B2B companies: Do you track account lead source? | Community
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Anonymous
January 25, 2013
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B2B companies: Do you track account lead source?

  • January 25, 2013
  • 3 replies
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Lead source makes perfect sense on the lead/contact level, but I'm not 100% convinced of its value at the account level.

Is anyone tracking this and if so, how do you determine the best account lead source?

Thanks!
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Best answer by
Hi Delinda,

I would definitely recommend against tracking (or trying to track) "source" by Account.  2 reasons:

#1 - Since lead source (or "source") is really more relevant to an individual, and you could potentially have multiple individuals (or contacts) connected to an account, which "source" would you select as the primary, and how would you do this.  It would have to a manual process - which doesn't scale.

#2 - If you start going down the "rabbit hole" of tracking account source, then add another data element to the metrics you useto determine which source is your greatest value.  This could potentially skew your data.  For example, let's say you have an Account with the lead source of "web form" and 4 contacts within the account, of which 3 were sourced from "web form" and the other was sourced from social media (hence the account holding the "web form" value).  In this case, you would actually be skewing the data towards "web form" being the higher producing source.  A more pronoucned skew would start to occur as your database grows.

Just my 2 cents.  I would stick to sourcing on a individual basis only.

John
LeadMD


3 replies

A
Anonymous
Accepted solution
January 25, 2013
Hi Delinda,

I would definitely recommend against tracking (or trying to track) "source" by Account.  2 reasons:

#1 - Since lead source (or "source") is really more relevant to an individual, and you could potentially have multiple individuals (or contacts) connected to an account, which "source" would you select as the primary, and how would you do this.  It would have to a manual process - which doesn't scale.

#2 - If you start going down the "rabbit hole" of tracking account source, then add another data element to the metrics you useto determine which source is your greatest value.  This could potentially skew your data.  For example, let's say you have an Account with the lead source of "web form" and 4 contacts within the account, of which 3 were sourced from "web form" and the other was sourced from social media (hence the account holding the "web form" value).  In this case, you would actually be skewing the data towards "web form" being the higher producing source.  A more pronoucned skew would start to occur as your database grows.

Just my 2 cents.  I would stick to sourcing on a individual basis only.

John
LeadMD


A
Anonymous
January 25, 2013
Thanks John. I agree. What are your thoughts on opportunity lead source? I have been asked for this multiple times, but can't get away from opportunity influence and telling the full story. It's not "Sales vs Marketing" but rather what did we do together to make this work?

On the flip side, management needs a clear summary of what drove an opportunity without drilling down to the contact level. They're not interested in the opportunity influence, just one field - opportunity source. How do you or others address this?
A
Anonymous
January 25, 2013
We track the Opportunity Lead Source, so that we can provide a Marketing Sourced metric.  The policy is that whomever the rep is talking with at the point they decide to create an Opportunity should be added as a Primary Contact Role and that Contact's Lead Source becomes the Lead Source of the Opportunity.  We only do this for trial versions and main products, not renewals, upsells or sales into other divisions of the Account.  We could use the First Touch attribution metric in Marketo Opportunity reports, but this gives us a cross-check.  Also we report on Marketing Sourced Opps in a Salesforce dashboard, and its easy to report using this method.

We also have the concept of Marketing Recycled Opportunities, which is independent of the Opportunity Lead Source.  If a lead is in the Remarket or Inactive revenue stage and they re-engage with us through a marketing program we increment a score field counter (Marketing Recycled MQL), which if that Contact has a Primary Contact Role on the Opportunity regardless of the lead's Lead Source, we update a "Recycled Primary Contact" checkbox field on the Opportunity, which allows us to report on these as well.
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