Whenever I hold a peach, I experience a fingernails-on-blackboard style discomfort. They make me squirm so much I can’t eat the delicious beggars. It must be something in my genes.

Professionally, I have the same teeth-on-edge sensation when I hear the phrase “marketing sourced revenue”.

The phrase come concept, and its related cousin “marketing influenced revenue”, are everywhere in the B2B tech and services companies I’ve worked with. Both are used as a proxy for marketing’s contribution to the commercial wellbeing of the business.

They are, however, nonsense.

The first problem with the idea of marketing sourced revenue is accuracy. It will always be questionable. We know the limitations of first- and last-touch attribution but even the most nuanced of multi-touch models fail to account for the rich internal life of a buyer or the myriad intangible, uncountable influences on their decision.

It is conceptually like asking the question, what proportion of Big Mac sales are attributable to the bun and what to the beef patty?

Everyone can agree we want to sell more Big Macs, but that framing hardly seems the most promising route of inquiry.

In my experience, using marketing sourced revenue contributes to rifts between sales and marketing. It implies that the two things can be easily separated. ‘Us lot’ will do 30% and ‘you lot’ do 70% and, if something isn’t working, we can blame each other.

It is both poppycock and at the same time a useful fiction for anyone trying to plan targets and pretend to themselves that the complex challenge of growing revenue is reduceable to spreadsheet models.

Marketing sourced revenue is useful fiction for anyone trying to plan targets and pretend to themselves that the complex challenge of growing revenue is reduceable to spreadsheet models.

It also leads to unwanted behaviours. Since targets and bonuses are based on it, so marketers become good at gaming it. It’s the famously problematic pizza-flyer-outside-the-pizza-restaurant model of marketing effectiveness: marketing sourced revenue simply incentivises the ‘tagging’ of prospects most likely to become customers.

It has become to me somewhat emblematic of a broader challenge. Like a B2B Prufrock, I measure my life in conversations with marketers who are living with the cognitive dissonance of wanting to do something they believe to be more effective but having to do something their business is measuring.

B2B marketing’s job is to make it easier for the buying group to agree 

The intentional alternative

So what’s the alternative? Marketing sourced and influenced revenue exist because we want commercial accountability. They have a seductive appeal so are not easy to shift. But one of the first things I do when I work with clients as a consultant is try to reframe the question from the backward-looking ‘what is the contribution?’ to the more forward-looking, ‘what is the investment thesis?’.

This is more intentional, I find. It directs our attention towards diagnoses and specific hypotheses about how our marketing investment is driving commercial outcomes.

Attribution tends to have conclusions like ‘paid search is driving the most revenue so let’s spend more on paid search’. It is in reality designed for optimising large-scale advertising spend – which may be an important part of the marketing strategy but should never be confused with the whole thing. In the complex B2B sale, an investment-thesis mindset is typically more useful, helping us to make ‘educated bets’ linked to specific commercial goals.

To give a common example: Your business has identified that cross-selling in a particular set of accounts will have a disproportionate impact on your commercials. In a relationship-driven sale, that means building connections with a new set of buyers.

In this case, we can measure the effectiveness of specific tactics at achieving our immediate goal – let’s say face-time with a new persona – and the overall outcome of major account revenue growth. There is no way of proving causation between the two but we have clear contracting: agreement, up-front, about how marketing can contribute to shared commercial goals and how to hold ourselves accountable. Without resorting to the fallacy of marketing sourced revenue.

Marketing sourced revenue is backward looking and misleads us to what is important; it is a fiction we can do without.