The Attribution Debate: What Level is Worth It

Intro VO  00:05

Welcome to revenue rehab, your one stop destination for collective solutions to the biggest challenges faced by marketing leaders today. Now head on over to the couch, make yourself comfortable and get ready to change the way you approach revenue. Leading your recovery is modern marketer, author, speaker and Chief Operating Officer at Tegrita Brandi Starr

Brandi Starr  00:33

Hello, hello hello and welcome to another episode of revenue rehab. I am your host Brandi Starr. And we have another amazing episode for you today. I am joined by Drew Smith, as the CEO and founder for attributor Drew is passionate about helping b2b organizations solve complex marketing attribution challenges with a broad range of marketing experience, including event management, partner marketing, web marketing, email marketing, and most recently, marketing and revenue operations. Drew understands the complex challenges that CMOS face when trying to tie disparate channels into a cohesive attribution story. Drew, welcome to revenue rehab, your session begins now.

Drew Smith  01:23

Thanks for having me, Brandi.

Brandi Starr  01:24

I am excited to have you here on the couch. And I like to break the ice with a little Woosah moment that I call buzzword. banishment. So tell me what buzzword would you like to get rid of forever?

Drew Smith  01:41

This is a tough one. Because there's so many honestly. But I will probably go with oh, if I have to pick one. It's probably going to be synergy or synergies? Yeah.

Brandi Starr  01:56

Yeah, that is one that I definitely agree with you and I have even seen people throw in synergy in this stick, which I'm not even quite sure what's meant by that. But, you know, it conjures up. I always get visions of like witches and spells with that word. flows where my brain goes, but tell me why do you hate the word synergy?

Drew Smith  02:24

Honestly, I think it just it's, it's, it's so meaningless, most of the way that it's used, I feel like people need to add more copy to something. And then they said they say hey, put in drives synergies. And it's just it doesn't mean anything. And so I think that the word itself is fine. But it's just the way that people use it and the usage of the word, it's lost all meaning it's just completely meaningless at this point.

Brandi Starr  02:58

Yeah, it's right up there with you know, everything drives productivity, and then we're going to get the synergies, and it is one of those bud buzzwords, soups, that goes into marketing copies. So I can promise that we won't talk about any form of synergies today.

Drew Smith  03:18

Perfect, love it. Awesome.

Brandi Starr  03:20

So now that we've gotten that off our chest, tell me what brings you to revenue rehab today?

Drew Smith  03:25

Yeah. So why I'm here today is I'd like to talk a little bit about marketing attribution, I'd like to talk about, is it right for you? Is it something that you should care about, and also kind of dispel some of the rumors around it? Because there's a lot of rumors about marketing attribution, and some of them are true, some of them are not true. And so I think we can kind of dispel some of those rumors and get rid of some of those, those bad takes and get get into what what it really can and cannot do. I

Brandi Starr  04:00

love it doesn't say we've talked about attribution on the couch a few times. And I even think that that words been banished a couple of times.

Drew Smith  04:10

It's in the last

Brandi Starr  04:12

on the list at least once or twice, but um, you know, I believe in setting intentions, it gives us focus, it gives us purpose, and most importantly, it gives our audience an understanding of what they should expect from our discussion today. So tell me, what are your best hopes for our talk? What would you like people to take away from the discussion?

Drew Smith  04:31

Yeah, I mean, I think the most important thing that people can take away from this discussion today is, is attribution, something that I should care about, or is it something that I don't need to care about at based on where my current company currently is and the type of go to market that we have? We can help folks understand if attribution is something they should they should be interested in, or if it's something that's like, three years down the road or will never be on their roadmap.

Brandi Starr  04:59

Awesome. Well, I will start with my first question is really around where the problem comes from. So I know the big arguments, the two big arguments that I hear with attribution as to why people are against it is one, they say it creates friction, because everyone is trying to take credit. And so attribution becomes that mechanism for, you know, sales and marketing and everybody to fight over who gets credit. And then the second thing is that it actually never takes into account the big picture of all of the things that actually drive revenue. And, you know, over state certain channels, because it's like, oh, everything gets funneled through the website. So it looks like the website is, you know, the end all be all when there's all these other things that got them there. So like to hear your take on the naysayers. In terms of why do you believe I mean, obviously, you've got a whole company behind attribution. So I know that you believe in it. So give me your perspective there.

Drew Smith  06:09

Yeah, absolutely. So the first point that you mentioned, which is that it creates friction, and creates kind of this competitive environment between marketing and sales in other parts of the revenue process. I would say that, that that assessment is absolutely true, that attribution can do that. But I am on record as having said multiple times, and I've even created a meme about this is that if you're using attribution, to take credit, you're using it wrong. That is that is the wrong usage of the tool. So we don't blame the tool. When it's used incorrectly, we blame the user that's using it incorrectly. And in this case, attribution is being used incorrectly. If it's creating that, that conflict between revenue teams, it's matter of fact, when used correctly, it doesn't create any conflict at all. All it does is it tells a story about how an opportunity or a deal came to be. And there are chapters in that story. And some chapters are told from the perspective of the marketing department. And some chapters are told from the perspective of the sales department. And some chapters are told from the perspective of the SDR department. And some chapters were talking about things like expansion opportunities might even be told by the customer success team or an account management team. But it's just chapters in a novel, you're not when when you read a book, and you are watching a movie or whatever, you don't you don't say, hey, well, chapter 17. That's, that's all I need to know about this book is chapter 17. And nobody ever says that, you don't read the whole book, and then go back and pick the chapters you like best every chapter lead to the conclusion of that book. Now, some chapters have more stuff going on than others, right. But every single chapter moves the plot forward in some way, shape, or form. And that's when attribution is used correctly, that's all attribution is doing is telling that story with different chapters along the way.

Brandi Starr  08:23

I really, really liked that analogy. I mean, I love a good analogy, no matter what, but I think that is a great way to think about it. And I think where one of the problems come in, is when most people talk about attribution, they are talking about the first and the last chapter. And it's like you got, you know, the opening and the conclusion. And it is as if all those things in the middle don't matter. And although I can say in college, I did read a few books that way, it is not. So what I would recommend in general. So how do we what is good look like? So we talked about what the problems are, you know, I like to set the stage of when companies get this right, and are able to, you know, use attribution effectively. What does that really look like for them?

Drew Smith  09:15

It's it well, so first off, it's different for every type of organization that you work with. And this is kind of one of the things that that I hope is a big major takeaway from this episode is. First touch attribution works perfectly fine. For some organizations, they don't need any more than that last touch attribution works perfectly fine. For some organizations, they don't need more than that. First and Last touch works perfectly fine for some organizations. Some organizations need the full multi touch, they need to know what happened in chapter 17 and chapter 23, and chapter 34. But not every organization needs that. Here's a dirty little secret. It's actually not a secret, but we're gonna call it that. The attribution company attributor, we don't do complex attribution. Oh, doesn't that mean I'm not eating my own dog food? No, it doesn't. Because we're super small. I have, it's me and three other people right now. So I sell everything I do all of our marketing, I know where every lead and opportunity comes from. I don't need complex attribution because my business isn't complex. The more complex your business is, the more complex your go to market is, the more people that touch a lead or prospect, or opportunity through that process. That's when you need to start understanding more of those chapters. My book only has three chapters. Most of the time, my book doesn't have that many chapters, really, honestly, it doesn't. But the more chapters your book has, the more of those you need to have visibility into inside your data. So there is no one answer to what does good look like. Because every organization has different needs. Now, at the most complex level, let's let's talk about the most complex level, because because it's easy to understand, when you just need simple, simple is easy complex is difficult. So let's talk about about complex. At the most complex level, what organizations need is they need visibility into the entire every single chapter in that book. And that book is going to have upwards of 100 or more chapters in it. And the chapter should contain a lot of different information. Each chapter should contain information about where where that in, we're going to kind of break away from the analogy for a moment. But where that engagement happened, was that on the website, was it through something else like an in person event? Was it through a phone call from somebody? Where did that engagement happen? What was that engagement? So was it was it a phone call? Was it a form fill? Was it just a web page visit? Was it a trick or treater at a tradeshow booth that came in, you know, open up their bag, said scan my badge? Give me your tchotchke? Or was it somebody that had a more meaningful conversation with us at the tradeshow booth? So what was that engagement? It should include when that engagement happened, both in terms of date and time, but also were in the buying journey that happened to that happen at the MQL stage at the SQL stage at some significant opportunity stage. When did that happen? It needs to tell you who did that action, who was the who was the main character for that chapter, right? Who was the person. And then it also needs to include, depending on the needs of the business, it could include things like segmentation information, Persona information, industry information, things like that, to just give you some more reporting flexibility, and different ways of slicing and dicing the information. That's really what it looks like. At a very macro level, what good looks like is that you have all of these chapters, and each chapter can have that much information in it about what each chapter is about, and what what happened. That's what good looks like. Now great looks like being able to relate each chapter back to an opportunity and assign $1 value to each chapter and awaiting behind each chapter. It also looks like the ability to understand if how well that chapter helped move the plot forward? Did it? Did it have a minor impact on the plot that have a major impact on the plot? We also want to know are there we from an outcome standpoint, we want to be able to understand if there are any chapters that are if there's any types of chapters, specific campaigns, specific channels specific specific tactics that lead to negative outcomes, as opposed to just positive outcomes. So good attribution doesn't just show us what works. It also shows us what doesn't work so that we can eliminate waste in our marketing spend. So that's, that's what good and great look like.

Brandi Starr  14:22

I that I mean, there's so many things there because I love your last point in that attribution isn't just about seeing what works because I mean, obviously anything that's working well, we want to do more of it anything that's not we want to you know, modify it or stop. And I see most people when they have any level of attribution, it is really identifying just where did the revenue come from? Like that seems to be the only question that is being asked and I love your distinction between good and great, because I'd say for most organizations, even Getting to what you defined as good feels like, you know, a utopia and this unicorn experience, but then even to think about what is great, and really being able to have that visibility, it almost feels like a fairy tale. And, you know, the argument there is, is, even if it's possible, the level of effort to get there is greater than most people have capacity for, or at least that's what they believe. And so I'd love your your take on one, if you agree that it is, you know, the level of effort to get there is significant. And then your perspective on why is that significance worth it?

Drew Smith  15:44

Yeah. So I think, from my experience, and I've been doing this, specifically with attribution for about six years, is when I got my start with attribution, I've seen over 100 different organizations and seeing where they're at when they start this journey. Most organizations are doing the foundational things already. And what they need is they need a little bit of tweaking to that foundation, to be able to really turn it into what it needs to be. But most organizations are already using UTM s UTM. 's are critical and attribution. Most organizations are already using them. So a lot of organizations I work with need some operational rigor around how they use ATMs, but but they're using them, they need a little more consistency, but they're using them to most organizations that that I speak with already have some structure in place for campaign tracking, typically in their CRM, like in Salesforce. And that campaign structure is really going to be one of the main foundations for how to start tracking each one of those individual chapters, that the architecture is already there. And we may need to massage it a little bit and optimize it a little bit. But that architecture is already there, the foundations there. So most organizations are much more ready than they think they are. So the effort doesn't necessarily become enormous and overwhelming through some massive operational overhaul and process overhaul. You don't have to do big overhauls to get ready for that that utopian view, it's usually just some minor tweaking and optimization that happens there. Now, certainly, there is effort that's required to to even when you do get to the state where your your operational processes are ready to go, and your data is ready to go. There is some effort that's required to maintain that, I mean, it's no different than anything else, you when you build something, you have to maintain it, right. When you buy a car, you have to take it in for oil changes and tire rotations, and you know, all sorts of different maintenance that you have to do. So there is maintenance. But the maintenance isn't that bad, particularly if you are keeping an eye on things and addressing things when they're small problems and not letting them turn into big problems. So the effort itself is really not as cumbersome and overwhelming as a lot of people think it is.

Brandi Starr  18:31

Okay, yeah. And so listening to you, I had a thought, I think where you got a great point and that the foundations are there. I think the piece just in my experience that I've seen that is missing for some people, is what you refer to as the operational rigor. Because I have seen even with UTM is like some of the tracking, it's like some of it, you can tell you've got certain people that are on top of it. And then you see other things come through. And you know, you're just kind of scratching your head a little bit, that and then how technologies are connected. Because that is the other thing that I've also seen is that, I mean, you have your obvious things like if you're doing display, and search and all those things that that you ATMs are able to track. But then when you get to the campaign level, and how things are flowing through different technologies and where that data is coming from. I think that's probably the place where people don't always have their house in order so to speak, that you would need to pair those things with those foundations in order to get the outcomes that you're talking about.

Drew Smith  19:38

Oh, for sure. Yeah. You know that that operational rigor is usually the most important part of the attribution puzzle. Because if you don't, if you don't execute things the same way every single time, you will create what I call Data drift. And data drift is where you have a set standard for what your data is supposed to look like. That's your normalized data. And then every time you execute something in a different way, your data starts drifting away from what it's supposed to be, right. And you create that data drift. And the more data drift that you have, the less consistency you have in your data. And therefore, the less usable your data is to actually be useful for attribution reporting. And that applies to whether you're doing first touch or you know, last touch, or multi touch or self reported or whatever, it doesn't matter what type of attribution you're doing. If you have a lot of data drift, you're gonna have bad data, and you're gonna have bad results. So operational rigor is important for any level of attribution that you want to do, period. I

Brandi Starr  20:57

agree completely. Getting you know, keeping your data house in order is something that, you know, I always stress because with all the technologies and everything that we're trying to do, if the data is a mess, you're handcuffing yourself, essentially? Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about some other things that I hear people asking, you know, questions I hear people asking, which is, you know, you have dark social and dark funnel, and, you know, you have things like communities that aren't tracked. And I mean, even you know, we do this podcast, which, you know, people are like, where does that fit into attribution? You know, there's all these different things that we spend resources on, whether it's budget, or you know, human resources, that arguably play big roles in these chapters going back to our analogy, but we're not really able to track them in the process fully. And so what do you do about that? Like, do you just chalk it up as it is what it is? Or, you know, how do you address that in the big picture?

Drew Smith  22:07

Yeah, so this is some of the this is some of the where we get into some of those rumors that I want to address about, about what attribution is capable of. So when we talk about things like dark funnel, dark social, things like podcasts, the general consensus out there's that attribution can't track these things. And I say, to an extent, that's accurate, to an extent, it's not accurate. So I've written an article about how Podcasts can be tracked using multi touch attribution platforms. I've written an article about how some of the dark social things like likes, comments and shares on LinkedIn can actually be turned into chapters in your book, through multi touch attribution tools, it is possible. Now there are some blind spots, there are certainly some blind spots in there. Now, where what I, the way that I respond to that is very simple. If you are an organization that has invested 50% of your marketing budget into a podcast, you have to have that tracking locked down, you have to otherwise you're gonna have a massive 50% gap in your attribution data right. Now, if you're doing a podcast, now, let's let's let's also be very honest about podcasts. We're on one together, podcasts are started, for any number of reasons. Some of those reasons are marketing and trying to generate awareness and trying to create pipeline and branding and things of that nature. Some podcasts are started as vanity projects. And truly just to get somebody's personal profile enhanced in the marketplace. Neither one's right or wrong, they are what they are. If you have a podcast, it's a vanity project. I don't care if it can be tracked by attribution or not. Because the vanity project, we don't care about the results of it, it's vanity. If you are doing a podcast for things like lead gen demand gen branding and awareness and things of that nature, then we should be able to try to find ways to track it. An article that I wrote has a number of different methodologies to do that. Same thing with social, if you are going all in on LinkedIn, and you are super just engaged on that platform, and that is your primary marketing vehicle. You need to track that stuff. And there's certain ways that you may or may not be able to do that using multi touch attribution tools. If you are dabbling in LinkedIn, and it is, you know, maybe 2% of the chapters in your novel are going to talk about LinkedIn. Is it a big deal if you You'd have if you have a gap there and you can't track every single action that's happening on LinkedIn. No, it's not, it's 2% of your marketing budget, it's 2% of your marketing attention. If there's some gaps in there, it's not going to cause an issue, a major issue with your marketing attribution. So it's all dependent upon how big of a gap you have to fill. In some cases, I know organizations that are super worried about tracking their podcast, and they have one podcast episode a month, and it's purely for vanity sake, who cares? Who cares if you can track it, if that's the environment, so we have to be realistic about what should and should not be tracked. And we also have to be realistic about the fact that you will never achieve 100% data fidelity, I don't care what type of attribution you're using, you will never achieve 100% data fidelity, what matters is that you want to know what your data fidelity is, am I at 97% of my 57%, and two, you focus on the important things, and you get the important things, right. If you're getting the important things, right, and you're able to track the areas where you're spending a lot of time energy and resources and money, then your attribution is going to be fine. Even if you have a couple of gaps in spaces, like communities and other places where where attribution really, truly cannot be tracked. Right, like communities that is nearly impossible to track for any attribution system. Other than just, you know, the Where did you hear about us question, right? That's really the only way to track that. But if that's 1% of your deals come from that. Who cares. I like to use a, I like to use a flag system, it's really simple. I like to use a flag system about how much I should care about something. A red flag means something's broken, and I should care about it immediately. It's a high priority. An orange flag means it's, it's the next priority. Once I get the red flags figured out. The yellow flag means who cares, it's not a big deal. It's low on the priority list. It's very low on how important it is, probably because it's low volume. And then green flags are good. We'd like those green flags means everything's working properly, I don't have any data gaps. So if you use a flag system like that, it helps you understand what are the things that you should be focusing on. And one of the things that are just like, if I have some extra time, and I don't know what to do with it, like I'm the only one working between Christmas and New Year's, then I'll deal with my yellow flags, then.

Brandi Starr  27:44

I like that as a way, because I think my biggest takeaway from what you just said is, we all have to think about what matters. And just let the rest go and put your effort into being able to track and you know, have a part of your attribution, the things that you care about most that are most important to your marketing strategy. And some of those other things that may be harder to get at, we just let that go. And you know, over time, we may get to them over time, they may stay irrelevant. But it is a little bit of comfort and just accepting that not everything's gonna be in there. And sometimes it just is important to just hear that because I do think that we can often be perfectionist or have this kind of all or nothing mentality of like, either we're gonna do it, and we're gonna do it all or we shouldn't touch it. And so my last question for you is, I know, you touched on rumors, is there or misconceptions? Are there any other key ones that you want to make sure to dispel? Before we get to the end? Yeah.

Drew Smith  28:53

So I think the two big ones that I already kind of touched on our podcasts that you know, attribution tools can't track podcasts. That's that's not accurate. The you can track podcasts using attribution tools to things like likes comments and shares on LinkedIn cannot be tracked by attribution tools they can, it's it's a little bit more difficult to get there, which means which means you really have to determine do I care. But if you do care, it is possible to get there. And the last one, I think, is just that there's there's kind of this misconception that you you can't a lot of the detractors for like attribution platforms and tools will say that like you know, just use self reported attribution, just ask the question, How did you hear about us and you'll get as much information as you as you need. And I don't think that that it's an either or proposition. It's not attribution software, or how did you hear about us It's the best environments is both? Because both have gaps, right? Like, if you think about the how did you hear about us question? If I asked you, you know, what did you have for lunch three weeks ago on Tuesday? You're not gonna know the answer that question. I don't know, I don't know what I had for lunch three weeks ago, Tuesday, I have no clue. How did you hear about us? It's no different than the human brain is fallible. We don't have perfect recollection and perfect recall and perfect memories. And so we don't know, I don't I may not know exactly how I heard about somebody. I may say, Hey, I heard about you on revenue rehab. My episode hasn't even aired yet. So I don't know how you could have heard about us on revenue. Right. So people are fallible. And so when people are fallible, and they don't know how they heard about you, that's where the attribution tools can fill that gap. Because they're tracking engagements throughout somebody's history. And they would they will know where somebody heard about us. Conversely, when you get somebody that came in, and the attribution tool says that came from organic search, what's the thing that's missing? Well, why were you searching for us? Right, that's missing, that context is missing. And the How did you hear about us can provide that context, if their memories, right, if they if they can recall properly. But that that's the ideal state when you put those two things together, because both of them have gaps. And many of the gaps that are there for each one, are filled by the other one. So they actually play really, really, really well together. And they're not in conflict with one another, they play really, really well with one another. So it's not that you do one or the other, ideally, is particularly the more complex your businesses, right, the more complex your needs are for data, that's the ideal state is having both of them it's not an easy, it's not a it's not an either, or.

Brandi Starr  32:04

Yeah, and I think that is key. And so often decision making criteria is do I do this or that? And that, or replacing that or with an and is often the right answer? Because, you know, multiple things can coexist and can give you different insight as well. So I agree completely there. Because, yeah, I know, a lot of times, I mean, we see all the time, like it would look like organic search is like our biggest driver. But if I look at what people are searching for, they're searching Tegrity. So it's like, clearly it's, you know, that's just the vehicle that they use to get to our website, not that they actually found us that way. If you're searching our name, you, you know, you know who we are from something else. And so, you know, that question of How did you hear about us? It's like, oh, this was a referral from a client or, you know, someone recommended you in the community or, you know, all those sorts of things. So yeah, I really love that as an and and not trying to make the decision between one method or another, but blending them together. Yeah,

Drew Smith  33:17

I mean, there's there's tons of power and information in running a report that says, you know, organic search drove 25% of our deals. And from organic search, here's the context about what where they heard about us in relation to that organic search before that organic search happened. That's super powerful information. And you can't get both pieces of that puzzle without both the How did you hear about us, and the attribution tool, or whether that's, you know, marketing automation tool or an actual attribution tool or whatever. Like, you have to have both to get to that that report?

Brandi Starr  33:55

Yes, well, talking about our challenges is just the first step and nothing changes if nothing changes. And so in traditional therapy, the therapist gives the client some homework, but here at revenue rehab, we like to flip that on its head and ask you to give us some homework. So I always like our guests to take, you know, have a one thing takeaways. So if if people have, you know, what you've said has resonated with the audience, and they recognize that attribution is worth it. Where do you think they should start? What would be the first step?

Drew Smith  34:30

Yeah, so I would say that the first step should be to check your operational rigor, because if you have that operational rigor, you are ready to get started with, you know, attribution. If you don't have that operational rigor yet, then that's where you need to focus your attention. So I'm going to give two very highly actionable things that somebody can do to check their operational rigor number one, go into your CRM and run a report for leads created this year, we're almost at the end of the year. So you're gonna get a whole year's worth of leads, I don't care what happened three years ago, I care about what's happening this year. So leads created this year. And then what I want you to do is I want you to group it by the lead source. And I want you to hide every other detail, I just want to see the lead source. And here's what we're going to do, I want to know the number of individual values that you have in your lead source. And I want to know the percentage of leads created this year that don't have a lead source at all. Those two things will tell you about your operational rigor related to lead sources. If you have about if you have more than about 20 to 30 Different lead sources, you don't have the operational rigor to get started. If you have more than a quarter of your database doesn't, that you've created this year doesn't have a lead source that has a hole that you need to plug before you get started with attribution. Because you have that means you have a 25% data fidelity problem just with first touch attribution, which tells me that you probably have similar data fidelity issues further down the funnel. Now, once we've done that, the next thing I want you to do is take that exact same report, I just want you to change the grouping, get rid of the lead source entirely. And what I want you to do is just put in the whatever field you use, to tell what stage in the funnel somebody is in right now today, I want you to put that field where you have the lead source. Again, no other details other than that, and I want to know what stage, everybody that's been created this year, I want to know what stage they are in in the in the funnel. Now, a couple things to keep in mind there. Number one, if you don't have a field to do this, you don't have operational rigor to get started with attribution, because you don't know at any point in time where somebody's at in the funnel. So that's problem number two. If that field is not a true representation of the exact stage, somebody's in at the moment, you have a problem. Number three, if you have a whole bunch of people that don't have a value in that field, means we can't tell what stage they're in, they don't have a stage, you have a data rigor problem and operational rigor problem. These two things right here, these two are like canaries in the coal mine. If you if you are doing really good with these, then you're probably in a good shape to get started with attribution. If you are not doing good with these two things, that's where you need to focus is on that operational rigor right there. Get started making sure that you have consistency and operational rigor. And then you can get started with attribution. And again, that's not just multi touch attribution, I'm talking about first touch, last touch anything like that. Because if you don't know what stage somebody's in, you don't know if it was the last touch. You can't tell that. So those two things super actionable, won't take you more than 1015 minutes. And you can tell whether or not you have the indicators that if you have the right operational rigor or not.

Brandi Starr  38:32

I love that anytime a good pivot table is an action item, I think it's a win. But that is a great place to start and gives you good data to have the conversation with your Reb ops team or you know, whoever is managing your systems to really go through and address cleaning up the data, making sure that you've got that operational rigor because yeah, all of the things I mean it when ties to email marketing, and you know, even where your sales teams are engaged, all of those things rely on good data and knowing like what's the right place to run it that time. And if you don't know where people are and where they came from, you can't you know, it sort of handicaps, everyone. Absolutely,

Drew Smith  39:18

absolutely. And the one last thing that I want to talk about with with this is, there's no better time to get started than right now. I saw this amazing image on LinkedIn and I totally reshard it and repurposed it. And the image is essentially a picture of like, tree, a tree growing and then sprouting fruit. And the image says, The day you plant the seed is not the day use you get the fruit is not the day you eat the fruit, which means if you want to be able to report on attribution data, six months from now, you got to start today. Yeah, cuz you won't have it the day you start on it, you have to plant that seed and let it grow before you get the fruit. So there's no better time to get started than today.

Brandi Starr  40:12

Which is always the best action item, especially this time of year is everyone is thinking about how do we make 2024? You know, the best year ever? Or, you know, in some cases I've seen people say survive until 25. Like they're expecting a hard 24. But no, I agree with you completely. And I think that is a great starting point. Well, Drew, I have enjoyed our discussion immensely. But that's our time for today. But before we go, how can our audience stay connected with you and give us this the shameless plug for attributor? Cuz I definitely would like to hear you know what the organization does?

Drew Smith  40:52

Yeah, absolutely. You can find us our websites attributed.io. We're on LinkedIn, you can either find me on LinkedIn, true Smith, or you can find a tribute on LinkedIn as well. It's just LinkedIn at attributor. And then what we do is, we do a lot of this exact type of work. We focus our primary focus is attribution. And so what we do is we help organizations develop that operational rigor, we help basically get them ready for whatever type of attribution is right for their organization. Welcome, determine what type of attribution is right for their organization. And so we'll help you focus on what matters to you and skip the stuff that doesn't matter for you. And then ultimately, once you're actually able to do attribution, we have some services around data analysis and data reporting and things like that, where not only can we help you get make us with you're able to do attribution, will also help you do the actual work of doing the reporting the analysis, generating the insights, things of that nature. Awesome.

Brandi Starr  42:04

Well, we will make sure to link to both your LinkedIn and atributos website. So wherever you are listening or watching this podcast, make sure to click the links to connect with Drew. Drew, thank you so much for joining me.

Drew Smith  42:18

Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. Awesome,

Brandi Starr  42:21

and thanks, everyone for joining us. I hope you have enjoyed my conversation with Drew. Until next time, I'll see you later.

Outro VO  42:31

You've been listening to Reverend rehab with your host Brandi Starr. Your session is now over but the learning has just begun. join our mailing list and catch up on all our shows at revenuerehab.live. We're also on Twitter and Instagram at revenue rehab. This concludes this week's session. We'll see yo next week.