Most marketing reports describe activity. Very few explain a result. You probably know the monthly ritual. Forty slides of impressions, clicks and open rates, a chart that goes up and to the right, and a sales director at the end of the table asking the only question that matters: which of this turned into business? The room goes quiet because nobody agreed, before the money was spent, what an outcome would look like or how anyone would recognise it.
Our analytics, CRM and attribution work fixes the plumbing behind that question. We define the outcomes first, then make sure your campaigns, your website and your CRM record the evidence in a way that lets an honest answer exist. It is unglamorous work. It is also the reason some marketing teams get a bigger budget next year and others get a smaller one.
Define the outcome before you read the performance
A number only means something next to a definition. “Leads” can mean a brochure download, a stand visitor who scanned a badge, or an engineer who asked for a quotation against a live project. Put those in one column and the total tells you nothing.
So we start with a short outcomes document, agreed by marketing and sales together. For each programme it states:
- The business outcome you actually want, such as qualified enquiries from a named sector, repeat orders or programme sign-ups.
- The evidence that proves it happened, and the system where that evidence lives.
- The leading signals worth watching on the way, labelled clearly as signals rather than results.
- What the data cannot show, written down now so nobody over-reads it later.
Every term we use goes into a shared glossary. If you want a head start, our marketing metrics glossary sets out the definitions we work from, and how we measure explains the standards we hold our own reporting to.
Campaign tagging that survives real teams
Attribution breaks long before anyone opens an analytics tool. It breaks when one person writes “LinkedIn”, another writes “linkedin_paid” and the agency writes “LI”, and the report counts three channels where there is one. It breaks when a QR code on a trade-show poster points to the home page with no tag at all.
We write a tagging convention your whole operation can follow: source, medium and campaign names in a fixed pattern, a simple link builder in a shared sheet, and rules for offline material such as printed literature, posters and event invitations. Then we check it. A tagging audit across your live campaigns usually shows where the leaks are within a day or two, and the fixes are almost always cheap.
The CRM handover from marketing to sales
The most expensive gap in B2B marketing is the few days between a lead arriving and a salesperson calling it. Context gets lost in that gap. The salesperson sees a name and an email address, not the application page the buyer read three times or the question they asked on the stand.
We design the handover as a piece of communication. What fields must be complete before a lead moves to sales. What summary travels with it. Who owns it on which day, and what happens if nobody picks it up. We work with your CRM administrator or implementation partner to configure it; we define the rules and the wording, and they build the fields and workflows in your system. That division keeps responsibilities clear and keeps your CRM yours.
Could your sales director name the campaign behind last quarter’s best enquiry?
Send us a briefLead stages your sales team will actually use
Lead stages fail when they are written by marketing for marketing. Sales ignores them, records the real status in a notebook, and the CRM drifts away from reality. Good stage definitions are short, observable and owned. Here is a simplified, illustrative structure for a B2B business selling engineered products:
| Stage | Entry rule | Owner | Evidence recorded |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enquiry | A named person has contacted you or asked for something | Marketing | Source tag, first message, product interest |
| Marketing qualified | Fits the agreed customer profile and has a stated need | Marketing | Sector, role, application, reason for qualifying |
| Sales qualified | Sales has spoken to them and confirmed a real opportunity | Sales | Call notes, decision makers, timing |
| Proposal | A quotation or proposal has been sent | Sales | Proposal reference and value |
| Closed | Won or lost, with a reason | Sales | Outcome and the reason in plain words |
Your version will differ, especially if you sell through distributors or run long qualification cycles. The principle holds: every stage has one owner, one entry rule and one piece of evidence that anyone can check.
What attribution can and cannot tell you
Attribution models assign credit for an outcome to the touches that came before it. They are useful, and they are also guesses with a formula attached. A first-touch model flatters awareness work. A last-touch model flatters search and retargeting. A data-driven model needs volumes many B2B companies never reach.
We are candid about the limits. In a long industrial sale involving several people, a trade show, two webinars, a distributor visit and a site audit, no model will reconstruct exactly why the order arrived. What you can do is record the touches consistently, ask buyers how they found you, compare periods and markets where you changed one thing, and treat the model as one input among several. Where a question cannot be answered from the data, the report says so plainly.
One of the cheapest improvements is also the oldest. Add a short, free-text question to your enquiry form and your sales call script: how did you first hear about us? The answers are messy, and they are often more revealing than any model. A buyer who writes “saw your stand, then a colleague sent me your application note” has just described a sequence no tracking pixel would have caught. We read those answers every month and set them beside the tagged data, because the two together are far harder to fool than either on its own.
Reporting that ends in a decision
A useful report is short. Ours open with three things: what changed since last month, what we think caused it and how confident we are, and the one or two decisions it suggests. Supporting tables sit behind that, for anyone who wants to check the working.
We keep the outcome, the signal and the activity on separate lines so nobody mistakes a rise in clicks for a rise in orders. When paid media is involved, the same discipline connects to our media planning and buying, where every brief starts from the outcome rather than the channel. For programmes built around members or repeat customers, we work alongside retention and lifecycle so the measures match the conversation.
How an analytics and CRM engagement runs
Audit
We review your current reports, tagging, CRM stages and the handover between teams, and list what is missing or contradictory.
Define
Outcomes, stage definitions and the glossary, agreed in working sessions with marketing and sales leads.
Configure
Tagging convention and handover rules, built in your systems by your administrator or partner with our specification.
Read
A monthly decision report and a quarterly review of whether the definitions still match how you sell.
We work remotely with companies worldwide, over video and shared documents. The fee is fixed and agreed before we start; see how we charge. If the measurement problem turns out to be a website problem, such as enquiry forms that lose context, we will say so and bring in our website design team.
The case notes below come from our team’s experience, work our founder led in earlier in-house and programme roles, written up to show the approach rather than to claim results for Quiamo.
