SPEAKER #0
Hello everybody. And welcome to our session today: Scrappy Attribution for SMB Marketing Teams. We have with us today Rachel Noble Squire, founder of Mobi and marketing consultant. She has a lot of great information to share with us. Please feel free to put your questions in the chat. If we have some time at the end, we can do a live Q&A. With that, I will pass it to Rachel. Welcome.

SPEAKER #1
Thank you. Let me go ahead and share my screen. Alright. Um, I’m gonna go ahead and jump in. So, like you all have probably already seen, we’re talking about scrappy attribution today, and this is specific for SMB, B2B, SaaS marketing teams. Although I have applied this across bigger teams and different industries, that’s kind of the focus for today.

Thanks to our awesome sponsors. As a side note, all these companies are amazing. And quickly, just a quick introduction about myself: My name is Rachel. I’ve been in the marketing technology space for twelve years—it’s gone by really fast. Mostly focused around Marketo and Salesforce, but also HubSpot, with a heavy focus on marketing intelligence and analytics, which is why we’re here talking about attribution today.

About two years ago, I started Mobi Solutions. We are a marketing technology analytics-heavy consulting firm, and we’re going to talk about some of the stories we’ve seen through our clients over the last two years, how we’ve approached attribution from a really scrappy perspective.

The steps we’re going to take to talk through that approach start with preparing our team—that’s key to making this a success—and then how to tell the attribution story. We’ll get really deep into the actual technical “how do I do this” from a low-cost approach, and then we’ll talk about what’s next—what does that mean for you and your team.

So, from that high-level perspective, let’s talk about attribution at a glance. What is the point of attribution? Everyone here today is probably here because attribution is something that you either want to do and aren’t doing, or maybe it’s something you are doing and the steps are overcomplicated, or it’s not working for you. Or maybe you have an awesome attribution model and you’re just looking for tips to grow it.

For those of us just getting started, specifically from a scrappy perspective, we might not have a huge budget to buy a really expensive attribution tool. We can still do this. We can still get the value out of an attribution model that companies with big budgets might get. Things like identifying key touchpoints that drive pipeline and revenue, using information to allocate marketing resources effectively—both budget and people—understanding the customer journey, and optimizing strategies to improve the customer experience. Finally, getting insights so we can maximize our marketing impact. That’s the goal.

This session was inspired by a company I worked with called Gadget Haven, a small B2B e-commerce startup. Their marketing team was flying blind and came to us saying, “I want to understand where I should invest; I have no idea what’s working and what’s not.” Budget was very small, we didn’t have tech, but we had Salesforce. We had a CRM with all the key data, basically the campaigns. So what could we do to take the data we already have and learn from it?

Their story is a really simple, straightforward attribution model, and when we implemented it for Gadget Haven, we realized some crazy things—some findings drove them to reallocate 90% of their digital marketing budget. I’ll talk about the approach, what we did, and how we do this for clients in general.

Before you even jump in, it’s important your team is prepared to be successful. You could have the most amazing attribution model, but if your team is not prepared and receptive, it doesn’t matter. So, cultivate this mindset of attribution. As marketers, it often comes externally—there’s a deep mindset of “we need to source our pipeline and revenue.” How do we get our team to start thinking differently? And I don’t just mean the marketing team—you may need to educate outside the marketing team so people see how marketing influences pipeline and revenue across the board.

There are a few ways to do that:

• Encourage curiosity: if someone says, “I want to understand how we got this deal,” dig into it together.

• Education and training: help your team feel confident in understanding and using attribution insights.

• Emphasize collaboration: use the attribution model in planning sessions, show contributions across channels, include the team when building the model.

• Make it accessible and self-serve: don’t keep it under lock and key. People need to be trained to use the data effectively.

• Share successes: when the model drives action, share results with everyone to increase adoption and excitement.

I’ve seen two types of blowups: minor ones within marketing, usually top-of-funnel teams worried about “credit,” and bigger ones outside marketing, like sales, who might misinterpret the influence model. Remember, attribution is a marketing decision-making tool, not about taking credit. Create talking points for executives so they can position this information successfully.

So, how do we actually tell the attribution story? You need to turn numbers into a story that’s digestible for non-technical stakeholders. For example, let’s pretend we have a company called CloudCraft. They are a B2B SaaS company selling to IT teams. We track multiple touchpoints—like a whitepaper download, webinar attendance, and an event—and assign value proportionally. Even if some touchpoints are repeated (like a whitepaper influencing multiple contacts), we account for that.

Technically, start simple:

1. Identify touchpoints (in Salesforce, correlate campaigns and responses). Start with marketing campaigns only.

2. Include key datapoints: person, company, opportunity, touchpoint date, source/channel, campaign type, campaign name, opportunity value.

3. Assign equal weight to start. You can experiment with weighting later.

4. Calculate scores per customer journey, e.g., $100k opportunity divided by number of touchpoints.

5. Aggregate across opportunities using a pivot table or spreadsheet to see the impact per channel or campaign.

Analyze the results: consider nuances, like if some large deals are sales-driven. Use visualization to inspire action and collaboration. You can also map customer journeys from this data.

For Gadget Haven, implementing this simple model showed that over 75% of new opportunities had at least one event engagement before creation, and most digital ad spend was underperforming. Reallocating 90% of the digital budget to field events increased marketing ROI by 45% the next year—without additional budget.

Next steps: start simple with spreadsheets or free/low-cost tools (Looker, Google Data Studio, Power BI). There are also some affordable attribution tools like HockeyStack, Octane11, Alignly, and RulerAnalytics. Share resources: HubSpot Academy, Adobe Blog, Kismetrics, Moz Blog, Nielsen Marketing Cloud, Reddit, and Slack communities for Revenue Ops.

In summary:

• Start simple: don’t try to make it perfect.

• Maximize tools you already have: Salesforce campaigns, spreadsheets, BI tools.

• Get stakeholders on board: encourage questions, transparency, and collaboration.

SPEAKER #0
Yeah. We do have a question. Early on, when you talked about the natural pull and push between marketing and sales and how they want attribution sometimes equated with credit—which is not what it should be—Nicole was asking, how do you break down competition between marketing and sales staff? What are some approaches to make that less tense in your organization?

SPEAKER #1
I love it. I’ve had a couple of approaches that work. In very touchy organizations, keep the information within marketing initially—build the model, get your CMO on board. Another approach: run sourcing side by side, showing more information is better, without taking away credit.

SPEAKER #0
I’ve seen organizations call it “pipeline enhancement,” framing marketing as supporting sales, making it clear everyone is aligned and no one takes undue credit.

SPEAKER #1
Exactly.

SPEAKER #0
One question I had myself: you use a lot of AI in your presentation. Do you have a viewpoint on how scrappy marketing teams can use AI for attribution?

SPEAKER #1
Totally, you can. I’ve imported spreadsheets and asked AI what’s working. It can hallucinate sometimes, so you have to QA carefully. You can even make up campaigns to test things, but be cautious.

SPEAKER #0
How do customers explain to management that the model will fail fast and need retuning?

SPEAKER #1
Be transparent. Let stakeholders know upfront: “We’re implementing a model, we’ll see what works, and we’ll adjust.” Show progress and pivot as needed.

SPEAKER #0
There’s a question about leveraging opportunity contact roles versus looking up accounts.

SPEAKER #1
Depends on your sales data quality. If your team tracks contacts well, use them. If not, use account-level lookup.

SPEAKER #0
Good point—Circante can automate opportunity contact roles for that.

SPEAKER #1
Love that. Huge pain point, unfortunately.

SPEAKER #0
Thanks so much for your time today. I learned a lot, and I hope the audience did too. Recordings and the deck will be available.