital market analytics company, signed a contract to acquire Heap in September 2023. 
• Heap has notable attributes such as a user-friendly interface and automatic event tracking that allow for easy and quick implementations, making it attractive to many B2B companies. 

In this article, you’ll find out whether Amplitude–with its personalization capabilities–is the better option for your company compared to Heap, which is much more user-friendly. 

CRM integrations 

All B2B companies use CRM tools, so it’s necessary that your company’s operating web analytics tools also integrate with the CRM tools you’re used to. These integrations allow you to have all the necessary data in one platform so that you can work seamlessly. CRM integrations offer cross-collaborations that increase the scalability of your processes and make client work much more methodical.

Amplitude’s notable CRM integrations include Customer.io and Salesforce. Heap has more integrations; in addition to Salesforce, it also integrates seamlessly with Hubspot and Zendesk.

Third-party integrations 

B2B companies use a variety of third-party tools for email marketing, e-commerce, and marketing. It’s essential that your web analytics tool integrates with all these tools in order to pull data from them as required.

Amplitude’s third-party integrations include:

• Extole 
• Facebook Ads 
• Apptimize 
• Slack 
• Segment 
• Optimizely 

Heap’s integration offerings are sizable, and comprise:

• Zapier
• Braze
• Cordial
• Shopify 
• Mailchimp 
• Marketo

Pricing 

Amplitude’s pricing model isn’t transparent, but it does have a basic free version with which your company can enjoy many of its features. In the free plan, you can access data planning tools core analytic charts.  However, if you want much more specific information–such as behavioral reports or analytics–then the shift from the free plan to the growth plan is quite steep, starting at $995/month. The Enterprise plan is for data-led businesses that require much more detailed insights and begins at $2000/month for companies that require it.

Heap has four pricing plans: Free, Growth, Pro and Premier. The free plan encompasses up to 10K monthly sessions. Similar to Amplitude’s basic plan, it also provides core analytic charts. Heap’s Growth plan is quite inexpensive compared to Amplitude’s. It starts at roughly about $3600/Year or $300/Month, making it much more accessible to small businesses wishing to scale. Heap does not offer transparent pricing for its Pro and Premier plans, and instead charge per session. Overall, Heap seems to have more cost flexibility in its pricing models simply because there are more models available. 

Ease of installation 

Both Amplitude and Heap don’t require you to install anything on your desktop. If you want to set up Amplitude or Heap, all you have to do is go to their respective websites and sign up for the plan you want. 

In Amplitude, once you have signed up and chosen a plan, you can then login and access the dashboard. To use Amplitude effectively, you must add Amplitude’s tracking code and install the SDK to the codebase. You also have to set up tracking within the app so that it can gather the data as per your requirements.  Heap also follows the same procedures; the two analytics tools are quite similar in this aspect. 

Event tracking 

Event tracking is among the most important features that most companies use web analytics tools for. Both Amplitude and Heap allow your company to track events. However, the advantages that they serve are different. Amplitude is more flexible and provides easily customizable event tracking. Your company has a lot to gain from custom event tracking as it captures unique customer actions that help detail more specific date insights. 

Heap, on the other hand, records everything from the moment that you start using it for your website. This feature is termed Automatic Event Tracking, which records everything without coding or any manual code tagging. It can also collect historical data from the past, leading users to analyze data from the past without any extra tracking. However, users also claim that it’s difficult to set up an event correctly, and matching it to the coding can be complicated.

Data privacy

Data privacy and protection are of utmost importance for users and companies alike. Therefore, data collection has become an extremely complicated landmine that companies have to navigate around and Amplitude is no different. However, Amplitude has had quite a responsible stance on data privacy and protection since 2018 when the GDPR was passed. 

The company has made updates so that it may fall in line with the General Data Protection Act, including product updates such as single and bulk user data deletion which allows users to delete all their data from the platform. The Email Monitoring update lets users track their request so deletion is successful. The company is also ISO 27001-certified for secured governance. 

Heap has privacy built into its design. The company states that its focus remains on creating a tool that aligns with data privacy. Still, to comply with GDPR, Heap has taken the following steps:

1. Third-Party Audits: These audits helped the company conduct any gap analysis regarding their GDPR readiness. 
2. Data Protection Act: The company has rewritten its Data Protection Act to comply with data subject rights. 

How Can You Pick the Best Web Analytics Tool?

Web Analytics tools are instrumental in helping you understand user demographics and tracking customer activity. Hence, it’s necessary to pick a tool that’s reliable and trustworthy. You can judge how well your web analytics tool will perform by considering the following factors:

1. Business Objectives

Every business has its own objectives; knowing these can help you better manage your company’s expectations and outcomes.

2. Pricing 

We have mentioned this before, but you should pick a web analytics tool that is sustainable as per your business model. Be aware of the hidden fees and growth fees that you will have to pay so you can budget accordingly.

3. Data Privacy Compliance

Data Protection Laws protect clients and companies alike. You should opt for tools that follow these laws. Using a tool that is GDPR-compliant informs your customers that your company is conscious regarding data collection and security. 

4. User Interface and Visualization 

There’s no point in web analytics tools that lend more complications to your company’s data. Pick a tool that is easy to use and has dashboards for immediate data visualization. Data visualization simplifies data so non-technical personnel can also understand it. 

5. Run Trials 

If the web analytics tools you’re opting for have the option for a free demo, opt for it and notice how your workflow changes. Make sure you have metrics in place for these trials so they are effective. 

Deciding on a Web Analytics Tool 

Choosing the right web analytics tool changes your workflow for the better and generates actionable insights that you can implement to grow your business exponentially. While no tool can be perfect, Factors is a comprehensive analytics and attribution tool that offers you:

• Marketing impact measurement
• Conversion rate optimization 
• Granular visibility
• Funnel conversion optimization
• Customer journey analysis
• Points of inflection identification for B2B sales
• AI-automated Insights
• Account level timelines
• Tailor-made reports and data visualization

If you’re looking for ways to get more out of your company, then Factors provides some of the best marketing solutions for a B2B SaaS venture. 

Customers using Factors testify to its reliability. It has a 4.7 out of 5 score on G2. Companies that have worked with Factors have seen an uncovering of 64% of the anonymous companies on their websites, which has helped them close more than 20,000 deals. All in all, client satisfaction for Factors’ services is high. 

For more information or to set up a demo, contact the Factors’ team today and learn how to utilize the tool to fulfill your company’s objectives. Not sure about Factors? Sign up for a free trial and decide if Factors is the best option for your company. 

B2B marketing teams invest significantly across campaigns and content to drive qualified website traffic. However, benchmarks find that only about 2% of this traffic actually converts, with the majority of visitors simply bouncing off or browsing anonymously on the website.

Retargeting the remaining 98% of visitors via LinkedIn has proved to be an effective strategy to recapture interest from anonymous website traffic. While we won’t cover the specific benefits of LinkedIn retargeting here, this case study summarizes how Sage successfully leveraged LI retargeting to: 

• Generate 700,000 impressions in 6 weeks
• Improve lead generation by 4x
• And reduce cost-per-lead (CPL) by 80%

Simply put, LinkedIn retargeting works.

LinkedIn retargeting relies on the LinkedIn Insight tag (aka LinkedIn Pixel) to match website visitors with LinkedIn audiences. 

The LinkedIn insight tag is a simple piece of code placed on a website to help optimize campaigns. While the LinkedIn Pixel serves many functions, including conversion tracking and demographic insights, it’s challenged by shortcomings around website retargeting.

While LinkedIn Pixel works to some extent, we have found an alternate approach that can take your retargeting campaigns to the next level, also known as account-based retargeting. Account-based retargeting works by identifying, qualifying, and targeting anonymous accounts, as opposed to individual users visiting a website. Using a combination of identifiers, account-based retargeting has been shown to deliver:

• Larger, account-level audiences 
• Improved match rate accuracy
• Better segmentation and targeting

And the results? Well, they speak for themselves:

While the LinkedIn Pixel is a must-have solution given its wider functionality, we explore the limitations of Pixel-based retargeting and why Account-based retargeting is an effective alternative ⬇️

Limitation #1 - Match rates

The LinkedIn Pixel works by placing a cookie in visitors’ browsers, so when a LinkedIn user lands on your website, they may be identified and retargeted on LinkedIn. Note that this cookie-based identification takes place at a device and browser level for individual users. This means that, for the Pixel to match a website visitor to a LinkedIn user, the visitor must meet all 4 of the following criteria: 

1. Be an active member of LinkedIn 
2. Explicitly accept cookies on the website
3. Use the same device (phone/laptop/tablet) to visit the website and LinkedIn
4. Use the same browser (chrome/firefox/safari) to visit the website and LinkedIn

While a few visitors will probably fit this criteria, audience match rates via the Pixel are limited by the fact that the majority of traffic either doesn’t use LinkedIn, rejects cookies, or, most commonly, uses different devices/browsers for product research and LinkedIn browsing. 

In fact, only about 42% of B2B product research involves mobile touch points — with the majority of B2B buyers choosing to conduct their research on desktops. On the other hand, a whopping 80% of LinkedIn engagement is via mobile. This is not surprising, given that LinkedIn is primarily a social networking app. 

And so, despite the fact that LinkedIn Pixel works as designed, its match rates tend to be relatively poor, given the practical realities of B2B user behavior.

The limitation: Low match rates as a result of limited, cookie-based matching mechanisms by the LinkedIn Pixel. 

How Account-based Retargeting helps

The LinkedIn Pixel relies exclusively on cookie-based tracking to create its matched audiences. Factors, on the other hand, leverages a combination of three identifiers — IP address, advertising ID, and cookies, to triangulate a data connection and match anonymous traffic to a company.

Factors connects with over 4.2B+ IP addresses and 65M+ company profiles (in addition to cookies and ad IDs) to accurately identify which accounts are visiting your website. Note that this is regardless of whether the visitor in question is a member of LinkedIn, uses different browsers, etc. 

In fact, Factors can also identify remote companies by initially cookie-ing people using their corporate IP address to then re-identify them when they work remotely. To further explain how Factors achieves industry-leading match rates, here’s Viral from 6sense, one of our data partners:

“As a person moves around, their IP address changes. The platform adjusts for these changes by pulling in several additional markers to help match signals to an account. Now, with more variations in IP address data as remote working spreads across industries, our Graph deploys available secondary marker information, like cookies and mobile advertising IDs, to triangulate data connections. The Graph uses additional markers to sift through the noise so that confidence in the match rate remains consistent. Given the amount of signals we track, we don’t map every signal all the time, but we have observed accuracy over 85%.”

- CTO Viral Bajaria, 6sense, Data Partners

‍💡Build Better LinkedIn Retargeting Audiences with Factors‍

Limitation #2 -  User-level targeting

B2B buying decisions are rarely made by a single person. The typical buying committee comprises almost a dozen people from multiple departments and time zones. Selling a SaaS product today might involve gaining buy-in from multiple C-suite executives, individual stakeholders from operations to sales to marketing, and a chief revenue officer – along with legal and implementation teams.

Source: Challenger

Given that the Pixel focuses on individual, single users visiting your website, it fails to capture the wider buying group from each account those users are from. This shrinks your total matched audience size considerably, but more importantly, it inhibits your marketing efforts from reaching key stakeholders and decision-makers who may not have been the ones visiting your site. 

For example, if a junior marketer visits Factors.ai and is retargeted by the LinkedIn Pixel, the junior marketer alone will receive ads — with other stakeholders from the target account being ignored. As a result, this approach relies on the junior marketer being independently influential enough to convince the rest of the team to move forward with the deal. Definitely a tough sell. 

The limitation: User-level targeting, as opposed to account-level targeting, results in fewer stakeholders targeted per account and smaller audience sizes. 

How Account-based Retargeting Helps

While LinkedIn is best for targeting buying groups, it’s important to remember that there is no initial intent to buy on a social media platform. You need to layer in intent signals from multiple sources, such as your website and review sites like G2, to understand how you can best retarget relevant accounts.

Factors identifies intent signals and re-targets anonymous website traffic at an account level. This means that multiple decision-makers and stakeholders from the same company will be targeted on LinkedIn, regardless of which user actually visits the website. This bodes well for multiple reasons:

1. Increases audience size without compromising on the quality of accounts
2. Creates brand awareness at a company level rather than at an individual level
3. Improves odds of targeting the right decision-makers within each account

Even assuming that account-based targeting finds the same 100 accounts as Pixel-based targeting, the former would generate an audience size of 300-500 users (3-5 people from each account), while Pixel-based targeting would only target 100 users (1 from each account). More importantly, a larger audience will improve the odds of targeting decision-makers, ultimately resulting in more leads and conversions. Accordingly, account-based retargeting solves for the practical limitation of LinkedIn campaigns struggling to scale due to poor audience size. 

Limitation #3 - Audience segmentation

The previous two points discussed the LinkedIn Pixel’s limitations in terms of audience quantity. This third limitation highlights why the Pixel tends to fall short in terms of audience quality. In reality, a significant portion of your website traffic wouldn’t make a good fit for your business. Even within the subset of ICP accounts visiting your website, only a fraction would be “sales-ready” at any given moment (with the remaining accounts having to be nurtured until they’re prepared to buy). 

As important as having a large audience is, the quality of this audience plays a key role in determining conversions and RoAS as well. In an ideal scenario, marketing teams should only retarget this subset of sales-ready “3000-pound marlin” accounts.

The LinkedIn Pixel limits audience segmentation based on intent and engagement. With the Pixel, website traffic can only be segmented based on page views. While this is definitely a good starting point, it lacks granularity.

With Pixel, filtering out accounts that don’t match your target geographies, industries, sizes, or engagement levels can be challenging. This also translates to limited personalization options, as you can only segment campaigns by page views rather than by account and engagement properties. 

The limitation: Limited segmenting & filtering options resulting in subpar audience quality and limited scope for personalization. 

How Account-based Retargeting helps

Account-based retargeting with Factors supports granular segmentation based on a wide range of firmographics and engagement criteria. For example, with Factors, you can identify and retarget a list of accounts that meet the following rules:

“US-based Software companies with 100-500 employees visiting our pricing page & G2 profile for at least 10 seconds with a scroll-depth of 20% or more”

Here are a few ways in which Factors helps segment traffic data (in addition to regular old page views):

• Country
• City
• Industry
• Size
• Revenue range
• Time spent on page
• Scroll-depth
• Button clicks
• And a combination of all of the above

‍This level of filtering results in a list of precisely targeted ICP accounts that would make a great fit for your business. Additionally, by integrating your CRM, you may also include/exclude specific accounts, such as existing customers and competitors. 

And guess what? We found the solution to fix your list-building problems once and for all!

Factors has launched Audience Builder, which allows marketers to automatically segment based on their preferred criteria, push these segmented audience lists to LinkedIn, and activate personalized, targeted advertising. 

For example, you may choose to show accounts that visit high-intent pages such as factors.ai/pricing an ad creative offering a free trial. On the other hand, you can show accounts reading your competitor comparison blogs a “comparative” ad creative. The possibilities are endless. 

Real-life comparison: Pixel vs Account-based retargeting 

We’ve talked the talk - now we’ve got the numbers to back it up. Here’s how two campaigns, one that’s Pixel-based and another that’s Account-based, compare to each other. Note that all else (duration, budgets, creatives, copies) has remained the same through the course of this experiment.

Over the same period, we find that CTR is higher under Pixel-based retargeting, likely because this approach targets exact users visiting the website. That being said, Account-based remarketing significantly outperforms Pixel-based retargeting in every other key metric, including leads generated. 

And there you have it. 

Solve your ad targeting woes with AdPilot

If you want to maximise ROI for your LinkedIn ads, look no further than our latest offering: LinkedIn AdPilot! We offer a wide range of features that allow you to segment audiences based on intent data, implement exposure control for your campaigns and determine the true ROI for your ads.

Speak to our team today to understand how you can use AdPilot to improve your LinkedIn retargeting efforts.

The end of GA’s Universal Analytics 360 model has prompted many GA users to find other analytics tools that better suit their needs. Universal Analytics ceased to process new data as of July 2023, and had to begin the transition to GA4 or find an alternative analytics services provider.

Amplitude is among these alternative analytics solutions. Google Analytics was popular due to its basic version being free and its former setup’s ease of use; these aspects are set to change with GA4. Many users are opting to switch to Amplitude since it offers migration of historical data, while GA4 does not. Here’s what you need to know about GA4 and Amplitude to understand which is better for your company.

tl;dr

• Google announced that Universal Analytics would stop processing new data beginning July 1st, 2023, and encouraged current users to switch to GA4.
• Universal Analytics 360 users can only extend their usage until July 2024.
• GA4 does not support historical data migration, while Amplitude allows seamless data transfer.
• GA4 offers extensive integrations but has a steep learning curve; Amplitude retains traditional metrics and prioritizes privacy.
• Pricing for both platforms follows a usage-based model, with Amplitude providing a free starter plan.

Read on to understand what you can expect from Google Analytics’ and Amplitude’s services.

Data migration from Universal Analytics

If you’re a Universal Analytics user, GA4’s big disadvantage is the loss of historical data. Since Universal Analytics 360’s tracking code is so different from GA4’s, there’s no path to migrate historical data from the former to the latter. While you will not, of course, lose the ability to access your Universal Analytics data, you cannot compare it with data that you gather through GA4. You can only begin collecting data through a new GA4 property once you add its tracking code to your company’s website.

If you want to keep using your Universal Analytics property, you can keep doing so until July 2024. In order to obtain as much historical data as possible on GA4, you can switch to a dual tagging configuration. This will enable you to collect data into both properties. You can use Universal Analytics’ data points and reports while also building up a few months’ worth of historical data in GA4.

On the other hand, Amplitude offers users a unified platform wherein they can migrate their data from Universal Analytics. It utilizes the same data elements and a similar tracking model to Universal Analytics. Current Universal Analytics users can immediately switch to Amplitude and compare historical data with present data.

Integrations

Companies require analytics tools that integrate seamlessly with their CRMs and third-party tools. Your analytics tool should be compatible with any online workspaces, e-commerce tools, and advertising platforms that your company and employees utilize frequently.

GA4’s list of integrations is extensive for CRMs, email marketing tools, artificial intelligence, e-commerce platforms, and sales and marketing/advertising platforms. Its integrations include Facebook Ads, ChatGPT, Microsoft Excel, Calendly, Hubspot, and Dubsado via Zapier. 

Integrations are not currently Amplitude’s strong suit. While it does offer some strong CRM and online workspace integrations–including Salesforce, Adobe Analytics, Notion, and Slack–it does not integrate with many of the tools that GA4 does. It also does not offer integrations with lesser-known CRMs.

Data models

GA4’s data model is very different from Universal Analytics. That’s not an understatement; not only is it impossible to migrate data, it’s also impossible to measure certain data points that you’ve gotten used to with Universal Analytics. You might be able to collect these data points in different ways, but they may not be labeled in ways you’re familiar with. For example, GA4 does not measure the bounce rate of webpages.

Amplitude allows you to use data points that GA4 has rendered redundant on its platform. It will measure data points such as bounce rates and compare it with historically available information imported from your Universal Analytics account.

Pricing

GA4’s new pricing marks a significant shift from UA’s fixed price model. As a Universal Analytics user, you would be charged a set price of US $150,000 every year. The rate of data collection wouldn’t usually affect this price. Data collection limits were extensive, so businesses only incurred extra costs when the data collection would increase significantly.

GA 4’s usage-based model means that users will be charged according to the amount of data they collect. GA4 also offers a free version, known as GA4 Standard.

Amplitude also utilizes a usage-based model. It offers three pricing tiers: Starter (which is free), Growth, and Enterprise. The Growth and Enterprise plans’ prices are available on request. In addition, Amplitude also offers certain startups one year of their Growth plan for free if the startups are early stage or have Black co-founders.

Although Amplitude does not disclose its price publicly, TrustRadius states that the Growth plan begins at US $995 per month. Verified users also state that Amplitude’s basic plan offers a good variety of features and allows first-time users to check whether the tool is compatible with their business for free.

Data protection and privacy

Data protection experts have complained about Google Analytics’ non-compliance of privacy laws numerous times in many different countries. The adoption of the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework by the European Commission lifted the ban on GA in the middle of this year. Before that, GA was banned in Austria and France, with various other European countries raising concerns about the ways Google stores and utilizes consumer data. Sweden’s privacy protection authority, the IMY, has raised questions about GA’s compliance with the GDPR.

Companies using GA have to be extra careful about data storage and usage. The Data Privacy Framework requires companies to follow a multitude of policies that protect user data. GA4’s efforts to comply wholly with privacy laws such as the GDPR allow users to opt out of cookies. Machine learning fills the gaps created through these opt-outs. If enough users opt out, this data could therefore become unreliable.

Amplitude’s privacy disclosure on how it uses consumer data is extensive and easy to understand for users. Clients can change or retract their data at any time. They can also opt out of cookies. Your clients can ask for a copy of their personal data at any time to verify which personal information Amplitude has access to. Amplitude is fully compliant with the CCPA, and takes privacy petitions seriously.

Features

Amplitude’s intuitive dashboards enable you to understand how prospective clients interact with the content on your website. You’ll be able to access crucial insights into client behavior and drive conversions through a better understanding of prospects’ pain points. Amplitude also offers users the option to design surveys for their clients. These feedback surveys are customizable and can be used to target certain segments of users. Real-time feedback allows you to increase client satisfaction and trust in your company.

There is a significant learning curve involved in switching from Universal Analytics to GA4. While a variety of learning material is available for GA4, the importance of dedicated, immediate customer support cannot be understated.

However, GA4’s extensive integrations allow it to be a widely implementable tool. While it is true that GA4 is notoriously difficult to set up, it offers robust analytics and tracking information. 

Choosing the Right Analytics Tool for Your Business

Finding the right analytics tool can be a long, tricky endeavor. We’ll help you find an indispensable tool on the first try, instead of letting you go down the trial-and-error route.

With the phase-out of Universal Analytics 360 in July 2023, businesses must carefully evaluate their analytics needs before selecting a new platform. The right analytics tool depends on several key factors. 

First, consider data continuity. Some platforms may not allow you to migrate historical data, which can disrupt long-term analysis. Privacy and data protection should also be a priority, especially for companies operating in regions with strict regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

Next, assess ease of use. Tools with steep learning curves or complex setups can slow down adoption across teams. Seamless integration with your existing CRM, marketing platforms, and other third-party tools is crucial for maintaining workflow efficiency. Pricing structures also vary; some platforms charge based on usage, which can lead to unexpected costs as your data volume grows. 

Finally, reliable customer support ensures quick resolution of issues, minimizing disruptions.

Selecting an analytics solution involves balancing privacy, scalability, ease of use, data flexibility, integrations, and support to align with your company’s growth and data strategy.

In a nutshell, the most important features are:

• Privacy. The tool you use should be in full compliance with the GDPR and CCPA or other local privacy laws.
• Scalability. Will your analytics tool accommodate greater influxes of information as you grow, and indeed, help you grow? 
• Ease of installation and use. You don’t want a tool that requires a dedicated team of experts to decipher. An analytics tool should be easy to use across all the teams that require access to it, and ideally come with a no-code setup.
• Extensive analytics and reporting options
• Seamless integration with other tools, and
• Dedicated, quick customer support.

If we had to pick…

We would pick Factors. While no analytics tool has the full package, Factors comes close with its:

• Customizable reports and dashboards
• Compliance with privacy laws,
• Attribution across multiple channels
• De-anonymization
• Quick, codeless setup
• Ease of implementation
• CRM integrations

Factors was created to help your B2B company reach its goals by allowing you to make the most of your web content. Its competitive pricing options also set it ahead of other tools with similar capabilities. The paid tiers are priced between US $99 to US $1499. 

You can also check out Factors’ features for free using their trial option, or contact them for a plan custom-built for your business.

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Customer engagement is crucial for business growth and profitability. Highly engaged customers buy more, promote your brand to others, and stick with you for the long haul.

But how do you know if your customers are engaged?

This is where customer engagement metrics come in. When tracked consistently over time, these metrics reveal objective insights into how customers interact with your brand. 

In this article, we'll cover the top 10 customer engagement metrics every business should track in 2023 and beyond. We'll define each metric, explain how to calculate it, and discuss its importance.

Let's dive in!

TL;DR

• Customer engagement metrics reveal how customers interact with your brand and drive loyalty and revenue.
• Key metrics include NPS, CSAT, churn rate, CLTV, session duration, and bounce rate.
• Tracking these data points helps businesses improve customer experiences and reduce churn.
• Unified platforms simplify data analysis and uncover actionable insights for growth.

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement is the process of building a long-term relationship with your customers. It measures how often customers connect with your brand, the different channels they use to connect, and how many of them return to make a purchase.

Simply put, customer engagement refers to how customers think, feel, and act toward your business and brand over time.

It goes far beyond a simple transactional exchange. Rather, engagement measures the depth of a customer's relationship and emotional connection with your brand.

Some examples of highly engaged customers:

• Visit your website frequently and spend time reading content
• Get social with your brand by liking and commenting on posts
• Open and click on emails and marketing campaigns
• Provide feedback and reviews on their experience
• Participate in surveys, contests, or online communities
• Respond to special offers or actively refer friends
• Increase their purchase frequency and order sizes over time

On the flip side, disengaged customers only interact on a superficial level. They don't open your emails, ignore social media, rarely visit your site, and overall have negligible connection to the brand, increasing the risk of customer churn.

These customers are at high risk of churning and switching to a competitor. 

For example, an early-stage startup using a SaaS platform may be highly engaged—frequently using product features, staying updated through newsletters, engaging on social media, participating in user research, and even recommending the platform to peers. 

An enterprise client may be relatively unengaged—using only basic features, providing limited feedback, and feeling indifferent towards the SaaS provider brand.

When you monitor customer engagement through various metrics, you can identify disengaged accounts proactively so you can reactivate them before it's too late.

What are customer engagement metrics?

Customer engagement metrics are data points that help companies understand how customers interact with their brand and product. Tracking customer engagement metrics serves several important purposes:

• Achieve a better understanding of target audience: For our startup example, metrics may show the product resonates well with early-stage teams looking for agile collaboration tools.
• Pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in sales funnel: Customer engagement metrics may reveal messaging is not working to convert enterprise prospects at the top of the funnel.
• Know what to prioritize & refine the customer journey: Since enterprise clients have larger deal sizes, it may make sense to refine messaging and sales collateral to better appeal to their needs.
• Improve customer experience and retention: Analyzing usage metrics can reveal where customers struggle or lose interest, highlighting areas to improve CX and retention.

Continuing our engaged vs unengaged customers example, for the early-stage startup, vital engagement metrics may validate their current targeting and product-market fit. 

For the enterprise prospect, weak metrics signal a need to adjust strategy to better appeal to and support those customers. 

Tracking these metrics gives your sales and marketing teams visibility into customer behavior that can then be used to tailor messaging, visuals, and even product features over the long run. 

10 Customer Engagement Metrics You Should Track

So, what metrics should you track? Let’s look at the ten key customer engagement metrics that you should consider. 

1. Bounce Rate

The bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who enter your site and then leave ("bounce") after viewing only one page. 

High bounce rates indicate your content may not be resonating with users or properly targeted.

Bounce Rate = (Bounces / Total Site Visits) x 100

For example, if you had 5,000 bounces out of 25,000 visits, your bounce rate would be:

5,000 / 25,000 x 100 = 20%

Across 150 million page views taken as a survey by Animalz, the median bounce rate for SaaS blogs in 202 was 80.33%. 

But the general rule of thumb is—lower is better. 

A high bounce rate means visitors aren't finding what they need on your site quickly enough. As a result, engagement is superficial.

For example, an ecommerce site had 25,000 entrances last month and 15,000 bounces. The bounce rate would be (15,000 / 25,000) x 100 = 60%. You could try to get this below the 50-65% ecommerce average benchmark by trying one of the following:

• simplify navigation so the user can find what they came looking for
• improve page load speed
• highlight your phone number prominently on the contact page
• add pricing breakdown
• Add visual elements like images or videos.

This article by SEJournal can be a great starting point to reduce bounce rates and increase the time a user stays on your page—a.k.a. Average session duration.

2. Average Session Duration

Average Session Duration measures how long users are actively engaged on your website during a visit. It's calculated by totaling all session durations across your site and dividing by the number of sessions.

Longer average session durations signal you provide valuable, relevant content that engages visitors. Short durations may indicate the content isn't resonating with users or site navigation needs improvement.

The average session duration across SaaS websites participating in the survey is 77.61 or 1 minute 17 seconds.  

Formula:

Total Session Duration / Number of Sessions

For example, an ecommerce site has 5,000 sessions in a month for 15,000 minutes. The average session duration would be 15,000 / 5,000 = 3 minutes. 

An analytics tool like Google Analytics or Factors will automatically calculate and display this data on your website tracking screen.

This aligns with general benchmarks. If the duration was lower, the site owner could look to improve content quality or navigation to drive up engagement.

3. Scroll Depth

Scroll depth measures how far down a page visitors scroll before leaving. Higher scroll depth indicates engaging content. 

Typically, a scroll depth of 50% or more means that your content is resonating with visitors. And anything lower should be a cue that you need to spend time optimizing that piece of content.

For example, your latest blog post sees an average scroll depth of 25%, meaning most visitors bail out after reading just the first 1/4 of the content. 

In response, you shorten the intro paragraph, add subheads, break content into shorter paragraphs, and include visuals after every few sentences—these changes drive scroll depth to 65%, helping your users engage further. 

4. Social Media Engagement

Social media engagement rate measures the amount of engagement (likes, shares, comments) a post gets compared to reach. Higher rates indicate content resonates. 

Powerful analytics tools like Factors can help you bring together data from across different social media platforms into a single place—giving you a single source of truth (SSOT) dashboard. 

How to calculate social media engagement:

(Likes + Shares + Comments) / Followers x 100 = Engagement Rate

For example, if you had 30 total likes, shares, and comments over 1,000 Facebook page followers last month, your engagement rate would be:

30 / 1,000 x 100 = 3%

Average engagement rates vary widely by platform. Here are the average social media engagement rates for Technology businesses.

• Instagram: 1.48%
• Facebook: 0.96%
• X (Twitter): 1.26%
• LinkedIn: 1.53%
• TikTok: 1.20%

The key is not to compare your engagement rate to others in your niche. Rather, track it over time to see if your rate increases or decreases month-to-month.

5. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score

The CSAT score measures customer satisfaction with service interactions, often via surveys. Higher CSAT correlates with better engagement and loyalty.

Typical survey questions ask customers to rate their experience on a 1-5 or 1-10 scale, from very unsatisfied to very satisfied. The percentage of positive responses becomes the CSAT score.

The numbers below can range from 0% to 100%. For example, a score of 75% means that 75% of the users who answered the survey are satisfied with the product/service. 

According to Fullview, CSAT benchmarks by industry are:

• Software - 78%
• Retail - 80%
• Internet providers - 64%

For example, an ecommerce company surveys customers and finds:

• Fifty customers responded 9 or 10 for "very satisfied."
• Twenty responded 7 or 8 for "satisfied."
• Ten responded six or below for "unsatisfied."

The CSAT score is 50 very satisfied / (50 very + 20 satisfied) = 71%

6. Net Promoter Score

The NPS survey measures customer loyalty and likelihood to recommend on a 0-10 scale. Higher NPS indicates growth potential through referrals.

NPS is calculated by finding the percentage of customers who are:

• Promoters (9-10 score): loyal enthusiasts who will promote your brand
• Passives (7-8): satisfied but unenthusiastic
• Detractors (0-6): unhappy customers who can damage your brand image

Subtracting the percentage of Detractors from Promoters yields the NPS.

Retently ran NPS benchmarks for different industries. Here are two industries relevant to us:

• Software - 64+
• Consulting - 67+

For example, a SaaS business surveys customers and finds:

• Promoters: 70%
• Passives: 10%
• Detractors: 20%

Their NPS is 70% - 20% = 50%. This is on the lower end for software businesses, revealing opportunities to improve loyalty and satisfaction. 

Track your NPS over time to see if it's improving or declining. If it is declining, try to talk to your detractors and understand if there’s a fixable problem that’s causing customers to rate you lower. 

When you find something, start by fixing it and announcing that you’re taking steps in the right direction. This will help your customers know that you aren’t simply collecting surveys but also working on them. 

7. Net Dollar Retention (NDR)

The NDR compares recurring revenue from existing customers period-over-period. Rising NDR indicates expanded purchases from engaged customers.

Formula:

A report by Benchmarkit (formerly RevOps Squared) reveals that the median net dollar retention is 105%, where a 100% NDR falls in the 75th percentile. 

For example, a SaaS had $1M in revenue from existing customers last quarter. This quarter's revenue was $1.1M, with $100K from upsells but $50K lost from churn. Their NDR is:

(($1.1M + $100K - $50K) / $1M) x 100 = 115%

This exceeds the 105% median, demonstrating solid expansion and engagement from the existing customer base. That brings us to customer churn, a measure of how many customers leave after signing up. 

8. Customer Churn Rate

The churn rate measures the percentage of customers lost in a period. Lower churn signifies higher satisfaction and engagement.

Here’s the formula to calculate churn:

(Customers Lost / Starting Total Customers) x 100

CustomerGauge released an NPS and retention report in the B2B industry. The median churn rate for IT services is 12%, and that for the software industry is 14%. 

To benchmark your churn rates, check this example out. As a SaaS, suppose you had 1,000 customers last quarter and lost 75 of them. The churn rate will be calculated as below:

(75 / 1,000) x 100 = 7.5%

This is well below the 14% median churn for software businesses. However, that does not mean you should ignore it and move on. Reducing churn helps boost revenue growth so you can improve the onboarding process, account management, customer experience, and even retention promotions.

The lower your churn, the better. High churn signals poor customer engagement and satisfaction. Dig into why customers leave and address weak points across marketing, product, service, and other areas driving attrition.

9. Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)

CLTV estimates future revenue a customer generates over their lifetime relationship with the company. Higher CLTV indicates greater engagement and business value.

Formula:

Average Order Value x Purchase Frequency x Average Customer Lifetime

According to CustomerGauge’s reports, the software industry has a CLTV of US$ 240,000, while a business consultancy has an average CLTV of $385,000. 

However, this may not represent the indie startups or smaller SaaS businesses with 1-10 employees. 

How can you determine your CLTV? Let’s look at it through an example. 

A SaaS customer subscribes to a monthly plan costing $500. They remain active for four years. Their CLTV is:

$500 x 12 x 4 = $24,000

As you can see through this formula, boosting retention length, increasing the subscription prices, asking users to upgrade to better plans, and improving CX can help boost your customer lifetime value. 

10. Daily/Monthly Active Users (DAU/MAU)

DAU/MAU measures daily and monthly active usage of apps and software. Higher ratios signify strong engagement and retention.

Sequoia tweeted that the average number of DAU/MAU for most businesses is lower than 20%. Very rarely does a business cross the 50% threshold. Whereas, with WhatsApp, the DAU/MAU hits 73% on average and is one of the highest recorded numbers.  

To determine the DAU/MAU for your business, check your analytics for the total monthly active users. Then, check the daily active users. 

For instance, if your daily active users are 1000 and your monthly active users are 5000, your DAU/MAU will be—1000/5000 * 100 = 20%

A lower percentage signals an opportunity to improve retention and engagement through changes to the user experience, onboarding, notifications, and loyalty programs.

Mistakes to Avoid When Measuring Engagement

While it's critical to track customer engagement KPIs, it's just as important to avoid these analysis and reporting mistakes:

• Using arbitrary targets without research—Don't randomly choose target metrics without researching realistic industry benchmarks and averages. Basing goals on competitive data provides an objective comparison point for whether your engagement levels are truly high, low, or average.
• Over-reliance on quantitative data—Hard metrics only reveal part of the engagement story. Supplement with qualitative data through post-transaction surveys, customer interviews, focus groups, and monitoring reviews. This provides context into the "why" behind metrics.
• Data silos across teams—Break down silos between marketing, sales, support, and product groups. Share insights cross-department to improve engagement holistically across the customer journey.
• Obsessing over vanity metrics—Don't fixate on vanity metrics like website visitors, email subscribers, or social followers. These don't measure true engagement or business impact. Focus on metrics tied to outcomes.
• Forgetting ongoing analysis—Don't just report metrics—actually act on what they tell you! Research why engagement levels change over time and continue optimizing based on insights.

How a Platform Like Factors Can Help

Trying to measure customer engagement across your business can get messy fast. You've got data in all these different places—your website, email stats, support tickets, social media, etc.

And those sources almost never talk to each other. So you're stuck manually pulling reports from individual tools and then trying to make sense of fragmented data to see the big picture. Not fun.

That's where Factors comes in. 

It's an analytics platform that brings all your customer data together in one place. Finally—a single source of truth!

1. Unified Data and Reporting

Factors connects your data from sources like your website, CRM, marketing campaigns, customer support channels, and more. This provides a complete view of engagement across touchpoints on one centralized dashboard.

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You can instantly analyze metrics by various segments like channel, campaign, cookie ID, account, geo, device, and more without tedious exports or merges between tools. Trend reporting over time is also streamlined.

2. Flexible Goal Tracking

Factors gives you the flexibility to define and track engagement KPIs tailored to your specific business needs. For example, you may track CES for support and email campaign CTR. Determine the metrics most aligned with your goals, then track performance over time.

3. Account Identification and Scoring

A challenge with engagement data is connecting metrics across anonymous and known users. Factors uses proprietary IP resolution to identify anonymous traffic at an account level.

From there, you can easily segment and filter accounts based on attributes like industry, tech stack, and more. Apply scoring models to tag accounts from highly engaged to at-risk based on your criteria. 

The major benefit of Factors is its unified approach. Since it connects data from ad campaigns, websites, G2 pages, and more together, it can help you score leads considering customer engagements across all these platforms instead of basing decisions on single-platform engagements. 

‍4. Customizable Dashboards and Reporting

Factors enables customizable reporting segmented by channel, campaign, account, and other attributes. Easily create leaderboards and reports for key metrics and trends visible to stakeholders company-wide.

You can also build customized dashboards with charts and breakdowns for different teams like marketing, support, and sales. And along with that, it’s enhanced automated reporting ensures insights are readily accessible whenever you need them.

5. AI-Driven Recommendations

Factors takes insights further by providing AI-powered recommendations to improve engagement. The system analyzes changes in metrics and suggests actions to boost performance.

For example, if you type in something like “how do I improve my demo submissions”, Factors will run AI-fuelled algorithms in real-time and offer a list of touchpoints that are already working and can be optimized to achieve the desired result. 

This centralization of engagement data helps you uncover insights instantly with Factors—helping you make smarter decisions and optimize experiences faster. 

Start Using Customer Engagement Metrics And Build Customer-Focused Strategies

Tracking engagement gives you priceless insights into the customer experience. With the right data, you can spot friction points, find your best segments, and unlock growth opportunities.

But collecting all this data sounds easier than it is. Website stats live in your analytics platform. Email reports need downloading. Support tickets sit in a separate system. Stitching it together feels like a puzzle.

That's why Factors comes in handy. 

It automatically brings data together from your website, ads, email, support, and more. Now you have a single view of engagement across touchpoints.

Factors also lets you define the metrics most important to your goals. 

Want to track demo requests and trial signups? No problem—you can monitor the KPIs for your unique business needs.

The platform identifies known accounts from anonymous traffic so you can filter and segment at the account level. With Factors, you can build custom dashboards to share key metric trends and insights across your teams. 

Its AI-powered recommendations analyze changes in your data and suggest ways to optimize engagement.

Measuring Customer Engagement

Customer engagement drives business growth, loyalty, and long-term profitability. Engaged customers buy more, advocate for your brand, and are less likely to churn. However, measuring engagement requires more than surface-level metrics like social media likes or email open rates. Businesses need data-driven insights into how customers interact across various touchpoints.

Customer engagement metrics reveal how customers connect with your brand over time. These include bounce rate, session duration, scroll depth, social engagement, Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT), churn rate, and customer lifetime value (CLTV). Tracking these metrics helps businesses optimize the customer experience, reduce churn, and uncover opportunities for growth.

For startups and B2B teams, connecting engagement data across platforms can be challenging. Tools that unify data from websites, CRM systems, support platforms, and ad campaigns simplify tracking and analysis. Real-time dashboards, account-level insights, and AI-powered recommendations enable teams to proactively identify disengaged customers and refine their marketing and sales strategies.

Focusing on meaningful engagement metrics allows businesses to shift from vanity performance indicators to data-backed strategies that drive revenue and customer retention.

Want to learn how Factors can help enhance your customer engagement and experience? Book a demo today!

Now more than ever, B2B deals involve shrewd, inquisitive buyers. Generic marketing strategies are no longer sufficient to capture customer attention or loyalty. Instead, marketing personalization plays a crucial role in building trust and intent amongst buyers. 

B2B marketing personalization is about creating tailor-made user experiences that convey a feeling of empathy and validation. It's about replacing broad, generic messages with personalized marketing efforts based on your target audience. The following article explores several ways to personalize your B2B marketing efforts. 

B2B Marketing Personalization 

Personalization is quickly becoming a buzzword in the industry but with good reason. It's a powerful marketing approach that drives better results and builds stronger connections with your audience.

Imagine you walk into a cafe, and the barista greets you by name, asks about your day, and already knows your usual order. You’d feel special, wouldn't you? You’d probably be encouraged to become a regular customer. This is, in essence, the objective of personalization; it makes customers feel valued and understood.

To personalize your marketing efforts, the first step is to gather relevant information about your customers' demographics, pain points, use cases, concerns, engagement behavior, and more. Once all this data is in place, it can be leveraged to customized experiences on your website, emails, social media, and ads.

To make the data collection easier, you can build a custom software tool that collects data of users who visit your website and integrate it into the website. Of course, there are software outsourcing companies you could task with this. The tool should be such that when users visit your website or interact with your ads, it will collect their behavior and preferences, like what they click on and what they aren’t interested in. You can then use this data to target the ads you show to them. This leads us to...

Personalized Targeted Advertising

One of the most common use cases of personalization is targeted advertising. Have you ever searched for a product online, and suddenly, ads for that exact product started following you around the internet? That's not a coincidence; it's targeting.

A lot of advertisers are now using tracking technologies to gather engagement data and leverage this information to display ads that are more relevant to users.

But personalization goes beyond just ads. It extends to the entire user experience. This level of personalization makes the shopping experience more convenient and enjoyable. And most importantly, they can sell more because of those strategies. 

Personalized Mail and Content marketing

Email marketing is another opportunity to leverage personalization and enhance user experience. Do so by segmenting your audience and sending them tailored messages based on their engagement. This is far better than simply sending generic mass emails to all subscribers, regardless of their differences.

You can also leverage personalization in your content: think blog posts, videos, and social media posts. When you’ve gained insights into your audience's preferences, challenges, and goals, you can create content that resonates with them on a deeper level. This will help establish your brand as a trusted resource and help build a loyal community of followers. Even in the case of eCommerce, users delivering personalized content is the key to generate more sales. You can do this by leveraging merchandising feature of the best digital experience platforms out there.

Personalized Website Experiences 

With the advent of GenAI, chatbots and virtual assistants work better than ever to provide personalized assistance based on user inquiries and previous interactions. By understanding the context and history of a customer's interaction with the brand, these AI-powered tools can offer tailored solutions and recommendations, thereby enhancing the overall customer experience.

Personalized Social Media Experience

Social media platforms also offer opportunities for personalization. Start by delivering targeted content and advertisements to the right users. Not every social media user cares about that paint ad you recently published. When you target the right ads to the right audience segment, you increase the content's relevance and maximize the impact of your marketing efforts.

Prioritize Privacy While Acquiring Data

It's essential to strike a balance with personalization. While customization can enhance the user experience, it’s of utmost importance that you respect user privacy.

Let your customers know how their data will be used and give them control over their preferences. Respecting boundaries builds trust and ensures that personalization remains a positive experience for both parties. Implementing personalization strategies requires combining technology, data analysis, and creative thinking. 

Wrapping up

Leverage data and technology, and you’ll be able to deliver targeted advertisements, personalized website experiences, tailored content, and customized customer support.

However, never forget to strike a balance between personalization and privacy. Respect user boundaries and ensure transparency in data usage.

Increasingly, marketing performance measurement has become the heartbeat of every SaaS go-to-market function. Marketing performance measurement serves a dual purpose: first, it determines if marketing is indeed working towards business objectives, and two, it supports efficient resource allocation to ensure every marketing dollar counts towards revenue 

Marketing Performance Marketing - A Tale of Two Meetings

Let’s begin our journey by exploring the duality of marketing performance measurement:

Meeting 1: In the C-Suite

Imagine a high-stakes C-level executive meeting in a sleek boardroom, where the CMO stands front and center, under the spotlight.

Their mission? To prove that Marketing isn't just a department spending dollars; it's the strategic lever pushing the business towards its objectives. The CMO seeks to demonstrate marketing's contribution to the bottom line. This is where the first challenge unfolds.

The CMO's Dilemma

The CMO shoulders the responsibility of showcasing how marketing aligns with the overarching business goals. Their primary goal is to guarantee that every marketing initiative enhances the efforts of other departments, including Sales, Customer Success, and Product. The ultimate aim is evident:

1. Achieve Alignment - The CMO must navigate the labyrinth of business objectives and show how marketing's compass is set in the same direction.
2. Get Budgets Approved  - To secure the necessary resources, the CMO must articulate how marketing initiatives are essential to drive the business forward.
3. Show the Impact of Marketing  -In the eyes of the C-suite, the CMO must demonstrate that Marketing is more than a cost center — it's a revenue generator and a strategic asset.

This objective revolves around three key goals: 

• Achieving alignment
• Securing budgets
• Demonstrating the impact of marketing

The CMO's journey is riddled with challenges. They must define and measure marketing success in a way that resonates with the broader business goals. It's a complex task that goes beyond mere clicks, traffic, or conversions.

Meeting 2: Within the Marketing Team

Shift gears to an intense Marketing Team meeting. Here, the scene is all about competing priorities. Each marketing leader is striving to secure their share of the budget pie, aiming to maximize their team's performance. It's a complex puzzle, one that requires a judicious allocation of resources to different marketing functions.

In both meetings, one factor is evident: Marketing's performance holds the key to success, but measuring that performance is easier said than done.  Let's delve into the intricacies of these measurement challenges.

Challenge With Marketing Performance Measurement

The challenges with defining and measuring marketing performance is a tale of two perspectives: 

1. 1. High-level business objectives in the C-suite
2. 2. Granular resource allocation within the marketing team

Challenges for C-level Executives in Assessing Marketing Performance

C-level executives are tasked with the critical role of assessing marketing performance. From the perspective of a CMO in the CXO meeting, the objective remains clear: to establish how marketing significantly impacts business goals and aligns with other teams, amplifying their work. 

1. Proving Marketing ROI and Influence on the Pipeline

One of the critical challenges that C-level executives face is proving marketing return on investment (ROI) and measuring marketing's influence on the pipeline. The pressure to demonstrate that every dollar allocated to marketing translates into tangible results weighs heavily on the CMO's shoulders. Here, it's no longer enough to highlight vanity metrics; the focus is on metrics that directly tie marketing initiatives to revenue. It's about showcasing the journey from a marketing touchpoint to a closed deal.

2. Justifying Marketing Investments

Another challenge they often grapple with is the need to justify marketing investments. In an environment where every expenditure needs to be justified, marketing budgets come under tight scrutiny. The CMO must make a compelling case for why marketing deserves a significant share of the financial pie. This involves presenting not just the historical performance data but a strategic roadmap that lays out how marketing investments will contribute to the company's growth trajectory.

3. Improving Budgeting and Resource Allocation

Striking the right balance in budgeting and resource allocation is an intricate puzzle. C-level executives understand that underinvesting in marketing could stifle business growth while overinvesting could lead to budgetary constraints. The task is to allocate resources effectively, ensuring that marketing has the necessary tools to propel the business forward. The balance between short-term gains and long-term brand building must be maintained, a challenge that requires a strategic perspective.

4. Aligning Marketing Efforts with Overall Business Goals

To meet the objective of achieving alignment, executives must ensure that marketing efforts are in complete harmony with the broader business goals. The days of isolated marketing campaigns, driven solely by creative innovation, are long gone. The CMO's mission is to bridge the gap between marketing and other teams like Sales, Customer Success, and Product, ensuring that each department's work complements and amplifies the other.

5. Interpreting Marketing Data and Its Impact on Customer Experience

As you may agree, the world of marketing data is a labyrinth of numbers, charts, and graphs. The challenge lies in interpreting this data and understanding its real impact on customer experience. C-level executives can find themselves lost in this sea of information, struggling to discern actionable insights from vanity metrics. The CMO's role is to present data that tells a story, a narrative that highlights how marketing initiatives shape the customer experience and ultimately drive business growth.

These challenges aren't isolated; they are interconnected facets of the CMO's quest to prove marketing's worth in the CXO meeting. The following sections will delve into the specific strategies and solutions that can help C-level executives overcome these challenges and showcase the true impact of marketing on the bottom line. Through real-world examples, case studies, and analogies, we'll shed light on how business alignment is not just an aspiration but a tangible achievement in the realm of modern marketing.

Example: Adidas' Data-Driven Attribution Success Story

To illustrate how organizations have effectively addressed the challenge of substantiating marketing ROI and measuring marketing's influence on their business outcomes, we can examine the data-driven attribution success achieved by the global footwear giant, Adidas.

Adidas, a prominent player in the athletic and sportswear industry, identified a significant gap in its ability to measure the return on investment effectively. In a fiercely competitive market, understanding the impact of marketing became pivotal, and Adidas recognized that its existing strategies fell short of delivering precise results.

Adidas confronted the challenge of precisely measuring the return on its marketing investments. Despite its stature, the company found itself falling short in accurately gauging the impact of marketing endeavors, especially in the highly competitive landscape of sports and lifestyle apparel.

So, how did Adidas address this challenge?

1. Data-Driven Marketing Strategy

Adidas embarked on a comprehensive data-driven marketing strategy, leveraging state-of-the-art data analytics tools, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Through these technologies, they meticulously traced every dollar invested in marketing, discerning its direct influence on their sales pipeline.

1. Attribution Modeling:

Adidas implemented advanced attribution modeling, transcending the limitations of the last-click attribution model. This allowed them to attribute due credit to all marketing touch points, even those that contributed earlier in the customer journey. The shift in perspective unveiled the holistic impact of marketing interactions.

2. Customer Journey Mapping:

Adidas undertook a detailed mapping of the customer journey, encompassing the various marketing touchpoints across different stages. This comprehensive view empowered Adidas to understand precisely how each marketing interaction influenced prospective customers at different points in their journey, transcending mere lead generation.

3. Holistic Performance Reporting:

The company amalgamated data from diverse marketing channels and tools into a unified performance report. This consolidated view provided C-level executives with a crystal-clear, end-to-end depiction of how marketing endeavours directly contributed to the sales pipeline and, ultimately, revenue.

The Results:

Adidas's strategic adoption of data-driven attribution bore remarkable fruit. They achieved a substantial 15% increase in marketing-sourced leads and a remarkable 30% improvement in return on ad spends, as evidenced by Forbes.

In a nutshell, the Adidas case serves as a compelling example of how a data-driven approach can effectively address the challenge of proving marketing ROI and showcasing marketing's direct impact on the sales pipeline. By investing in advanced analytics, advanced attribution modeling, and a customer-centric methodology, Adidas not only demonstrated the ROI of its marketing initiatives but also uncovered opportunities for further optimization. It stands as a testament to how the alignment between marketing and overarching business objectives can be not only a goal but an attainable reality, delivering tangible results and substantiated ROI.

Challenges for Marketing Teams in Evaluating Performance

Marketing teams, from the perspective of a CMO in a marketing team meeting, face a different set of challenges in evaluating performance. They have the overall budget approved by the C-levels, and the pressure is on them to allocate it wisely across various initiatives. Here, the challenge is not just proving the value of marketing but also ensuring that every marketing dollar is spent with precision and purpose.

1. Measuring and Analyzing Efforts

One of the foremost challenges marketing teams face is measuring and analyzing their efforts effectively. This involves collecting data from various channels and campaigns, a process that can quickly become convoluted. Ensuring that the data collected is accurate, relevant, and up-to-date can be a Herculean task. Marketing teams must grapple with tools and technologies that promise comprehensive data but often fall short in delivering insights that really matter and help them build a case.

2. Attribution Modeling and Performance Reporting

Attribution modeling is often perceived as a daunting task. Determining which marketing touchpoints contributed to conversions and how much credit each should receive is a complex web to untangle. Marketing teams can feel overwhelmed as they attempt to assign values to different marketing channels and efforts accurately. The challenge is to construct an attribution model that aligns with business objectives, a puzzle that often remains unsolved.

3. Demonstrating ROI and Proving Campaign Effectiveness

Marketing teams also face the pressure of demonstrating return on investment (ROI) and proving the effectiveness of campaigns. This involves looking beyond the surface-level metrics such as clicks and impressions and diving into metrics that directly correlate with business outcomes. It's not merely about reporting numbers but about telling a compelling story of how each campaign contributes to the bigger picture.

4. Allocating the Approved Budget Across Initiatives

From the standpoint of marketing teams, the CMO must wrestle with the challenge of allocating the overall budget approved by the CXOs across various initiatives. This isn't just about dividing the pie; it's about distributing it in a way that maximizes the ROI for each initiative. The task is to determine which channels, campaigns, and strategies deserve the lion's share of the budget and which should make do with less.

5. Picking the Right Channels

Choosing the right channels to invest in is often another challenge for marketing teams. The digital world is rife with options, and not all are equally effective for every business. Making the right channel choices can mean the difference between a successful campaign and a wasted budget. That said, marketing teams need to carefully consider their target audience, message, and objectives when deciding where to allocate resources.

6. Unifying Reporting

Another challenge lies in unifying reporting across various channels and campaigns. Often, marketing teams are inundated with isolated reports from different tools and platforms, making it difficult to see the big picture. The objective is to streamline reporting, making it comprehensive and coherent, so that insights can be drawn from a holistic view of marketing performance.

Measuring the Influence of Touchpoints in Unison

Long gone are the days of attributing success to individual touchpoints. Marketing teams must now focus on measuring the influence of touchpoints in unison with each other. Understanding how different channels work together to lead a prospect down the conversion path is a multifaceted challenge. The CMO must guide the team in constructing a performance measurement framework that considers the synergy between touchpoints.

This section will explore solutions to these challenges, drawing from real-world B2B examples, case studies, and analogies that help demystify the intricacies of marketing performance measurement at the ground level. The aim is not just to uncover the problems but to provide actionable insights for CMOs and marketing teams to overcome these hurdles effectively.

Example: OneSpot's Attribution Modeling Revolution

We’ve already seen how C-levels can resolve marketing measurement-related concerns. Now, to exemplify how marketing teams can address the challenge of attribution modeling and performance reporting, let's take a peek into OneSpot's transformative journey.

OneSpot, a renowned inbound marketing and sales software company, realized the need for a more sophisticated approach to attribution. Like many other marketing teams, they were grappling with assigning proper credit to various touchpoints in the buyer's journey.

So, what did they do?

Holistic Attribution Model 

OneSpot transitioned from a simplistic first-touch or last-touch attribution model to a holistic attribution approach. They introduced a custom attribution model that factored in multiple touchpoints throughout the customer's journey. This shift allowed them to accurately assess the role each touchpoint played in conversions.

Unified Reporting 

OneSpot integrated various marketing channels and tools into a unified reporting dashboard. This dashboard provided marketing teams with a comprehensive view of their efforts' performance. It allowed them to see how different channels and campaigns interacted and influenced one another in the conversion process.

Machine-Learning for Attribution

OneSpot leveraged machine learning algorithms to automatically assign credit to different touchpoints. This data-driven approach ensured that attribution was based on actual data patterns rather than subjective judgments. It eliminated the bias that often crept into manual attribution methods.

Data-Backed Decisions 

By implementing these changes, OneSpot not only enhanced its attribution modeling but also made data-backed decisions regarding budget allocation. The marketing team could clearly see which channels and campaigns were most effective at different stages of the customer journey. This allowed them to optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.

OneSpot's journey is a prime example of how marketing teams can navigate the challenges of attribution modeling and performance reporting. By embracing advanced attribution models, unifying reporting, and leveraging technology like machine learning, they transformed the way they assessed marketing performance. The above example we just saw, illustrates the practical steps that CMOs and marketing teams can take to address these challenges effectively and ensure that every marketing dollar is spent with purpose and precision.

Bridging the Gap: Strategies for Improved Measurement

Understanding the challenges faced by both C-level executives and marketing teams, it's clear that a bridge must be constructed to close the gap between expectations and operational realities. Here, we offer actionable strategies to enhance marketing performance measurement and foster collaboration between CXOs and marketing teams.

For C-Level Executives

1. Educate and Equip 

C-level executives need to invest in understanding the complexities of modern marketing. This means not only asking for data but also having the knowledge to interpret it. Education in digital marketing trends, analytics, and performance measurement can be invaluable.

2. Set Clear Objectives 

Establish unambiguous objectives for marketing efforts that align with broader business goals. Make it a collaborative exercise, involving marketing teams in the goal-setting process to ensure realistic and feasible targets.

3. Regular Reviews and Alignment 

Implement regular review sessions where marketing teams present their findings, challenges, and plans to the C-suite. This keeps everyone on the same page and helps to identify and address bottlenecks promptly.

4. Innovation Budget 

Allocate a portion of the marketing budget to innovation and experimentation. Encourage marketing teams to explore new tactics and technologies that might yield long-term benefits, even if they are harder to measure in the short run.

For Marketing Teams

5. Enhance Data Collection 

Invest in data collection tools and methodologies that provide a holistic view of marketing performance. This includes incorporating cross-channel tracking and ensuring data accuracy.

6. Focus on Customer Journey Mapping 

Instead of isolated touchpoint measurements, concentrate on mapping the customer journey. Understand how different channels influence prospects at various stages, allowing for a more comprehensive performance evaluation.

7. Collaborative Reporting 

Develop a standardized reporting format that incorporates both high-level metrics for the C-suite and detailed analytics for internal use. This ensures that every team member, from CMOs to data analysts, can interpret and act on the data effectively.

8. Continual Learning

The marketing landscape evolves rapidly. Encourage and enable your team members to upskill by staying updated with the latest developments within the industry, emerging trends and technologies. Investing in employee training and development can significantly impact performance.

Joining Hands: Collaboration and Alignment

A significant component of bridging the gap between C-level executives and marketing teams is fostering collaboration and alignment. At the cost of sounding cliche, this means both parties need to work together, understanding each other's challenges and priorities. Establish cross-functional teams where marketing, sales, product, and customer success work together on joint initiatives. This approach helps break down silos, promotes data sharing, and accelerates the achievement of common goals.

The benefits of this collaboration are substantial. C-levels gain a deeper understanding of the intricacies of marketing performance, while marketing teams feel more empowered and supported in their endeavors. The two groups can collectively evaluate the effectiveness of different marketing strategies and tactics, making informed decisions on how to allocate budgets more effectively.

Bridging the Gap for Optimal Performance

In B2B marketing, addressing the challenges surrounding performance measurement is essential. Understanding the nuances of these challenges from both the C-level executive perspective and the marketing team's viewpoint is the first step towards bridging the gap. By implementing actionable strategies and fostering collaboration, businesses can achieve optimal marketing performance measurement, align marketing efforts with broader business goals, and showcase marketing's true impact. In this quest for better measurement, both C-level executives and marketing teams must work hand in hand, guided by a shared commitment to success.

You’ve tested your product to market fit and you’re seeing an amazing response to your solution across the board. 

But you're not growing at the pace you’d like. Maybe you’re unable to reach your target audience, maybe your ad campaigns aren’t working as expected, maybe your website isn’t up to par, or maybe sales reps are dropping the ball. 

It’s overwhelming. To sort through multiple marketing and sales channels, to pinpoint where the problem is and allocate spends efficiently. 

Out of all the marketing attribution models, time-decay attribution proves to be one of the most effective models when facing the challenges of business growth. 

What is Time Decay Attribution?

The time decay attribution model assigns credit to customer touchpoints across the marketing and sales funnel based on their temporal proximity to a conversion goal. It recognizes that interactions closer to the conversion point have the most significant impact. Accordingly, it gradually diminishes the credit assigned to earlier touchpoints. 

Picture a company trying to understand how customers decide to sign up for their product. Along the customer's journey, buyers first see an ad on a tech blog a few months ago. Then, they attend a webinar, and finally, they receive a targeted mail, prompting them to convert.

Using a time decay attribution model, the email they received just before the conversion gets the most credit (50%) because it had the most immediate impact. The webinar would recieve some credit (30%), and the initial ad (20%) would receive the least credit.

This model recognizes that while all interactions play a role, their influence varies over the customer journey from the first touch to conversion. It helps companies see which touch points were most influential, allowing them to fine-tune their marketing strategy accordingly.

Why The Time Decay Attribution Model Matters

A variety of attribution models exist, including First Interaction, Last Interaction, Linear, Position-based, and Time Decay. Each has their own benefits and limitations based on the nature of your business. 

Generally, the last click model has been the most popular but it can be heavily limiting as it’s a single-touch model that attributes conversions solely to the last touchpoint. As you might expect, this doesn't account for the contribution of previous touchpoints that led to the conversion. While this might be suitable for most B2C brands looking to see what channels drive the most conversions, it fails to capture the complexity of a lengthy, non-linear B2B sales cycle.

Let’s take a multi-touch model: linear attribution. This model assigns equal credit to all traffic sources, treating them uniformly, but it might not fully reflect reality. Each channel impacts decision-making differently, and giving them equal credit might be a limiting view for companies looking to optimize their marketing efforts and shorten their sales cycle. 

Here’s where time decay attribution models fit in. Time decay attribution strikes a balance between giving credit to all relevant traffic sources in reverse order, and how each channel contributed to the decision-making process.

Benefits of Time Decay Attribution 

Much like other attribution models, the time decay model has its unique benefits and limitations. Here are a few things to consider before you implement a time decay attribution model.

1. True-to-Life B2B Attribution 

In reality, each GTM channel has a unique life cycle, leading to natural performance fluctuations over time. Identifying these changes promptly represents a significant chance for enhancing results, and Time Decay offers a means to seize this opportunity.

This is because Time Decay assigns greater weight to the most recent touchpoints, it amplifies the influence of significant performance fluctuations within those sources on the overall outcomes. Consequently, the utilization of Time Decay empowers a more reliable method for determining the priority of pipeline sources that require immediate attention and improvement compared to other attribution models.

2. Best for Conversion Optimization 

The Time decay attribution model's benefit lies in its capacity to enable you to focus on actions that yield the most immediate results. Additionally, it helps identify critical late-stage touchpoints, often overlooked by alternative models, including strategies pertaining to bottom-funnel marketing and sales.

3. Enhanced Customer Journey Representation

Conventional attribution models tend to oversimplify the customer journey by uniformly distributing credit among all touchpoints or solely attributing it to the first or last interaction. In contrast, the time decay model meticulously considers the timing of each interaction, resulting in a more precise depiction of the customer journey.

Moreover, it facilitates the comparative assessment of campaign or channel performance over time, introducing a layer of predictability as marketers can anticipate consistent attribution patterns across various campaigns.

4. Adaptable for Tailored Applications

The Time Decay Attribution Model boasts remarkable adaptability, permitting customization to align with specific requirements. For example, it allows for the adjustment of weightage on recent interactions or the prioritization of specific channels to suit particular needs.

Take the example of a travel company, where placing greater emphasis on the last interaction or channel before booking a trip can offer deeper insights into the decision-making process, as travel decisions often manifest close to the departure date, making recent interactions more influential.

In cases like these, the time decay rate can be reduced to account for external influence. 

5. Easy to integrate with other models 

Integrating the insights gained from the time decay model with other data sources provides a comprehensive perspective of your marketing strategies.

For instance, many B2B companies observe that direct searches are the last event before a user subscribes to their solution. In these instances a time decay model can be combined with a position-based model, helping give higher credit to touchpoints that contributed to opportunity creation before the final sale took place. 

Limitations of Time Decay Attribution 

1. Weighted Focus on Recent Interactions

This model places a heightened emphasis on touchpoints that are in close proximity to the conversion event. Although this approach yields valuable insights into the effectiveness of strategies for driving conversions, it may unintentionally downplay the significance of initial touchpoints. 

In cases involving deliberate and well-considered purchases, such as enterprise sales, customers engage in extensive research and comparison, late-stage interactions may receive an overemphasized credit. This could potentially result in an excessive allocation of resources to strategies aimed at closing sales, while inadvertently neglecting those designed to attract and nurture leads.

2. Greater Complexity 

Due to the complexity of the model, it may not be beneficial for companies at different stages in their growth journey. The companies that are just starting out and looking for a product-to-market fit, may benefit more from first-touch attribution, rather than the time decay model, which will require a lot of resources. 

Challenges With Implementing Time Decay Attribution Model

As mentioned above, the time decay model can be complex and difficult to implement. 

Since attribution relies heavily on data, one of the biggest challenges when implementing any attribution model is the accuracy of data. 

But oftentimes, social media attribution tools such as Facebook ads, and analytic tools such as Google Analytics show discrepancies in data when compared to one another. 

Account-based marketing solutions can sieve out these interactions, creating a more concise data set to derive insights.

This also helps address another of the challenges faced by marketers and entrepreneurs, when working with time decay attribution. It is to use a refined data set that excludes sessions that lack meaningful engagement, such as quick bounces. You can also filter out sessions with little or no activity, and guarantee that the data you analyze represents genuine user interactions. 

Time Decay Attribution for Smarter Marketing Decisions

If your product has a strong market fit but isn’t growing as expected, ineffective marketing attribution could be the issue. Time decay attribution helps businesses identify the most influential touchpoints by assigning higher credit to interactions closer to conversion. Unlike single-touch models, it acknowledges the cumulative impact of multiple engagements throughout the customer journey.

This model is particularly beneficial for B2B sales cycles, where decision-making is complex. It enables conversion optimization, provides a realistic representation of customer interactions, and integrates with other attribution models.

Looking to get started with time-decay multi-touch attribution modeling? See why Factors might be a great fit for you. 

The race to find the most effective lead-scoring software in 2023 is on. 

The competition to convert prospects into customers pushes marketers to use advanced lead-scoring tools to gain an edge. 

Lead scoring software platforms analyze behavioral data and activity to identify hot leads, route them faster, and boost sales. But the important part is to pick the most effective one.

In this guide, we look at the top 11 platforms heating the lead-scoring arena. We'll uncover the unique features of each and help you identify the one lead-scoring tool that can take your lead gen to the next level.

Let’s get started.

TL;DR 

• Lead scoring helps identify and prioritize high-value prospects based on engagement, attributes, and behaviors.
• When evaluating solutions, look for predictive lead scoring, account intelligence, journey analytics, and integrations.
• Factors provides the most comprehensive account intelligence to optimize targeting and engagement. It goes beyond essential scoring to analyze account health, revenue potential, and more with AI.
• ZohoCRM offers various capabilities like lead management, workflow automation, and predictive lead scoring to streamline the sales process. However, its UI can be difficult for new users.
• Salesforce Einstein leverages AI and machine learning to deliver real-time insights, next-best-action recommendations, and content within workflows. However, it lacks flexibility with integrations.
• HubSpot combines powerful CRM, marketing automation, email marketing, and analytics in one platform. It offers robust features but needs more AI capabilities.
• Freshsales maximizes sales pipelines with lead scoring, deal insights, automation, and other capabilities. Its UI could use some improvements for ease of use.
• ActiveCampaign provides end-to-end marketing automation with advanced lead scoring and Salesforce integration. However, support responsiveness needs improvement.
• EngageBay combines CRM and marketing automation tailored for SMBs with lead scoring and segmentation. But key analytics features require add-ons.
• Adobe Marketo enables personalized cross-channel experiences with marketing automation, analytics, and AI. However, its UI for campaigns needs refinement.
• Monday.com brings key sales capabilities into one intuitive, customizable platform. But it requires time for proper setup and customization.
• Platformly centralizes and automates marketing operations, including basic CRM and email. Its interface and documentation need improvement.
• Pardot focuses on lead nurturing, marketing automation, and CRM integration. However, it has limited social media integration and reporting capabilities.
• Aligning sales and marketing with shared CRM and automation tools improves conversions.
• Solutions range from standalone scoring to full suites like CRM and marketing automation.
• Pricing varies based on features like contacts, AI capabilities, and number of users. Most offer multiple tiers.

What Should You Look for in a Lead Scoring Tool?

When it comes to driving sales, not all lead-scoring tools are created equal. But what should you look for when evaluating options? Let’s go through the must-have features of an excellent lead-scoring tool.

• Predictive Lead Scoring: Rule-based lead scoring is old school. And while it may work, predictive lead scoring is where we’re now. These tools use artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze data points to predict which leads will most likely convert. Unlike the rule-based approach, predictive lead scoring helps you “set-it-and-forget-it”. . 
• Comprehensive Account Intelligence: You need more than just names and emails to understand your leads. Comprehensive account intelligence gives you a 360-degree view of their behavior, needs, and potential value. This allows you to create hyper-targeted campaigns that convert like crazy.
• Insight Into Customer Journeys: Understanding the journey leads take through your sales funnel provides a roadmap to conversion. It helps you see exactly how and when to engage each lead to boost conversions. This is especially useful for account-based marketing teams who need to track touchpoints.
• Integrations With Other Tools: Your scoring tool can't live in a silo. It must play nicely with your other martech tools like CRM, email, and analytics. Look for a range of integrations to connect the dots seamlessly.
• Intuitive UI: An intuitive user interface helps your team focus on what matters most—converting and leads. Complicated UIs slow everyone down and lead to errors. Make sure it's human-friendly!
• Customizable Reporting Options: Granular data and customizable reporting help uncover the insights you need to optimize your strategy. Track specific KPIs, monitor campaign performance, and more with the flexibility to slice and dice.

Top 11 Lead Scoring Software of 2023

Let’s start with the top lead-scoring software tools in 2023. 

1. Factors

Factors is an AI-powered account intelligence platform tailored to the needs of B2B sales and marketing teams. It goes beyond essential lead scoring to provide comprehensive account insights that drive revenue growth.

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With Factors, you get a 360-degree view of your target accounts by analyzing behavioral, firmographic, and technographic data signals. The platform uses predictive analytics and machine learning to model account health, engagement, and revenue potential.

This actionable intelligence lets you identify high-value accounts, uncover growth opportunities, and personalize engagement across channels. If you're looking to boost ABM impact and align sales and marketing on what matters most, Factors is a go-to solution.

“Factors lead generation and nurturing capabilities have been instrumental in helping us identify and engage with high-value prospects. By providing us with real-time insights into website visitor behavior, we can quickly identify and nurture leads and move them along the funnel.” — Soumya M.

Key Features

• Predictive Lead & Account Scoring: Factors analyzes multiple attributes with AI to model account potential and prioritize your outreach accurately.
• Account Intelligence Engine: Get a comprehensive view of your target accounts, including firmographic and technographic profiles, churn predictions, win probability, and more.
• Advanced Behavioral Analytics: Track channel engagement to inform your account-based strategies and campaigns. Identify areas of momentum and weakness.
• Journey Analytics: Analyze accounts' steps to optimize conversion touchpoints through your funnel. Factors' "Explain" feature highlights trends driving account progression.

What Users Say About Factors

“Factors has successfully optimized our marketing and sales procedures by centralizing our data, encompassing both marketing and sales data, into a single, convenient platform. This consolidation has not only saved us valuable time but also valuable resources. Consequently, we have witnessed a notable increase in our return on investment (ROI), owing to the significantly reduced time required to engage with potential clients and the ability to create more precisely targeted campaigns.” — Ashok D.

Factors.ai Integrations

Factors.ai integrates with a wide range of platforms to streamline your data collection and analytics:

• Segment
• Leadsquared
• Rudderstack
• G2
• Google Ads
• Facebook Ads
• LinkedIn
• Bing Ads
• Google Search Console
• Slack
• Microsoft Teams
• Hubspot
• Salesforce
• Webhooks
• Webhooks with Zapier
• Webhooks with Make.com (formerly, Integromat)

Pricing

Factors offers four pricing tiers:

• Free Plan: Ideal for small businesses or individuals just starting out. This plan allows you to track up to 100 monthly accounts at no cost.
• Basic Plan: Priced at $99/month when billed annually, the Basic Plan is designed for growing businesses. It offers additional features like custom events, KPIs, and onboarding support.
• Growth Plan: For established businesses looking to scale, the Growth Plan costs $499/month when billed annually. This plan introduces account lead scoring and provides a Priority Customer Success Manager (CSM).
• Professional Plan: Aimed at large enterprises, the Professional Plan is priced at $999/month when billed annually. It includes advanced features like multi-touch attribution, AI-fueled explanations, and a dedicated CSM.

Higher tiers provide more identified accounts, tracked users, advanced features, and additional integrations. Custom enterprise pricing is also available.

2. ZohoCRM

Zoho CRM is a comprehensive customer relationship management platform engineered to streamline various business processes, including sales, marketing, customer support, and engagement. It offers a centralized system where businesses can store customer data, track sales activities, manage marketing campaigns, and provide timely customer support.

Key Features:

Zoho CRM features robust features to optimize lead management, including:

• Lead scoring - Automatically score and prioritize leads based on profile attributes, behavior, and engagement. Helps sales teams identify and focus on hot leads.
• Predictive lead scoring - Leverages AI and machine learning to analyze data patterns and behaviors to predict lead outcomes and suggest optimal next steps.
• Workflow automation - Set up triggers and actions to nurture leads through customized journeys. Automates repetitive tasks to boost efficiency.
• Sales insights - Real-time analytics provide visibility into deal performance, sales activities, and more to inform data-driven strategy.

What Users Say About Zoho CRM

"Zoho CRM helps us bring our organization together–pieces fragmented across emails, notebooks, and different applications are now centralized. Zoho CRM is a game changer for us and Indian businesses of the digital era." - Suresh Iyer, CIO, Blue Star Limited

“Zoho CRM can be overwhelming for new users. The user interface is not very intuitive, and it takes some time to understand how to navigate and use all of the features. The reporting functionality could be improved, as it is not as robust as some of its competitors.” — Juan E.

Integrations

• Gmail
• Outlook
• Slack
• Hubspot
• Mailchimp
• Zapier
• Quickbooks
• Google Analytics

Pricing

Zoho CRM offers four main pricing tiers, each designed to cater to different business needs:

• Standard Plan: Priced at $14/user/month when billed annually. This plan focuses on automating and optimizing your sales cycle.
• Professional Plan: Costs $23/user/month when billed annually. Aimed at improving customer acquisition and accelerating growth.
• Enterprise Plan: Priced at $40/user/month when billed annually. Designed for managing global customer experience operations.
• Ultimate Plan: Costs $52/user/month when billed annually. This plan allows businesses to scale exponentially with dedicated Business Intelligence capabilities.

3. Salesforce Einstein

Salesforce Einstein provides an end-to-end AI solution to help companies adopt AI. It offers predictions and generates content to assist with marketing emails or content. Deeply integrated with Salesforce, Einstein uses data from CRM and other apps to deliver real-time insights, predictions, and content within your workflows.

Key features

• Einstein Prediction Builder allows you to create custom AI models to predict outcomes like churn or lifetime value. This is useful for scoring leads based on different criteria.
• Einstein Next Best Action delivers recommendations to employees and customers within Salesforce apps. You can define strategies and build models to suggest the next steps for nurturing leads.
• Einstein Discovery uncovers patterns in your data and provides AI insights for solving problems. This can help identify high-value leads or understand lead behavior.
• Einstein Language uses natural language processing to understand customer sentiment and intent. It can route inquiries and optimize workflows to prioritize leads based on interactions.

What users say about Salesforce Einstein

“Salesforce.com is our source of truth database for customer relationship management activities. With the Salesforce.com enablement features we have bought and the third-party vendors we work with sitting on top of our Salesforce.com, we can do all client interactions within Salesforce.com. Because of this, we have robust data on our sales and customer activities.” — Anonymous user

“I dislike that if you want a channel that isn't covered out of the box it's so difficult to use your own connectors. Also, it's extremely hard to bring your own bot to the party.” — Marilyn M., Senior Director

Integrations

Salesforce supports an extensive list of integrations as they have a complete marketplace to help you seamlessly integrate your stack. And because Einstein is part of the Salesforce ecosystem, you get the same integrations with Einstein. 

Some popular integrations include:

• Google Data Studio
• GraphSQL
• Zapier
• And much more

Pricing 

• Salesforce Cloud Einstein is priced at $50/user/month and charged annually. This includes unlimited requests for its lead-scoring-focused features. 

4. HubSpot

HubSpot is an all-in-one sales and marketing software that helps businesses attract, engage, qualify, and convert leads at every sales funnel stage. It combines a full suite of tools to streamline and automate the sales process. HubSpot also offers powerful lead scoring features that can be a great way to prioritize your marketing campaigns, especially ABM. 

Key features

• Lead Management & Prospecting: Manage leads and upcoming sales activities in one workspace.
• Email Tracking: Get real-time notifications when a lead opens an email.
• Sales Automation: Automate follow-up tasks and emails to keep leads engaged.
• Sales Analytics & Reporting: Full visibility into the sales process for effective forecasting.
• Predictive Lead Scoring: Available in the Enterprise plan, this feature helps prioritize leads.

What Users Say About Hubspot

“Hubspot Marketing Hub is our go-to tool for all our Marketing Initiatives. The best about Hubspot Marketing Hub is its User Experience. It is pretty much simple and their to-the-point approach (not showing too many options) is very beneficial. 

The main red flag in Hubspot is its lack of Artificial Intelligence capabilities. Hubspot do have generative AI for Content creation but it lacks AI functionalities in Analytics and Database cleansing. We are tedious process especially if you have a huge database.” — Karthick M.

Integrations

HubSpot, like Salesforce, has a marketplace of integrations that allows you to integrate with hundreds of different tools. Some popular ones include:

• Google Suite
• WordPress
• Microsoft Suite
• Eventbrite
• And more

Pricing

• Free CRM plan with basic features
• Starter plan at $45/month for 1-10 users
• Professional plan at $800/month for advanced features
• Enterprise plan starting at $1,600/month with predictive lead scoring, A/B testing, and more

5. Freshsales

Freshsales is a powerful CRM platform designed to maximize business sales pipelines and revenue. It equips teams with robust features, including multiple sales pipelines, revenue analytics, CPQ capabilities, and AI-powered automation. This enables in-depth visibility into the sales process and intelligent prioritization of high-value deals.

Key Features

• Contact Scoring: Freddy AI assigns scores to prospects based on positive and negative signals to identify sales-ready leads.
• Deal Insights: Predictions on deal closure based on historical data, engagement, and activities to focus on high-value opportunities.
• Sales Sequences: Set up personalized outreach campaigns with triggers to effectively nurture prospects.
• Workflows: Automate repetitive sales tasks to reduce manual work and focus on qualified leads.
• Territory Management: Segment and prioritize prospects with rules to pursue leads likely to convert.

What Users Say About Freshsales

“Freshsales is a userfriendly CRM that is constantly looking for ways to improve. I like that they not only take feedback, but actually implement it. It syncs up easily to your email and allows for seamless work across different platforms like Google calendar/Gmal and Acuity. 

I wish it would not ask to duplicate leads when they have different locations. Sometimes there will be a lot of leads with the same name (i.e. Jennifer Smith) and FS will automatically assume it is a duplicate. If it was somehow able to identify a difference in, say, location or company name, it would make the AI work in our favor with more ease.” — a reviewer on G2.

Integrations

Freshsales has a marketplace of integrations and these are some of the most popular ones. 

• Mailchimp
• Trello
• Magento 2
• QuickBooks
• HubSpot
• PandaDoc
• Xero
• Stripe
• DocuSign

Pricing Plans

• Free Plan: $0 for up to 3 users with basic features.
• Growth Plan: $15/user/month billed annually or $18/user/month billed monthly. Includes contact scoring and sales sequences.
• Pro Plan: $39/user/month billed annually or $47/user/month billed monthly. Includes multiple pipelines and deal insights.
• Enterprise Plan: $69/user/month billed annually or $83/user/month billed monthly. Advanced customization and governance.

6. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is an end-to-end marketing automation platform designed to help businesses grow by streamlining the entire customer experience. It offers powerful capabilities, from email marketing to advanced lead scoring and sales automation.

Key Features 

• Lead Scoring: Scores leads based on behaviors and attributes to identify and prioritize hot prospects for outreach.
• Win Probability: Uses machine learning to analyze past interactions and estimate the likelihood of closing a deal.
• Salesforce Integration: Enables robust scoring models by incorporating CRM data.
• Attribution Reporting: Provides insights into effective marketing channels for conversions.

What Users Say About ActiveCampaign

What I love about AC is they don't try to be the "only tool" you use. They get that we all use dozens of tools and instead work with that. We integrated in our Calendly, our Segment, our Bonjoro and many other integrations and they worked seamlessly. Not even Zapier required. — Casey H.

“Main downside we have experienced to date has been around Active Campaign support and responsiveness to issues. We have had our developer design and build the flows we are seeking but our main automation that has been set up is not working properly and a ticket has been logged with support for a number of days and no response or contact has been received.” — James C., Director

Top Integrations

• Salesforce
• WordPress
• Facebook Ads
• Slack
• Shopify
• WooCommerce
• Calendly
• Google Analytics
• Zapier

Pricing 

• Plus Plan: $49/month annually for 3 users. Includes basics like WooCommerce integration.
• Professional Plan: $149/month annually for 5 users. Adds AI, Salesforce integration, and more.
• Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing for 10 users. Advanced features like custom reporting.

7. EngageBay

EngageBay is an intuitive all-in-one CRM and marketing automation platform tailored for small and midsize businesses. It combines a robust feature set on one seamless platform to maximize sales and revenue growth by aligning marketing and sales. 

However, it contains multiple add-ons that you may require for proper analytics tracking which are not part of the complete package. 

Key Features

• Marketing Automation: Create targeted campaigns and workflows to nurture prospects with relevant content and offers for better lead qualification.
• Lead Scoring: Automatically score leads based on demographics, behaviors like email opens/clicks, and other criteria to identify sales-ready prospects.
• Segmentation: Divide contacts into groups based on attributes like location, firmographics, interests, and behaviors for highly targeted marketing.
• Email Broadcast: Send customized emails to contacts and subscriber lists to drive engagement, which can be tracked for lead scoring.
• Deal Management: A centralized pipeline provides visibility into deal stages to score leads accordingly and focus efforts on closing deals.

What Users Say About Engagebay

“I love how you can manage your deals (sales pipeline) with email automations associated with those deals from the same platform. This is essential as it saves my sales and account management team a ton of time and effort with regards to admin work” — Rahul C.

“One thing I dislike about EngageBay is that the All-in-one suite does not actually include everything. There is a new really cool feature which allows you to track website activity, but it is an add-on. EngageBay charges extra for this feature.” — Marcin R.

Integrations

• Zapier
• SendGrid
• Mailgun
• Mandrill
• Xero

Pricing

• Free Plan: $0 per user/month, includes 250 contacts, basic CRM, and email marketing.
• Basic Plan: Starts at $12.74 per user/month, includes 500 contacts and lead scoring.
• Growth Plan: Starts at $42.49 per user/month, includes 5000 contacts and advanced features like custom domain.
• Pro Plan: Starts at $84.99 per user/month, and offers unlimited contacts and advanced analytics.

8. Adobe Marketo

Adobe Marketo Engage is a comprehensive marketing automation platform for B2B and B2C companies looking to optimize customer engagement and accelerate revenue. It combines robust email marketing, advanced lead management, and data-driven analytics in one powerful solution.

Marketo helps marketing and sales teams work cohesively to attract prospects, identify hot leads, and guide customers through personalized journeys from discovery to conversion. AI-powered capabilities provide actionable insights to engage people at the right time.

‍Key Features

• Lead Management: Nurture and qualify prospects through tailored content and the sales funnel.
• Account-Based Marketing: Coordinate marketing and sales to target high-value accounts.
• Scoring, Routing & Alerts: Prioritize and route leads based on engagement metrics and behaviors.
• Advanced Journey Analytics: Uncover customer insights across touchpoints to improve lead scoring.
• Predictive Audiences: Use AI to build customized audiences based on predicted behaviors.

What Users Say About Adobe Marketo

“It is a fairly complete tool, focused on marketing automation composed of webinars, form editor, landing templates, which significatly help you to elaborate reports though the management and analysis of programs that contains Adobe Marketo Engage, being this has a quite striking workflow management, taking into account that this engine is what makes this software quite attractive.” — Marco P.

“The user experience of building emails and campaigns can be very frustrating. For example, spacing surrounding email components appears much differently in the Marketo email preview than it does in your inbox. About 50% of the time, when you add an image, link, or token to your email, it disappears upon saving and you need to add it a second time. Almost every time you add a line break in your email, you have to save the component, open it again, and save it again before Marketo will reflect the space you added in the email preview.” — Jordan M.

Integrations 

Like Salesforce and HubSpot, Adobe Marketo has a marketplace for all the tools that can be integrated with it. Here are some of the popular ones.  

• Adobe Experience Cloud
• Salesforce
• Microsoft
• SAP
• Google and Facebook
• LinkedIn 
• Event tools
• And more

Pricing

• Growth: Core email, segmentation, automation. Custom pricing.
• Select: Essential automation and measurement. Custom pricing.
• Prime: Advanced lead management, journey analytics, AI. Custom pricing.
• Ultimate: Robust marketing automation capabilities. Custom pricing.

With powerful automation, intelligence, and analytics, Marketo enables personalized cross-channel experiences to convert more prospects and drive revenue.

9. Monday.com‍

Monday.com is a flexible and customizable sales platform designed for sales teams looking to streamline processes, boost productivity, and centralize customer data. It brings key sales capabilities like pipeline visibility, forecasting, email integration, and activity tracking into one intuitive platform.

Key Features

• Email Sync & Tracking: Sync Gmail/Outlook to log emails and get notifications when prospects open or reply.
• Sales Forecasting: Set deal values and probabilities to track forecast vs. actual sales.
• Activity Management: Log activities like calls, meetings, and notes with leads and contacts.
• Team Goals: Manage and track team quota attainment over time.
• Lead Capturing: Integrate with other tools or add website forms to capture leads.

What Users Say About Monday

“I like how monday.com helps us create almost instanly more efficient team no matter the approach you take: be it Kanban, Scrum, Scrumban or any other predictive or agile enviroment, Monday.com is full of templates and views to show the data in all those approaches. Automations make the job of a project lead much easier and allows you track performance, SLAs, etc. You can assign owners, up to two, limit the work in progress, link with Gmail, etc” — Milton Adalberto A.

It takes a long time to set up exactly how you want it, truly you need a dedicated person to be able to get it going perfectly. Otherwise, you will be tweaking constantly to get it fully operational and customized. — Megan M., Director of Operations‍

Integrations

• DocuSign
• Aircall
• PandaDoc
• MailChimp
• Hubspot
• Facebook Ads
• Salesforce

Pricing

• Basic CRM: $10/user/month billed annually, unlimited contacts, custom pipelines.
• Standard CRM: $14/user/month billed annually, 2-way email, CRM automation.
• Pro CRM: $24/user/month billed annually, sales analytics, mass emails.
• Enterprise CRM: Contact for pricing, lead scoring, analytics, and security.

10. Platformly‍

Platformly is an intuitive marketing automation platform designed to help online businesses centralize, automate and scale their operations for growth. It combines email marketing, basic CRM, behavioral tracking, analytics, and more to streamline processes and convert leads.

Key Features

• CRM: Automatically record and update customer information like contact details, interactions, and recent social media activity.
• Segmentation: Divide your contacts into groups with shared attributes to send targeted campaigns.
• Sales Pipelines: Visualize deal stages to understand where leads are in the funnel and focus efforts on pushing them through.

What Users Say About Platformly

“Platformly is perfect because it always allows you to save time. It offers many features in one tool: marketing automation, emails, forms... and more. On top of that, it has many integrations with other tools! The other great thing is support. This is important to me. I don't like waiting too long for support.” — Thomas K.

“The well-defined interface is rather complicated and confusing. Their documentation is primarily technical documentation and less about use case scenarios to help train and guide in optimal usage.” — Peter K., CEO and Co-Founder‍

Top Integrations:

• ClickBank, PayPal, Paddle, Stripe
• WooCommerce, Shopify
• Twilio & Nexmo

Pricing

• Starter Plan: $69/month for up to 10K contacts, 10K emails/month, 1 dashboard, 5 integrations.
• Growth Plan: $49/month extra for 100K emails/month, 5 dashboards, unlimited integrations.
• Unlimited Plan: $99/month extra for unlimited emails, dashboards, integrations.

11. Pardot ‍

Pardot combines a suite of capabilities, including email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and seamless CRM integration with Salesforce. Automated and personalized campaigns allow you to engage prospects with the right message based on their interests and behaviors at the right time. 

Robust analytics provide insights to refine campaigns and strategies for optimal ROI continuously. The platform is optimized to find, nurture, and convert more prospects into customers.

Key Features

• Marketing Automation: Automate tasks to identify and engage with hot leads.
• Marketing Analytics: Focus efforts on high-value prospects based on conversion data.
• Sales & Marketing Alignment: Salesforce Engage connects sales with qualified leads from marketing.

What Users Say About Pardot

Complexity, Cost, Learning Curve, Limited Social Media Integration. Despite these potential downsides, many organizations find the benefits of Pardot when it comes to enhancing their marketing efforts and customer engagement — Deepak R.

Pardot requires knowledge of HTML, which is a nice way of saying that your time working on email campaigns is going to be complex, frustrating, and time-consuming. Formatting and styling are Pardot's pain points. Source reporting, and reporting in general, are famously awful. Don't take my word for me - check around, and you'll find out that Pardot is dead last in the market regarding providing useful data and insights. — Ian B., Growth Marketing Manager‍

Integrations

Similar to Salesforce, Pardot integrates and works with all the tools that Salesforce integrates with.

Pricing

• Account Engagement: $1,250/month for up to 10K contacts annually.
• Plus: $2,750/month for up to 10K contacts annually.
• Marketing Analytics: $3,000/user/month annually.
• Sales & Marketing Alignment: $50/user/month annually.
  

Key Takeaways‍

• Implementing lead scoring is critical to identify and prioritize hot prospects most likely to convert. The right software solution can analyze engagement, attributes, and behaviors to accurately predict lead potential.
• Look for AI-powered predictive scoring, actionable account intelligence, and intuitive journey analytics when evaluating lead scoring platforms. These capabilities optimize targeting, conversions, and revenue growth.
• Platforms like Factors utilize advanced AI and machine learning to provide unparalleled accuracy in predicting outcomes. Comprehensive account profiles and Explain features uncover trends driving progression.
• Seamless CRM and marketing automation integrations align sales and marketing around high-value targets. Shared tools and data foster engagement, coordination, and conversions.
• Solutions range from specialized scoring to end-to-end suites. Assess your needs and stack compatibility when selecting. All-in-one platforms can maximize efficiency.
• Carefully evaluate capabilities, ease of use, customer support, and pricing models. Many offer multiple tiers based on features, users, and contacts.

For enterprises seeking a powerful yet intuitive lead scoring and account management platform, Factors is a clear choice. Book a demo with Factors to learn how cutting-edge AI can uncover revenue opportunities.