Attribution Isn't Dead, You're Just Doing It Wrong 📉 GUEST! CMO & CRO Laura Beussman from CallRail | Ep. 507

0:01Welcome to Do This, Not That, the podcast for marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This, Not That, and I'm excited because I have an incredible guest here, and we're going to be talking about attribution, why I think it's garbage, why she says it's not, and she's a big deal. So who's here? We got Laura Beussman here. Now, Laura has possibly one of the wildest roles on the planet. Why? She is at CallRail. And if you don't know CallRail, first of all, they have 220 ,000 customers.

0:41And you might say, oh, they do phone call stuff. No, they're all about trying to figure out if all this marketing stuff that you're doing is actually converting the attribution. They're not just looking at the calls that are coming in. They're looking at your forms, looking at everything. They're an incredible company helping hundreds of thousands of businesses. but Laura's got the job of being chief marketing officer and chief revenue officer. Would you like to own both pipeline and revenue? That would make me throw up, but she does it. And she has incredible experience over the last 15 years being at places like Dell and Blackboard.

1:12She is like one of the leaders in the go-to-market space for all these product-led growth companies. I mean, over$100 million in revenue driving all of this stuff. It's her fault. We're going to talk about attribution. Laura, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Jay. Glad to be here. All right, here it is. We're going to jump right into it because you and I are going to like punch each other during the screen or however that works. But here it goes. I often go out there and I feel like I'm about to be told why I'm wrong. And I say attribution is garbage. We can't measure this stuff. Give up, throw in the towel.

1:45It's not possible. Are you on team attribution is garbage or what team are you on? Yeah, I'm going to tell you the truth, Jay. I think things like attribution is garbage, attribution is dead. I think they're clickbait. I think they're clickbait to get marketers to come in and take a look and watch the podcast. I would say at the end of the day, if you are a marketer, you are always going to have to be able to show how the marketing investments that you are given, that you are trusted with, are driving revenue for the business. If you cannot demonstrate that, you are probably not going to continue to have your job for very long.

2:21Unless, you know, if you're independently wealthy, you're completely self-employed, and you really like to flush money down the toilet, in which case maybe you can ignore attribution completely. But if you don't fit all three of those requirements, I would say you've got to be able to demonstrate how the investment that you have been given has been trusted to you is driving revenue for the business. okay so let me dig into that for a minute though because here's what i don't understand why i say it's garbage so they say that only five percent of your audience is really in market at any one time right so you're out there putting out thought leadership on social media on podcasts whatever and then you're also running you know a google search ad or whatever and then the person's finally in market after a year they click on that search ad they then fill out the form and then the Google search ad gets, oh, they came in because of the search ad.

3:12This last touch attribution, can we at least agree that that is garbage? If you are operating on the assumption that you have a perfect last touch attribution model, I would agree that is garbage. I think there's two things that you can do that are on the extreme ends and both of them are wrong, which is to say, okay, I have a beautiful model and it spits out to me a beautiful chart. And it says that all I need to spend money on is paid search. Branded paid search is all I'm going to spend money on from here on out. And you're going to take that to your CFO every month. If you're doing that, you're going to have a problem because you're not doing anything to generate awareness and exposure prior to that last touch.

3:49Why are they having that last touch in the first place? But the answer to that is not to throw attribution out the window and do nothing. You can do oversimplified one way or oversimplified the other, and neither one of those things is going to get you to the right place. You've got to be smart as a marketer. You've got to be curious as a marketer. You've got to look at other signals. And there are a lot of other signals out there that you can pull in to be smarter and more nuanced about what is actually working, both from last touch, bottom of the funnel, to at the top of the funnel, what's driving the last touch.

4:21All right, hit me because now I need to know the other signals. What should we be looking for besides for just that last touch? Yeah, so there's a few things that I'll flag. For one thing, conversational AI has come a really long way. So if you are lucky enough to be at a call-based business where you are actually having conversations with your leads, and not everyone falls into that bucket, but if you do fall into that bucket where you are having conversations with those leads, conversational AI can pick up also what they're saying. So perhaps they did a search and they clicked on an ad and then they gave you a call.

4:57And call roll is going to help you understand what keyword they searched to make that call in the first place. But perhaps the reason they did that search is because they were talking to their neighbor and their neighbor gave them a recommendation about who they use for their pest control or whatever the business is. Conversational AI can pick that up. So we can identify, yes, they did this search for this keyword. And also, yes, they referenced on the call what drove them to make the search in the first place. So conversational AI really helps give you a more complete picture with things like what we call self-reported attribution.

5:27CallRoll actually has the patent for self-reported attribution. What does that mean? What is self-reported attribution? Yeah. So what does the lead report cause them to contact the business? And it may not align with the last touch model. It's going to give you a more holistic view, a more complete view of what actually drove the call in the first place. Okay, so are we saying that forever, up until kind of AI, you would go somewhere and they would have the drop down, how did you hear about us, you know, friends, social media, Facebook, whatever. And I don't even know if people even use that data a lot.

6:01But that is, is that going by the wayside a little bit because of AI? Yes. I mean, if you can get it directly from the conversation, one, with the drop downs, people often will just select the thing at the top, which can skew the data and make it less helpful. um so if you can pick it up in the conversation and conversational AI has come so far that they don't have to answer you don't have to ask them the question and have them answer it it can pick up on the signals from the conversation it can pick up from the context of the conversation like okay now I'm just curious about this totally unrelated now I'm just curious about because what you all do at Quarrel is so cool like can you pick up on like tone like if the person's like upbeat or I don't know is that the weirdest question you've ever been asked is that something that like AI can actually pick up on and then you could have that somehow go into your marketing or whatever?

6:47AI can do so much now. It is really cool. I will say like when I first started at CallRail five years ago, it was transcribing the call. You know, pretty basic. Now you've got a transcription. You can go search the transcription and try to identify information. Now we can pick up so much more data and provide that directly back to the business and in a prescriptive way. So yes, for sure. The summary of the call, the sentiment of the call, did that call go well? And you can tie that back to what drove them to make the call. So are there channels that perhaps you're missetting expectation, like it's driving calls, but the calls aren't going well.

7:25You can connect that together. So you can understand what is the sentiment of the call. It also goes further though. And now we're getting a little bit away from attribution, but since you tangent it a little bit, I'll continue along the tangent, which it will also give you next steps from the call. It will generate a follow-up response to the call. It will coach you on how you should have handled the call better. So there's a lot that conversational AI can do now. That's amazing. AI is my best friend. It always tells me I'm doing great things. So I love AI. I want to know something about, now I'm going all over the place, but it doesn't matter.

7:58You're chief revenue officer and chief marketing officer. Okay. You're like a meme. You're like the two sides of the meme in that you got the sales person complaining about leads to the marketing person or whatever but you're both those people do you like have to split yourself you ever get in arguments with yourself how do you wear now i'm just curious like how do you wear both hats effectively so i love it i think it is actually like the perfect combination now look i have a vp of sales and a vp of marketing and both of those people happen to be fantastic at their jobs so it's not like i'm really doing these things 100 % by myself here.

8:35But being in the role that I'm in, I get to follow that lead all the way through. There is no going and blaming somebody else. I'm accountable for that lead all the way through. And I love that because as a marketer, because I grew up in marketing, my career grew up in marketing, and taking on the sales side is really less than a year old for me. But as a marketer, I was always very focused on the revenue. I was always very focused on the customers. I never was a marketer that measured myself on things like, look, I do care about impressions. I do care about leads, but only if they convert. They're signals to help me see that the marketing strategies are working top of funnel and then driving things through the funnel.

9:14But at the end of the day, if you're not driving more customers and more revenue, actual dollars to the business, then you're not getting your job done. You're wasting your time. And so having accountability all the way through and actually having the levers at my disposal to make sure that we are making that happen all the way through the journey. It's a lot of fun for me. You know, I think that that's actually the future for marketing professionals in general, is having more of an involvement on the revenue side, you know, especially as some of our marketing tasks kind of get taken by AI, you know, for marketers to really have a career to wear that dual hat.

9:48I think is it's great. I think it's a model that a lot of companies should follow. So now I'm curious now from you wearing your marketing hat, your chief marketing officer hat, and you trying to drive performance for CallRail as a marketer, right? You have attribution challenges, I would imagine, yourself, right? What do you kind of do to try to attribute your sales and your growth? What are challenges that you're trying to overcome for your own marketing? Yeah, absolutely. Look, I have the same kinds of challenges that all the other marketers have out there, which is that, look, your attribution model is going to overweight the bottom of the funnel.

10:26And if you are only looking at your pure clean attribution model, you might overinvest in things like branded paid search. We are also trying to drive growth at the top of the funnel. We're trying to get the CallRail brand out there in more ways. We're trying to introduce ourselves to more potential customers so that we can help solve more problems for those businesses. We're also trying to shape how people think about CallRail. You made the point at the beginning of the call moving beyond calls into AI, just tracking into the lead engagement elements, actually making sure that you're driving new customers that convert and getting those capabilities visible to everybody out there.

11:05Do you give any, do you give any, like it used to be, if you're wanting four or five years ago, we'd all have our marketing automation platforms and we would create all these scores. Oh, somebody opened an email, they get, you know, they got a B, they clicked on email, they got an A, I don't know, whatever, all this stuff. and then they high scores or get over to the BDRs, whatever. So when you're kind of looking at these really, I don't know, some of them are vanity metrics, maybe they're not, I don't know. When you're building out what is a lead for your organization, do you still look at any of those signals or are those kind of like that was yesterday type stuff?

11:40We absolutely do, but we look at them all together. So for us, we define a lead as a trial. So Carl has a free trial. You can come in and check out Carl at any time that you want. And so at the end of the day, the marketing team is trying to drive people into the product. So we take a step back and we look at it a couple different places. As we're increasing investment, if we're spending in a specific area, we're going to be looking at, are we driving impressions up? Now, if those impressions don't convert to trials, then something's wrong. Something's broken. Impressions for the sake of impressions is worthless.

12:09You can't go to the store and buy a gallon of milk with an impression. You need money. But if you're taking that investment and your impressions are growing and your trials are growing and your customers are growing. Because at the end of the day, marketing can't stop at the lead either. If they're driving leads and those leads aren't converting, yes, you can say sales has a problem. You can say sales needs to fix that. But if you're not willing to roll up your sleeves and get in there and dig in there and try to figure out what's actually going on, are there certain channels that aren't converting from lead to customer?

12:40Are there certain investments that we're making that are bringing in lower quality leads and being willing to workshop that with sales and dig in there with sales to figure out how to get the right leads over to sales, then you're doing it wrong. So at the end of the day, you should see the impressions grow. You should see the leads trials grow, and you should see the customers grow and the revenue grow associated with it. If you're just bringing in smaller customers, then you've got a problem as well. But you have to look at them side by side by side so that you can make sure that they're all connecting through together.

13:09I think it's really important for people to hear that impressions matter. I mean, impressions, if you only have those, then it doesn't matter. but impressions do matter. They are still a very relevant signal. So I'm curious about something else. Let's talk about AI, right? Everybody's, oh no, website traffic is down because everyone's just staying on, you know, Google's AI overviews and this, that, whatever. Are you being very intentional in your efforts to have your organization show up in AI results? And are you then trying to track attribution from the different LLMs that people are going to?

13:42Yes. Yeah, this is a super interesting topic, both from the sense of what we're providing to our customers and then how we're thinking about it internally as a marketing team as well. And what we're seeing right now across our customers and for ourselves is leads from LLMs are still pretty small. They're growing and they're growing really rapidly. We actually published a report earlier this year that folks can check out that go through some of the data on Like what are the LLMs that are really driving the traffic and what are the changes and trends over time? So we're seeing rapid growth, but it's still relatively small.

14:17We still see people doing discovery and then still coming back to it later. I do think that behavior is going to change every single day. So there is no like one snapshot of this is how you do it. I think it's going to continue to evolve. You've got to test. It's a little black boxy right now. if you're in marketing and you're not curious, then you're probably in the wrong profession. Like you got to get curious about that black box and try to uncover what is getting you to show up in the ways that you want to show up and then following through what of your leads are actually coming from there.

14:47It is really, I mean, it feels like the days of early search. It is super annoying to like this cat and mouse game to try to figure out how you do show up. And it's super interesting to me that you're not really seeing a lot of the traffic, if you will, the conversions coming from the LLMs yet. But yet I think it's like this whole discovery phase, which obviously factors in, I mean, it's like, it doesn't stop. It's like every day is something new, but that's why companies like CallRail around, right? That makes a lot of sense. So I'm curious about something else, but now we're going completely bonkers here.

15:19I've seen you at lots of different events and stuff. You're out there doing all these crazy events. So when you're at events, are you like, cause I just went to one and it was time for dinner and I got invited to a dinner and I lied to everybody and I said I had plans because I really just want to hide in my room and order room service. Are you the type of person when you go to like industry events or like, oh yeah, I'm ready to go, invite me to dinner or are you a hide in your room person like me? That's a great question, Jay. I would say that I'm probably by nature more a hide in your room person.

15:52But if I'm there representing Kalral, I got to push myself to go be a, I'm going to go to the party kind of person. to push yourself out of your comfort zone sometimes. All right. So if I invite you out to dinner and you say, no, I'm doing something else, I'll take it that you're probably lying and I'll be okay with it. I'll be okay with it. But I like you, Jay. So I will go. It'd be awkward right now. Like, yes, I'm telling you, I don't want to go and I'm lying. That would be super awkward right now. Well, that's amazing. Listen, everybody, a couple of things. First of all, you need to go and connect with Laura on LinkedIn.

16:26We're going to put her full name in the show notes. I'm going to spell Boisman, which I probably just butchered, but it is B-E-U-S-S-M-A-N. Okay. We're going to put in the show notes, but also CallRail is awesome. And for the listeners of this show, you can go to callrail.com slash do this. And there is a free trial there. Callrail.com slash do this. CallRail is a great company, great culture, great people. Laura's great. Appreciate you being here. Thanks for having me, Jay. Wait, the party is not over. Go to jayschwedelson.com because I want to do stuff with you. I want to partner with you. When you click on the button partner with Jay, you let me know what you got going on.

17:09Work with my agency. Work with me directly. Get access to all of my free resources at jayschwedelson.com. And I got a book coming out this April. It's called Stupider People Have Done It. And all of the net proceeds are going to the V Foundation for Cancer Research. Go on Amazon, buy stupider people have done it. That way you can help kick cancer's butt with me. And if this podcast wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, it might've been, leave it a review, follow the show. You are awesome. Go out there and crush it.