We all hear about tracking leads from creation to opportunity for closed-loop analysis. Marketo has provided great visibility into this lifecycle as long as one thing happens—Sales reps add Contacts to Opportunities in Salesforce.com. That link is vital to the process.
You get a silver dollar if your organization uses Contact Roles consistently. The fact is many Sales reps create Opportunities and neglect to add Contacts to the Contact roles. The end result is Marketing’s impact is often under reported as there is no Contact-to-Opportunity link.
With its September release, Marketo addresses this issue with Account Based Attribution. Marketers no longer have to worry about reps adding Contacts to Opportunities–as long as a Contact is part of an Account, that Contact’s program successes will get associated with the deal. This capability is critical to ensure closed loop reporting.
As with anything, there is a flip side. For larger Accounts with many Contacts, some Contacts may get added that had nothing to do with the deal. In other words, you may give more credit than credit is due. Keep in mind that credit is only given for a success (Filled out form, etc) so risk is somewhat limited. So if you have 200 random Contacts in an Account sitting in your database from Jigsaw, they don’t count (Unless of course they reached a success).
If your organization is using Contact Roles consistently, I’d recommend staying with the same. Otherwise, Account Based Attribution is most likely the avenue you want to take. And of course, test, test and test again to make sure the model works for your organization.
FROM MARKETO 9/11/2013 ANNONCEMENT
Program Attribution Settings
You can change the way Marketo ties contacts and opportunities for first and multi touch attribution metrics, including the ability to do account-based attribution. These settings will impact attribution metrics in Revenue Explorer reports under the Program Opportunity Analysis area and the Opportunity Analysis area. This will also affect the attribution metrics in Program Analyzer.
You can change the program attribution settings to one of three choices. Changing this setting does not modify any Marketo or CRM data; it simply changes the way your reports run and it can be reverted at any time.
The Explicit setting will only examine contacts with roles (current behavior). Implicit will examine all contacts associated to the account regardless of role. We strongly recommend using the Explicit mode if possible. Using Implicit may create false positives, people with credit for an opportunity despite having no real influence in the opportunity.
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