A SaaS(sy) B2B attribution guide on Hubspot! (Level 02)

[jforte]

A SaaS(sy) B2B attribution guide on Hubspot! (2/3)

Oh, look! You haven't given up after my previous article (whew!). So, are you ready to step up and build a multi-touch linear model?

Hmm … wait… if you’re still trying to understand why I’m talking like this or even who I am, you should take a look at my prep intro. A few weeks ago I felt the need to pay back all this amazing knowledge I’ve been getting from our amazing community so I’ve covered the most important steps to get a custom attribution structure and you can define how deep you want to go on those 3 levels:

• Level 01 • How to customise the original source data - Done
• Level 02 • Build a multi-touch linear model - Done
• Level 03 • Set your flexible Hubspot structure - WIP

If attribution models or even custom properties at Hubspot are something new for you I recommend reading “Level 01 • How to customize the original source data” it only takes 6 minutes and it will be useful to the rest of this thread.

L02 • Build a multi-touch linear model

Step 1: Perceive the need of having a qualification process

If your company has 300 teams between sales and marketing or if it’s only you on a stand-alone mission one thing that is common in both operations is that the time of who is reaching prospects is pure gold.

I’ll tell you the story of my grandfather to help you understand.

This lovely dude you see above is Capitan José Ramos (yup, same name as me and other 10M Portuguese guys) and his team fished codfish in Greenland at that time. Roughly explaining, he was steering a big vessel on the open ocean and every time he checked a big spot on the radar the vessel anchored and asked their team to go to the sea with their individual vessels. If his analysis failed, all the hours out in the ocean by those men would be wasted.

The same applies to your operation, if your team tries to reach every lead that appears in your contact base you’ll fail to focus on bigger fish and come back to land with nothing to sell (I promise that I’ll stop with these sea metaphors!!)

Step 2: Understand what is an MQL and how to define it

A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead that your marketing team recognises as likely to close. You can determine that by their profile or activity (asking for a demo, having authority in a company, working on a big or target company, checking specific pages, (...))

How should you define your MQL Criteria?

The main rule is that you should always align with your sales team on what makes them believe in the quality of what you’re sending.

Then try to look into your sales pipeline and check their interactions and profiles and ask yourself.

After what type of conversion did they agree  to be reached out to by your sales team?

It could be a demo request, an advisory call, a quote request or just something simple as asking something on your chatbot

Which specific traits do they have?

Try to understand if their job roles show that they have authority to buy your software (on a B2B SaaS company is not normal to have an intern or a student being able to push a new paid solution to the company tech stack)

Can every company buy your solution?

Yup, we know that it would be awesome to sell to everyone, unfortunately, a company with only 1 person in their marketing team will not have enough budget or even structure to use an enterprise CRM.

Which are the main reasons for your sales loss opportunities?

Check if companies or individuals with specific challenges are not in a maturity level of knowledge to understand the benefits of your solution.

And last but not least: What is crucial for your team to reach your prospects?

In some markets people don’t answer phone calls from unknown numbers so you’ll need their email, in others they prefer to speak through calls or Whatsapp or only having their Linkedin profile could be enough, it’s up to you!

Check a quick example of how you should do it:

Step 3: Build your custom defining workflow

Now that you’ve aligned with your sales team we can start to build our simple but important MQL stamper.

Before going to workflows go to settings > properties > create property:

1.1 name it as “Marketing Qualified Date” > select field type as date picker.
1.2 name it as “Marketing Qualified Stamp” > select field type as a single checkbox

Now that you have those 2 properties and all the ones you’ll use as criteria you’ll ask yourself “But if I’m using conversion type as criteria do I need to set all the forms with that type in my workflow?! And do I need to update the workflow every time someone makes a new form?!”

2. Nope, I’ll teach you a quick and nice hack. Go back to properties > create property > name it as “Conversion Type” > Select field type as multiple checkboxes > list all different types of conversions you want to split (i.e: demo, quote, case study, webinar, newsletter).

2.1 Still on properties create property > name it as “Conversion Type (String)” > Select field type as single-line text

2.2 Go all your forms (unfortunately the first time takes a bit) and open all per each type, in this example I’ll use the demo one > on the left side select your “Conversion Type” > make this field hidden and preselect “demo”.

2.3 With this hack your prospects will not see your property but you’ll be setting each form with their type. Do that to all your forms and align with the rest of your team that it’s mandatory to do that every time they build a new form. 

Before jumping to the next point, let’s build a quick and easy workflow to save all your prospect touchpoints.

2.4 Go to workflows > Set “Conversion Type” is known as trigger > Re-enrollment > Turn it on  

2.5 Set property value > select “Conversion Type (String)” as property to set > select contact token “Conversion Type (String)” > Add “;” in front of that > select contact token “Conversion Type”.

It should look like this:

Now that you’ve done that just take a break and go get a deserved coffee, you deserve it champ!! Do you understand that even before building your multi-attribution model you already have a solution to record your prospect path? Yup, amazing.

3. Now that we have all the properties we need, let's build this tool!

Things you need to be aware of before doing this workflow:
- You can only be an MQL once in your life so it shouldn’t have a re-enrolment trigger
- Time to time Hubspot take a few more seconds to have all data sorted out so it’s safer to have a 1 minute delay right after the trigger
- This workflow is the base of your attribution structure so you should always be aware if it’s working well (I’ll explain how)

3.1 Go to workflows > Set your criteria as triggers 

3.2 Set property value > select “Marketing Qualified Date” as property to set > select “Date of step”.

3.3 Set property value > select “Marketing Qualified Stamp” as property to set > select “yes”.

And voilá, you have your leads being defined as MQLs when they match your criteria!

Step 4: You are never too old to set another workflow

You're now able to clone the attribution workflow you made on Level 01 • How to customise the original source data - Done! 

Take a look just to remember what I’m talking about:

1. Go to properties > Search for “Lead Acquisition Channel” property > Clone > Set the name of this new property as “MQL Acquisition Channel” property > Search for “Lead Acquisition Ownership” property > Clone > Set the name of this new property as “MQL Acquisition Ownership” property

2. Now go to workflows > Search for your workflow > Clone it > Give a name that your team understands that they don’t should touch, something as STRUCTURE - MQL Acquisition Channels Definition.

Things you need to be aware of before doing this workflow:

- Time to time Hubspot take a few more seconds to have all data sorted out so it’s safer to have a 1 minute delay right after the trigger

- This workflow needs to be updated through time so you should build it on an organized and easier structure

Trigger: Marketing Qualified Date is Known

Delay for a set amount of time: 1 minute

3. Change the source:
3.1 All branches per original source to the latest source
3.2 All sub-branches per original source drill-down 1/2 to latest source drill-down 1/2

4. Change the channel properties:
4.1 All “Lead Acquisition Channel” to “MQL Acquisition Channel”
4.2 All “Lead Acquisition Ownership” to “MQL Acquisition Ownership”

Check 2, 3 times if you didn’t miss any branch or channel otherwise it can break your structure:

Step 05: Be sure everything works as you want, build error views

1.1 Conversion Type Form Error View:

Go to contacts > Table Actions > Clean the columns > Add recent conversion property + Conversion Type (String) > Then go to More filters > Set Recent Conversion: Known + Conversion Type (String): Unknown > Apply Filters > Save View 

With this view, you’re able to check if you have forms without this property correctly set.

1.2 MQL System Error View:

Go to contacts > Table Actions > Clean the columns > Add all your criteria properties + Marketing Qualified Date > Then go to More filters > Set All your criteria: Known + Marketing Qualified Date: Unknown > Apply Filters > Save View 

With this view, you’re able to check if your MQL Stamper Workflow it’s failing or not.

1.3 MQL Channel Error View:

Go to contacts > Table Actions > Clean the columns > Add MQL Acquisition Channel + Marketing Qualified Date + All Latest Source Properties > Then go to More filters > MQL Acquisition Channel: Unknown + Marketing Qualified Date: Known > Apply Filters > Save View 

With this view, you’re able to check if your workflow is setting the channels to your MQLs and if not which criteria you should update on your workflow.

Step 06: Trust me, they don't know it yet, but they're going to love you!

Now that you have everything figured out let’s play with your data. Take a look at a few examples of what you can do and build an amazing dashboard to keep you and your team on track and able to make smart decisions!

1.Monthly KPIs for Leads and MQLs

1.1 Go to reports > Single object > Filters > Select create date is this month > Add other filters if you want to have vision per market/industry/(...) > Visualization > On the left corner select chart type as: Area >On the right corner click on Display options > Check on Show total row; Stacked; Cumulative; Include monthly report goal > Set your monthly goal

1.2 Click on data > Add Contact Property > Get Lead Acquisition Channel + Create Date + MQL Acquisition Channel + Marketing Qualified Date > Back to visualization > On Display Select: Create Date and then Lead Acquisition Channel > measured by: Count of Contacts

You’ll have something like this divided by Lead Channel Ownership on the end result:

1.3 Now just clone this report and change Create Date with Marketing Qualified Date > change the monthly goal > change the display with Marketing Qualified Date + MQL Acquisition Channel

2. Lead to MQL Conversion Rate per Acquisition Channel

2.1 Go to reports > Single object > Filters > Select create date is [select time frame] > Add other filters if you want to have vision per market/industry/(...) > Visualization > On the left corner select chart type as table > On the right corner click on Display options > Check on Show total row; Stacked

2.2 Click on data > Add Contact Property > Get Lead Acquisition Channel + Marketing Qualified Stamp > Back to visualization > On Display Select: Lead Acquisition Channel and then Marketing Qualified Stamp > measured by: Count of Contacts

You’ll be able to check the conversion rate of each individual channel. In this example you can see that only 34% of the leads acquired by Channel X were qualified as MQLs:

3. Acquisition Source vs. Conversion Source

3.1 Go to reports > Single object > Filters > Select Marketing Qualified Date: [select time frame] > Add other filters if you want to have vision per market/industry/(...) > Visualization > On the left corner select chart type as columns > On the right corner click on Display options > Check on Show total row; Show total column

3.2 Click on data > Add Contact Property > Get Lead Acquisition Channel + MQL Acquisition Channel > Back to visualization > On Configure table: Summarized data table > Display Select: Lead Acquisition Channel and then MQL Acquisition Channel > measured by: Count of Contacts

In this report you’ll be able to understand that if your best Lead channels are the same as your MQLs channels or if people that enter your database have to be reconverted on a different channel. In the example below you can see that all leads from Channel A were also MQLs from Channel A but if you look to Channel G in the first column you see that 4 leads from that channel are MQLs but none were converted into MQLs by that channel:

And …. all good things must come to an end!! I truly hope that you’re enjoying this thread as much I’m on sharing with you guys

Soon I’ll share how to have a totally flexible structure to choose the attribution model as you want (Level 03) and some Pro Tips such as being able to track the time your sales team takes to pick an MQL and how that affects the quality of what you’re sending them and also how can you can predict your future results in a really effective way - Follow me to keep updated 🙂

For the new community members  please share feedback if you got lost in any step. I want to improve this article to make it a helpful resource for everyone! For the more experienced ones, feel free to share more ideas on how to develop a custom attribution framework. Keep being awesome 💪 Special thanks to @jennysowyrda for the review of this new post

[MiaSrebrnjak]

Awesome stuff @jforte, thank you for posting! 👍👍