Common sense > attribution

A tale about attribution holding back larger business growth

A little over a year ago we went all in with our dual-motion go-to-market (GTM) offer. We had a great sales-led GTM engine already in place and completely changed the industry by offering the first forever free recruiting ATS/CRM with our product-led GTM offer.

A handful of months in we were seeing PLG signups steadily rising, but the pipeline and revenue from those signups weren’t following that same trendline. Next to prospects explicitly asking to talk to sales, this should’ve been our second “hottest” pipeline driver…but it wasn’t.

The cause?

We had a basic marketing nurture series in place for those who signed up, but with these being higher “intent” signups, these would be layups for our BDRs to follow up with and convert.

So I reached out to our top BDR to see how I could help further enable the BDR team with these. What content would be helpful to supply, what objections could they expect + how to speak to those, FAQs, etc. But what was uncovered in the first 5 minutes of that call put a spotlight on the issue when they said:

“I don’t call on these until after 14 days so I get credit”

At the time we had a 14-day “Pro Trial” period where the prospect would have full access to the entire platform. After the 14-day window was up, they would be downgraded to the “Free” version. Based on this, there were rules in place that prevented BDRs from getting any credit or compensation for converting the PLG leads within the first 14 days because they were “attributed to marketing, not BDRs.”

Attribution was holding us back from business growth.

Worrying about who would get credit for pipeline or revenue was literally holding us back from even creating pipeline or driving revenue.

The fix

The actual fix for this is wildly simple - don’t get caught up in attribution. But putting this into practice is much easier said than done due to things like compensation plans, budgeting, and more.

So we went back to our north star metric: revenue.

Is what we’re solving for here going to increase revenue? Yes.
Is what’s holding us back from doing this internal processes or red tape? Yes.
Can this be solved by changing said processes? Yes.

There was our answer. And within the next week here’s what happened:

• We had BDRs starting the sequence we built together ASAP instead of waiting 14 days

• Marketing and Sales leadership reworked the BDR compensation plan for these

• Pipeline from the PLG signups shot up immediately

Remember: the goal of attribution isn’t to say “Who gets credit for this?” but to answer “What’s working to drive business?”

Once you overcome that hurdle, that’s when the magic happens as team siloes are broken down and true cross-departmental teamwork begins, resulting in a better customer experience + better business results.

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One LinkedIn post I bookmarked this week

I’ve worked at a large, publicly-traded company (Blackbaud) driving over $1B per year in revenue.

I’ve worked at a startup (Refine Labs) where I was the 10th person to join and were figuring out how to scale to our first $1M, $5M, and $10M.

I’m now at a scale-up (Loxo), joining as hire number 50-something to help take us from tens of millions to hundreds of millions.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned after my journey across all of these teams (+ the hundreds of clients advised while at Refine Labs), it’s that what Jason Lemkin calls a “startup person” is a very real thing.

The speed. The autonomy. The challenges. The stress.

I love it all and at this point in my life, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Startups (+ scale-ups) attract a certain type of person. And those are my people.

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One podcast episode I enjoyed this week

“The purpose of life is not just to get your goals. Your goals or getting what you want doesn’t make you happy. What makes you happy is who you become in pursuit of those goals. The growth, the progress - even if you don’t achieve it yet, but you start losing weight, or you start building muscle, or you start making your relationship better - the building, the progress, is what makes you feel alive because we’re all made to either grow or die.”

When one of the funniest people you’ve ever heard collides with the king of motivation, you know magic is going to happen, and this episode didn’t disappoint. Listened to this over the course of last weekend while taking our little one for her daily walks and found myself laughing, nodding, and even jotting a few notes down in my reminders app along the way.

And for anyone interested, here’s a playlist I add to each week with some of my favorite podcast episodes:

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See you next Saturday,
Sam