Mastering Revenue Attribution with Dreamdata's Steffen Hedebrandt

What are the marketing strategies that really drive valuable sales? As a B2B marketer, you always have this question on your mind.

Revenue attribution is an answer you may not have thought of. It shows how your potential customers are driving to conversion and how each touchpoint contributes to your bottom line.

But where to start your revenue attribution process and how should you proceed?

I had the same questions, and fortunately, I had the opportunity to sit down and discuss solutions with an expert in the field of revenue attribution in B2B marketing: Steffen Hedebrandt, CMO and co-founder of Dreamdata.io.

Drawing on his personal struggles to show the value of his marketing efforts in his early days to solving the same problem today with Dreamdata.io, Steffen shares his perspective on revenue attribution, how it helps with complex B2B customer journeys and what marketers should do to get it right.

We also talk about the need for marketers to be proactive in these volatile times and find methods that create lasting impact. So grab your tea and read on.

This interview is part of G2's Professional Spotlight series. For more content like this, subscribe to G2 Tea, a monthly newsletter with SaaS-y news and entertainment.

Warm-up Questions:

What's your favorite drink? Sparkling water. Sometimes a Coke Zero or a draft beer.

When do you enjoy it? Just daily use during lunch and dinner.

What was your first job? My very first job was delivering newspapers.

What is your favorite software in your current tech stack? Dreamdata and Google apps. This is probably what I use the most.

What issues at work make you want to throw your laptop out the window? Two things come to mind. One is when customers decide to unsubscribe. It annoys me a lot. The other thing right now is what we're working on [at Dreamdata]. In this category and this positioning, there are no answers that have just been given, and you will never know if you will make the right choice or not. So it can sometimes be a bit frustrating.

Soundarya Jayaraman: Let's first talk about your background in the B2B marketing space. Tell us how you landed where you landed.

Steffend Hedebrandt: In my first job after college, I tried to build a rig of vintage musical instruments. We were trying to get different physical stores to put their instruments on our website. This is where I had my first lesson.

"The activities must generate income. Otherwise, you will not have any more money."

Steffen HedebrandtChief Marketing Office & Co-founder, Dreamdata.io.

We grew this website to have hundreds of thousands of natural visitors because the instruments were highly ranked on Google. But we failed to convince merchants to pay us a subscription for this traffic. It was unfair, because some stores received thousands of visitors every month from our side.

This has always been the primary goal: if you want to be truly appreciated for your marketing efforts, you need to have a narrative of why you do things and how it benefits the business, and the ultimate expression of this is more income. And if that's not more income, then you need to explain why the other things that come from it are valuable.

Your career path exemplifies how and where you started, the problem you tackled, and how you are solving it now in your current position at Dreamdata: revenue attribution. I have a very basic question here. Is there a difference between revenue attribution and marketing attribution?

It's good that you asked. At Dreamdata, we very deliberately talk about revenue attribution as opposed to marketing attribution, because if you're talking about marketing attribution, it's like someone clicks on an ad and then the money comes out later.

But in B2B, you typically click on an ad, sign up for a newsletter, and get contacted by a sales development rep [SDR]. The sales team works with you for three months, then you sign a contract. Our job is to try to understand everything that is happening in relation to the purchase, instead of just understanding if the ad had a result.

So it's not just the marketing that's done, but every touchpoint across the whole customer j...