It’s 2023. Every Department Contributes to Every Closed-Won Customer

In the world of B2B, every department has a role in winning customers. From Sales and Marketing to SDRs and Customer Success, every team plays an essential part in bringing revenue to the company. However, many B2B companies still play the department credit game, where teams fight over who "sourced" the pipeline. This leads to misalignment, competition, and an outdated compensation plan that fails to incentivize teams effectively.

The Problem of Misalignment

Companies measure the success of their Marketing and Sales team (and Partners) on “sourced” pipeline, creating misalignment on measurement and attribution downstream that is biased toward Sales and demand capture. Marketing teams spend more time trying to get attribution credit on “influenced” pipeline or first-touch attribution rather than growing the business. This approach means that companies don't create demand effectively because their measurement and attribution models don't incentivize them to do it.

Departments such as Sales, Marketing, and SDRs fight over credit for who “sourced” the lead or account because that's how budgets are set, and teams are measured. As a result, growth stalls, CAC skyrockets, and Sales productivity falls off a cliff.

The Solution: An All-Bound Model

Smart companies want to adopt an “All-Bound” model because they see this clear problem in their business. However, they need a new framework to measure success and make strategy adjustments.

The All-Bound model is all about looking at what GTM motion captured the demand, what was the trigger for how the buyer entered the pipeline. These are called "pipeline sources." This demand capture source is a surrogate for buyer intent and will much better predict sales efficiency metrics like win rate, sales cycle length, and pipeline velocity.

In addition, companies need to build a separate attribution model (e.g., self-reported attribution) to characterize what programs are creating the demand. This data can be used to optimize the entire revenue strategy, not determine binary credit to teams, departments, and budgets.

Benefits of an All-Bound Model

Implementing an All-Bound model brings several benefits to B2B companies. First, it drives significantly better alignment between all GTM teams. All teams work together, not against each other, to win customers.

Second, it creates an entirely new view for revenue leaders and strategists to make far better decisions and strategy improvements. With an All-Bound model, revenue planning and forecasting accuracy is dramatically improved.

Finally, an All-Bound model clearly shows where to focus and what to stop doing. This information is essential for companies that want to stay ahead of the competition and grow their revenue streams.

Here’s How you Make the Switch:

1. Start with your customer. Understand the needs, motivations, and behaviors of your ideal customer. What triggers them to start looking for a solution like yours? What are their pain points? What are the channels they use to research and evaluate potential solutions? Use this information to identify the pipeline sources that are most likely to capture the right type of demand.
2. Audit your existing GTM model. Identify the stages of your customer journey and the touchpoints across your Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams. Evaluate the existing attribution models and how they allocate credit to each stage of the journey. Identify any gaps, redundancies, or overlaps in your current approach.
3. Build a new attribution model. Use the insights from step 1 to build a new attribution model that characterizes what programs are creating the demand. This can be based on self-reported attribution or other data sources that indicate the customer's journey.
4. Establish cross-functional goals and incentives. Instead of creating binary credits to individual teams or departments, establish cross-functional goals and incentives that encourage everyone to work together towards a common revenue goal. Set up compensation plans that reward teams for contributing to revenue goals, rather than for claiming individual credit.
5. Implement a revenue operations (RevOps) function. RevOps is a new approach to revenue management that combines sales operations, marketing operations, and customer success operations into a single function. The purpose of RevOps is to align all GTM teams around a common revenue goal, and to provide the data, processes, and technology to optimize revenue outcomes. Implementing a RevOps function can help you align your teams, optimize your processes, and measure your results more effectively.

It's time for B2B companies to update their mindset, compensation plans, and measurement frameworks for how customers buy and how the world works today. Adopting an All-Bound model is the way forward, as it promotes collaboration, rewards teamwork, and creates a more accurate picture of where revenue is coming from. By focusing on capturing demand, rather than fighting for credit, companies can optimize their revenue strategy, make better decisions, and increase their chances of success.