Updated September 18, 2023: We’ve added more clarity around how B2B marketing analytics tools can be improved and brought all the links in the article up to date.
While B2B marketing analytics tools provide a lot of value, at least 50% of their users don’t check with them on a regular basis. As the Dun & Bradstreet and Forrester survey found out, less than half of B2B sales and marketing efforts are based on data analytics and thus operate in the dark.
What’s even more surprising is that the other half that relies on analytics software doesn’t always get accurate reporting results.
Marketing analytics tools can help see a promising opportunity or create a new user experience on the condition that the data they process is correct.
For example, Forrester’s Q1 2018 Marketing Benchmark Study suggests that 80% of marketers focus on measuring volume in their pipeline. But what if velocity (the speed of getting leads) is more important than the amount of leads at any given time?
B2B marketing analytics tools exist to help sales and marketing teams achieve their goals. That’s why it’s critical to identify what those goals are (e.g. increasing click-through rates) and then select and adjust the right analytics tools based on the data you need to collect and analyze.
In this article, we’ll cover important issues that B2B marketing tools are missing and offer suggestions on how to address them.
Tip: Want to shorten the path between B2B marketing analytics and engagement? Try Lift AI. This buyer intent solution instantly screens every website visitor and connects the most promising ones to your BDRs.
What Is Missing in B2B Marketing Analytics and Reporting Tools?
The first problem with B2B marketing analytics tools is that the world is not as linear as they would like it to be.
A good example of this is handling contacts, accounts, and leads in your CRM. Since multiple leads could turn into contacts for any given account, how do you properly credit sales or marketing campaigns by assigning a source?
In a similar way, leads interact with various channels and campaigns before closing on a deal. If you credit a single activity for your success in your analytics tool, it would skew the reporting away from reality.
The success of other B2B marketing analytics tools (e.g. Salesforce Pardot) is dependent on the quality of your CRM data. That means any campaigns that haven’t been properly logged or attributed, any misclassified leads or contacts, any duplicate or missing information will have a significant effect in your reporting in the end.
Tool integration is another issue. Nowadays, every company is using at least a dozen marketing tools, from analytics (e.g. Looker Studio) to CRMs (e.g. Salesforce) to chatbots (e.g. Drift) to data enrichment tools (e.g. Clearbit). You have to constantly check that all these integrations are working properly as any missing connections will make it hard to analyze your marketing efforts and understand which aspects of your sales strategy have the best performance.
How to Improve Sales Pipeline Dashboards
Once you realize that custom dashboards in B2B marketing analytics tools might not show you a 100% accurate picture of your customer acquisition process, it’s a good idea to start experimenting and trying to improve it.
It might seem time-consuming, but manually adjusting campaign sources at the end of every week (or month) will bring clarity to the best performing marketing activities every time you review them. If you have extra resources, regularly cleaning up duplicate data in your CRM will help maintain accurate analysis over the years.
There are, however, no shortcuts to properly identifying every step of the buyer journey — your marketing tools must be integrated throughout to paint a realistic picture.
You might have a chat platform installed on your website, for example, which needs to be integrated into a B2B data mining tool to identify anonymous website visitors by tracking their IPs and comparing them against a database of physical corporate addresses.
Even in the best case scenario, trying to determine website visitors’ identities in this way will leave half of them secret, or not show much more than their company name. Without IP address tracking, anonymous visitors will represent up to 98% of your traffic.
If you don’t know who is visiting your website, you can’t find out what their buyer intent is and what effect they have on your marketing efforts.
How to Configure Analytics Pipeline for Engagement
Trying to wade through your website traffic with live chat sometimes creates more problems than it solves. Your sales team will miss lots of opportunities if any visitor is able to contact them directly, regardless of their intention to buy. The solution is to turn to data-driven actions with a tool like Lift AI.
Lift AI successfully identifies all anonymous website visitors as soon as they land on your website, even if they haven’t been previously recorded in your CRM or other marketing tools.
The way Lift AI does it is by leveraging its unique machine-learning model to measure the buyer intent of every visitor and present the option to connect with the highest-scoring ones (about 9% of your traffic). If your sales team is over capacity, lower-scoring visitors would be delegated to a nurturing or a self-help chatbot.
Lift AI could multiply your chat conversion rates anywhere from two to 10 times within the first 90 days by feeding your salespeople more engaging and qualified leads than ever.
Take a look at a few Lift AI case studies that go deeper into specific problems and results. PointClickCare increased their conversions by 400%, attributing over $1M of extra revenue to the Lift AI integration. Formstack similarly grew by 420%.
Try Lift AI free — for 30 days. Installation is simple and no credit card is required. Using Lift AI will immediately help you direct all your sales efforts into a data-driven and measurable channel that saves your sales and marketing team time while increasing conversion rates.
