Data-driven attribution: Road map to purchase, detours on the way
By Two Rivers Marketing
A solid business strategy requires corporate and channel partners to rally around a proven customer-recognized strength. Without agreement on where customer value lies, there is no core strategy and growth stalls.
Every B2B leader watches the same number: sales against goal. It’s the speedometer for your company’s growth engine, telling you whether the business is gaining ground, coasting, or slowing.
But a speedometer only measures speed. It doesn’t tell you whether the engine underneath is built to go faster or whether your business is even headed in the right direction.
The 2RM Catalyst Diagnostic — a qualitative and quantitative research survey we use to identify the precise friction points between clients’ corporate sales and marketing teams and their channel partners — has uncovered a trap: Leaders only read their half of the dashboard. B2B corporate teams look at corporate’s numbers. But the dealers, distributors, and local reps who are closest to your customers are reading a completely different gauge.
While your corporate teams are checking the speed, your channel partners are watching the road directly ahead. For the channel, they’re measuring their business success on such areas as:
- This quarter’s customer proposals
- This month’s showroom or location traffic
- The health of their own market
This creates blind spots for the B2B organization as a whole. Corporate sees the trajectory but not the detail; channel partners see the detail but not the trajectory. Nobody has the full picture of where you’re going or what the plan is to get there. And the gap between those two views tells you more about your company’s growth prospects than either number does alone.
A strong core strategy is your business’s shared answer to “Why us?” that remains steadfast and motivating whether you ask the CMO, the VP of sales, or the rep at the local dealership or field office.
Improve your B2B core strategy by evaluating your Business Drivers
To evaluate the strength of your core strategy, you need to examine your Business Drivers: sales against goal, brand perception, market position, and reputation. These areas indicate the health of your business.
When we assess these drivers in our 2RM Catalyst Diagnostic, we measure three sides of the house to understand what’s happening within corporate sales and marketing teams as well as what’s happening within the channel. The results are always enlightening.
An excellent example of the unexpected dynamics at work between teams — and how that impacts business outcomes — can be found in our Diagnostic assessment of two B2B manufacturers. Both came to us with the same question: Why are sales lagging?
When we dug into our research, however, their scoreboards looked nothing alike.
A larger gap may indicate exposure risk for the brand
At Manufacturer 1, corporate scored its Business Drivers at 2.4 out of 5, meaning they thought things like their sales goals, brand perception, marketing position, and reputation were well below average. This is an alarming score. Meanwhile, the dealers scored the same brand at 3.5.
The dealer optimism may look like good news, but it isn’t.
As we found in the qualitative portion of our research, the score masked a brand awareness problem. One respondent put it best: “Our customers buy from us because of our dealership, not because of the product.”
The score and the sentiment behind the comments indicated that the dealers feel good about their own businesses even as they’re quietly propping up a brand their customers don’t recognize. Therefore, that 1.1-point gap between the corporate team’s low score and the dealers’ higher rating represents an exposure risk for this company. If the dealer’s loyalty wavers, so does the brand.
Narrow gap indicates sales and marketing alignment, but missed opportunity
By contrast, at Manufacturer 2, corporate teams and dealers agreed almost perfectly, with Business Driver scores of 2.9 and 3.2, respectively. Alignment!
But look at where they aligned: the mediocre middle. Both groups agreed that the brand was merely keeping pace, not leading the pack. The one place where we found both corporate teams and dealers genuinely confident and in sync was product quality (around 4.2 from each side). That provided a clue that the teams were overlooking something important.
The corporate teams and the dealer network independently arrived at the same high score, indicating where the brand actually stands out with a strength customers genuinely recognize. This was the competitive opportunity the manufacturer hadn’t been capitalizing on.
With the exception of product quality, all other Business Driver scores were middle of the road for both groups. Our deeper analysis showed that the company was failing to build its strategy around a core strength it already had, leaving corporate and dealer teams feeling “meh” about how the brand was showing up in-market.
How to fix your Business Drivers
First, align. If sales are below goal — as they were for both companies discussed here — resist the reflex to increase your spend on demand gen tactics. A speedometer reading low doesn’t always mean “press the gas.” It can mean your business engine isn’t converting the fuel — that your corporate and channel teams aren’t aligned strategically.
Before you try to move forward, find out whether your corporate teams and your channel partners even agree on what your company is good at. Finding an answer you all buy into and developing your business strategy around it are key parts of driving future growth.
Second, investigate the cause of the gap, not just its size. A wide gap where the channel is more optimistic than corporate signals that you’re cruising on borrowed dealer goodwill, which is a precarious situation to be in.
On the other hand, a narrow gap around a middle-of-the-road score indicates that B2B corporate and channel teams are aligned but stuck. This is actually a more difficult problem to fix because everyone agrees things are fine, but “fine” doesn’t move the business into a market leadership position.
The issues that are causing the gap will require very different approaches to close and resolve them:
- A B2B brand running on borrowed dealer goodwill needs to build demand and brand recognition through a strategy focused on driving awareness and preference to local channels. This is the case for Manufacturer 1. Corporate needs to provide in-market activations that make customers actively seek out the brand and ensure that channel partners aren’t carrying the brand on their own.
- A B2B brand that’s aligned but stuck needs sharper differentiation within its core strategy. This is the case for Manufacturer 2. Corporate and channel partners need to identify the brand’s one real strength that’s recognized and valued by customers; then commit to building a leadership position around it.
Third, find your strength. The most useful question within the Business Drivers section of our Diagnostic is “What’s the one advantage your customers, your dealers, and your corporate team would all name?”
If your teams and channel partners can’t answer that quickly and consistently, your core strategy is weaker than it should be.
A gap in corporate and channel Business Drivers scores indicate that something is amiss. Unfortunately, that also typically means your B2B organization isn’t achieving the sales growth or business outcomes you’d like to see.
Growth stalls without a clear strategy — one where corporate teams, channel partners, and customers all agree on your core strength.
See your own score. The 2RM Catalyst Diagnostic reveals the specific areas where internal misalignment may be stalling your commercial strategy. Take the 2RM Catalyst Diagnostic to see where your corporate and channel teams are reading different gauges and identify where untapped momentum is waiting.
By Rachel Martin