Growthverse Spotlight: Bizible

Welcome to Beutler Ink’s newest series: Growthverse Spotlight. In 2015, Beutler Ink and Accel Partners teamed up to create the Growthverse, an interactive visualization that helps marketers find the right tech solutions for their teams, featuring over 700 tools and platforms. Our Spotlight series will focus on companies from all sectors of the Growthverse, highlighting their unique perspectives on industry issues.Today features Bizible, an omni-channel B2B marketing attribution solution. We sat down (virtually of course) with Dave Rigotti, Bizible’s Director of Marketing, to talk about Bizible within the universe of marketing tech.

What has the evolution of marketing attribution over the past year looked like? What changes do you see taking place in the next year?

Overall, I think there’s never been a better time to be in B2B marketing.

However, we have a ways to go with education. We just released the State of Pipeline Marketing report after surveying more than 350 B2B marketers on attribution and there are two stats that really shocked me. The first is that 24% of B2B marketers aren’t using an attribution model. The second is that 31% of B2B marketers don't know if they are using the right attribution model and 38% flat out say they aren't using the right model. Both of these make it impossible to be a good revenue focused marketer.

Luckily, 30% said they plan to change their attribution model in the next 6 months, so I think this next year will see a big audience really take a hard look at their attribution systems and models and figure out how to solve the gaps.

What distinguishes Bizible from other products in the marketing attribution space?

First, Bizible is only focused on B2B marketing attribution. This audience brings a unique set of challenges for attribution -- like revenue in the CRM, long sales cycles spanning many sessions and devices, and multiple decision makers in deals. We’ve solved all of these.

Second, our product is the only one that considers both online and offline channels in the attribution model. We collect all our own attribution data so are able to keep an accurate timeline of all the digital touches plus connect into Salesforce campaigns which is important for companies that invest in channels like conferences and outbound calling.

Third, is our customers, which you could also call our traction. We have some of the best companies and brightest marketers using Bizible and I think that’s a big vote of confidence for our company and product.

Can you talk about the different challenges facing online and offline campaign attribution?

The biggest challenge is looking at them the same way. Quite a few companies will have one attribution model for their online channels then use something like lead source for offline campaigns like conferences. As a result they don’t make the best decisions. It’s important that marketers view all their marketing with a single model, ideally with multi-touch, in order to give full credit where it’s due and to eliminate channel bias.

With the advent of social media and online marketing, in what ways have you seen B2C marketing attribution differ or coincide with B2B marketing attribution?

B2B marketing attribution is really hard. Unlike B2C, B2B often has multiple decisions makers in a deal, long marketing and sales cycle spanning many touches, and ultimately revenue living offline in a CRM.

For a long time, taking B2C tools and process has been the only way for B2B marketers to do attribution. However, so much of B2C attribution doesn’t apply -- like the attribution models. Single touch (and especially single person) is purely a B2C model.

In 2015, we saw a big divergence of B2C and B2B marketing attribution. I think we’ll continue to see a growing gap between B2C and B2B marketing attribution because of unique challenges and requirements.

What are your favorite operations and marketing technology platforms and tools?

My favorite marketing technology tool other than Bizible would have to be Salesforce. Sure, it’s usually thought of as a sales tool, but the data is for everyone and it’s the most important data for B2B marketers -- deals and revenue.