.png "HubSpot Employee"){kind=icon}
Single Point Attribution -- Visualize your Progress!
Sales and Marketing teams yearn to see how their work contributes to attaining team metrics or organizational goals. For Marketing, this may mean qualifying a certain number of leads for Sales. For Sales, it may likely be how many deals are closed in a certain time period to hit a revenue target.
To demonstrate the effectiveness of the above, there are several reports in HubSpot that you can use to help visualize progress between how your go-to-market teams are progressing.
This, which can be called single point attribution, views a single spot on a record’s lifecycle to indicate the result of that relationship. A record can be a contact, company, deal, or any other object on your HubSpot platform.
While these reports are not as comprehensive as multi-touch revenue attribution or customer journey analytics, such reports can get you used to viewing what channels and mediums work for your organization to acquire leads, customers, and revenue. This can also set leadership teams in a frame of mind that identifies causal relationships between the input that their marketing and sales teams are doing, and what the end result is.
The reports I am going to demonstrate are below.
- Marketing’s Contribution to Revenue
- Revenue by Original/Latest Source
- Revenue by First/Recent Conversion
- Campaign Attribution
These reports are not the only way to structure your data. Furthermore, the above reports can be built with default properties that come with every HubSpot subscription. More importantly, these reports identify whether the relationships between your go-to-market teams are working. Below are knowledge base articles listing HubSpot properties on default objects. All of the reports below can be used with Deals, and either Contact or Company properties.
- Default Contact Properties
- Default Company Properties
- Default Deal Properties
- Default Ticket Properties
- Default Activity Properties
To access the reports tool, click Reports ⇒ Create Report ⇒ Custom Report. From there you can determine what data groups you need to structure the visualization you need to spur collaboration while removing data silos.
Marketing’s Contribution to Revenue
This report can identify how valued your Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) are, based on how much revenue they generate when they close as a customer. If you choose to associate Deals with Companies, it is recommended to automatically associate your contacts and companies together, and tie the pivotal contacts to your deals. The Account Based Marketing terminology may give you an idea of roles you can associate with your deals that close.
When in your custom report builder, choose Deals as your primary data source since you are looking at the contribution towards revenue. You can then associate with contacts/companies based on your preference.
You can pull both the Close Date (Deals) and the Revenue Amount – I used Closed Amount (Deals) onto the X and Y axes, respectively. When looking at the filters, you should specify the property of Became a Marketing Qualified Lead Date is known (Contacts/Company). If you are doing this on the company level, this will work based on when the first associated contacts of that company became an MQL.
To make this chart more actionable, visualize this as a line chart and check cumulative in "Chart Settings." This will show an additive improvement of marketing’s work over time, represented by closed revenue.
This report visualizes how much your marketing team is adding to your organization’s revenue targets. Moreover, this can further underline the importance of strengthening Sales-Marketing alignment and amplify these returns.
Revenue by Original/Latest Source
This report helps go-to-markets teams understand what channels generate further revenue based on how they entered as a contact/company in your HubSpot instance. The properties you can look at here are Original Source and Latest Source.
It’s important to understand how original and/or latest source properties are tagged in HubSpot. If you need further details beyond the source properties, take a look at the drill downs. The main sources are listed below.
- Direct Traffic
- Organic Search
- Paid Search
- Paid Social
- Email Marketing
- Referrals
- Other Campaigns
- Offline Sources
When in the custom report builder, choose Deals as your primary data source since you are looking at the contribution towards revenue. You can then associate with contacts/companies based on your preference.
The nature of this chart is to understand the split of closed revenue between sources. Since that is the case, I recommend visualizing this as a pie or donut chart. You can pull the closed revenue (deals) as the value, broken down by the source property (Contacts/Company). For filters, you can look to exclude certain sources or keep all of them.
How your organization attributes deal revenue can determine if you should use the original or latest source. Regardless, this shows the composition of revenue generated by your source property, and can aid your go-to-market teams to agree on what is working and how make the most of your budget.
Revenue by First/Recent Conversion
This report will help you understand where your customers first converted into your CRM or most recently, before closing as a customer with you. The two properties you can use to pull this report are First Conversion and Recent Conversion.*
The properties label the specific form submitted, so naming conventions are important for this report to be meaningful. This can guide your Sales team to identify the specific conversion points that attract future customers!
When in your custom report builder, pull close date (deals) to your X-axis, Sum of Closed Revenue (deals) to your Y-axis, broken down by your Conversion property (Contacts/Company). Alternatively, you can pull this information by filtering the time period by Close Date, and just visualizing First or Recent Conversion by the revenue closed. You can also exclude certain conversion points in the filters to focus on a set of conversion points on your website.
This report should spur conversions on what is producing revenue for you, allowing Sales and Marketing teams to communicate openly about adjusting their conversion points, and optimize an increase in revenue.
*Edit from 26 February 2024: Recent Conversion will keep updating, even after a contact/company closes a deal with you. Keep that in mind as using that property could create a false impression of where the most recent conversion was prior to closing as a customer with you. Thanks to @smiller for the catch!
Campaign Attribution
Campaigns can be a powerful way your marketing team organizes the efforts around a certain initiative - product launch, conference or event, webinar series, or a promotional period. As such, this report can show you how much revenue that campaign is generating for you. The properties you can determine to use are First Touch Converting Campaign or Last Touch Converting Campaign.
You can construct this similar to the previous report – close date on your X-axis, Sum of Closed Revenue on your Y-axis, and broken down by your Campaign property. Similar to the above, you can input the date information in the filters, and just visualize closed revenue by the Campaign property associated.
If your marketing team knows certain campaigns that occur at that appropriate stage of a customer’s lifecycle, you can include those in the filters as well. This will give you a more focused view of how your campaigns are drawing revenue to your business vs. not.
The implications of this report are larger if your marketing team invests a lot of time in the Campaigns tool in HubSpot. They can understand what efforts returned revenue since campaigns can store all marketing assets – landing pages, blog posts, social media posts, tracking URLs, workflows, and paid ads among other assets. This can give your marketing team more clear direction as to what types of campaigns to continue going forward, and what efforts are not worth their time any longer.
Applications and Conclusion
These reports give you just a taste of how your organization can effectively visualize your customer’s lifecycle. This is because these reports pinpoint certain points in the lifecycle that your customers have interacted with, and show which of your efforts mattered.
As stated above, use these reports to spur action within your team, ditch what is not working, and align with other teams on how to maximize what efforts are working in terms of Sales-Marketing handoffs, lead generation sourcing, conversion points, and campaigns. As long as you have at least the Marketing Professional Tier or above, you can take advantage of these default HubSpot properties.
Should you or your team want to upskill further and see multiple points of your customer’s journey in one place, multi-touch revenue attribution is for you. You can also couple that with Customer Journey Analytics to get a holistic view of your operations.
Regardless, use your reports to start attributing positive feedback loops for your go-to-market teams!
