B2B Revenue Attribution | Cofounder at Dreamdata.io

I believe great marketing happens where data, intuition, and teamwork meet. Data shows what’s working. Intuition helps you take bold steps. And teamwork keeps it all together. Without it, everything falls apart.

Over the years, I’ve helped scale businesses and build marketing teams at companies like Upwork and Airtame - and now Dreamdata. 

Along the way (I think) I've learned a thing or two: 

Growth isn’t just about numbers. It’s about making smart decisions and balancing data with creativity. And no team succeeds unless the people on it are thriving.

Today, as co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Dreamdata, I'm passionate about helping B2B companies figure out what’s working and do more of it.

Why?

Because B2B customer journeys are... Complicated. They’re long, complex, and practically impossible to track without the right tools. 

Luckily, Dreamdata fixes this. In fact, I can proudly say the Dreamdata has become the tool I always needed in past B2B marketing roles. But we're not done yet.

We give you a clear view of your go-to-market efforts. You can see every touchpoint, prove ROI, and know what drives revenue. 

However that's not all. We also help you act on it. Build audiences, automate campaigns, identify buying signals with AI and focus your efforts on what works.

Great decisions aren’t about guesswork. They’re about knowing what works and having the confidence to act. 

That’s what Dreamdata helps you do. 

And it’s what I’ve spent my career helping marketers figure out.

Steffen Hedebrandt

Yesterday, I joined Dreamdata’s Sales Leadership Kickoff.

As a B2B marketing leader, participating in meetings like this isn’t a “nice to have.” 

It’s essential!

If you want marketing to have real commercial impact, you need a deep understanding of how sales actually operates - not just how we think it operates from the outside.

You need to know what’s on the minds of salespeople day to day.

You need to understand where deals stall, accelerate, or die as they move from stage to stage.

You need to know the real conversion rates across the sales funnel - not just marketings top-of-funnel input to it.

And you need clarity on how much demand sales actually needs to hit their targets, not how much demand sounds good in a planning deck.

Most importantly, you need to plan demand ahead of the curve. 

Sales targets don’t start in the quarter they’re due. 

They start months earlier.

Vice verse, one of the most valuable parts of that I could take back to the marketing team from session was discussing what sales can do to make marketing more effective.

Sales teams sit on an enormous amount of insight. 

In their 1:1 conversations with prospects, the same questions, objections, hesitations, and misconceptions come up again and again. 

When sales shares these patterns with marketing, we can turn 1-to-1 conversations into 1-to-many solutions: clearer positioning, better messaging, more relevant content, stronger enablement, and campaigns that actually address reality.

And there’s a hard truth B2B marketers sometimes forget:

There is no such thing as marketing ROI in B2B if sales doesn’t win deals.

Pipeline creation alone is not success. Activity alone is not impact. 

Marketing only creates value when it helps sales close.

How do you ensure a close collaboration between marketing and sales in your company?

That’s why tight collaboration between sales and marketing isn’t a slogan or an operating model, it’s the work itself.

AI-Driven Activation & Attribution for B2Bs | Cofounder at Dreamdata.io

1 in 3 deals we won last year were influenced by our LinkedIn Lives. 

Just because I have not seen anyone else sharing how their LinkedIn Live show performs - Here's the breakdown of Dreamdata's lives in 2025.

The highlights I'm sharing in the slides include:

᭼ Revenue Impact

᭼ Average and median number of attendees per session.

᭼ Diversity split for guests

᭼ Top Episodes & Guests

We maximize every session by turning it into: 

✂️ Video snippets for social. 
✍️ In-depth blog posts. 
📧 Weekly newsletters. 
🎙️ Episodes for the "Attributed" podcast.

Strong enough hook for you? 😄

Go browse the deck below👇

Dreamdata LinkedIn Live

Today I was invited by Patrick Bates to join his new show for marketing leaders to talk about…

You guessed it: marketing and leadership.

There’s a lot to unpack in that intersection, but here are three reflections I shared.

1) Self-awareness

Leadership has to start with yourself. Authenticity isn’t a buzzword - it’s the foundation. 

You can’t lead by wearing borrowed feathers. 

You need to know who you are and what you stand for, and then act from that place. 

People feel it when there’s alignment between who you are on and off the stage.

2) Sometimes you have to be the bad cop

Once you’re clear on your values and what “good” looks like in the organisation, you also have to defend it. 

That means occasionally being the uncomfortable voice that calls out behaviour that doesn’t belong. 

Conflict, discussion, and tension aren’t failures of leadership - they’re part of it. 

You lead because some behaviours are better than others, and someone has to draw that line.

3) Marketing is one long string of experiments
 
Thomas Edison said he found 10,000 ways the light bulb didn’t work before he found one that did. 

Marketing is no different. 

Every initiative is an experiment. 

Pre-qualify your ideas, pick the best candidates, start scrappy, and only scale with serious budgets once you’ve earned some confidence that it works.

That’s a snapshot of what I shared with Patrick today. I’m sure he’ll make plenty of noise when the episode goes live.

Stay tuned 🎧

- and feel free to share your own thoughts on marketing and leadership.

#marketing

B2B Marketing activities where you can control the size of the companies in the demand you create?

If you work in B2B, you’ve probably heard this statement before:

“We need to go upmarket” or “We need to go enterprise.”

Okay. Yes. Great.

So why don’t we? 😄

Actually doing this is easier said than done.

Once you start analyzing things, you’ll realize there aren’t many marketing activities that give you tight control over the size of the companies you attract.

(See my grouping below. Did I miss any marketing activities that should be added, mapped differently, or moved around?)

As a B2B marketer, this is something you need to be aware of.

Doing what you’ve always done and expecting different outcomes? 

Nope, that’s not going to work.

You need to shift most of your marketing time and budget into marketing activities where you can control the company size you attract.

Again, this might seem obvious.

But what about your team’s mindset and skill set?

Does your team primarily excel at activities where you don’t have that level of control?

And what about ROI?

You might be running activities that deliver a decent return. Should you stop doing them if you are not in control?
 
Well... Depending on company size, controlling these channels can become difficult, expensive, and slow.

How do you manage your B2B marketing mix to stay in control of the size of companies that you attract?

#b2bmarketing #abm

Positioning is probably the only marketing task that actually makes every other marketing task easier.

For many B2B marketers, "positioning" feels like a massive, once-in-a-career overhaul. 

But if you aren’t reviewing your positioning at least once a year, you’re likely marketing a product that no longer exists to a market that has already moved on.

The First Time is the Hardest

Let’s be honest: the first time you do formal positioning work, it’s a grind. It’s new, it’s uncomfortable, and because you haven’t seen the results yet, it’s hard to justify the effort.

But here is the truth: after that first heavy lift, everything else in marketing gets easier. 

When your company is truly aligned on who you serve and why you win, every ad, blog post, and sales deck practically writes itself because the foundation is finally solid.

Why an Annual Review?

Positioning isn't static. It must evolve alongside product updates, changing market expectations, and competitive shifts. 

An annual review ensures you don’t change things for the sake of "newness," but only when the evidence clearly shows your current stance no longer explains why you win.

How to Run a High-Impact Review

A successful review doesn't happen in a vacuum, it requires a cross-functional "Core Team" that owns the outcome, led by the business leader.

1. Gather Fresh Market Evidence Don't rely on gut feelings. Look at the last 6 months of data across the funnel:

Sales: Why did your top 10 "won" deals actually buy? 
Customer Success: Which accounts had the highest upsell?
Product: Which features are actually used by your most loyal customers? 
Marketing: Which pages are driving the highest qualified pipeline? 

2. Audit Your "Best-Fit" Customer Identify who bought the fastest and became "raving fans" in the last year. 

If this list looks different than it did 12 months ago, your positioning needs to shift to match.

3. Stress-Test Your Differentiation Ask the hard questions:
If we didn’t exist, what would our best customers do instead? 

Are our "unique" attributes still actually unique, or has the competition caught up? 

Does our current market category still help customers understand our value quickly? 

The 4-Week Sprint

You don’t need six months to do this. We run this as a 4-week sprint:

Week 1: Setup and evidence gathering.
Week 2: Building a shared understanding of the evidence.
Week 3: Locking in the best-fit customer and unique attributes.
Week 4: Finalizing the market category and making the big decisions.

The Bottom Line

Once the positioning is locked, the bringing it to life awaits. 

You update the homepage, the sales decks, and the ads. 

But this time, you do it with the confidence that the entire leadership team is standing right behind you.

At Dreamdata we're blessed that Andrea is leading this work for us 🙌🏻

How are you doing positioning work at your company?

#b2bmarketing

Attribution Isn’t bad. You’re Just Using It Wrong. 🏀

Every few weeks, another marketer declares attribution “useless.” 

It’s the LinkedIn version of Groundhog Day. Guaranteed engagement bait. 

And look, some of their critiques do make sense… if you only take the strawman version:

- The “Look, Ma, I’m Valuable!” Report – treating attribution like a vanity scoreboard instead of a decision-making tool.
- Channel Fight Club – as if LinkedIn and Google are rivals in a boxing ring, when in reality they’re bandmates in a jazz ensemble.
- The 30-Day Memory Loss Model – pretending B2B buyers make million-dollar decisions in a neat 30-day cycle.
- One Lead to Rule Them All – ignoring the 6–10 other people actually signing the contract.
- MQLs Gone Wild – chasing cheap leads that look pretty on paper but vanish in the pipeline.

Funny? Sure. 

True? Only partly. 

Conveniently oversimplified? Definitely.

Here’s the problem: 

This “attribution is useless” rant gives marketers a free pass to avoid accountability. 

A path where you don’t need to explain what you did, why you did it, or what impact it had.

Yes, marketing is probabilistic. (Thanks for the reminder, Liam)

Action A + B won’t always equal C. But that doesn’t mean we stop measuring.

At Dreamdata, our goal isn’t to make attribution linear or perfect. Our job is to make all your customer data available, unified, and useful.

Think of it this way:

Instead of journeys hidden in silos (CRM, ad platforms, your website, review tools), we bring them into one place.

Every account. Every user. Every touchpoint.

No, we won’t capture everything. But it’s a hell of a lot more illuminating than siloed guesswork.

And here’s what Dreamdata customers actually do with this unified view — every single week:

- Pull up complete customer journeys to have objective conversations with sales about what drives wins.
- See which campaigns are consistently creating ICP demo calls.
- Study what content is consumed by accounts that actually close.
- Identify which Google keywords are profitable — and which are wasting budget.
- Send offline data back to ad platforms to train smarter algorithms.
- Validate whether ABM activities are actually reaching the right accounts.

That’s not “bragging rights.” That’s actionable clarity.

Should you follow attribution blindly? No.

That’s the whole point.

Attribution is directional, probabilistic guidance. 

When combined with gut feel and team context, it’s one of the most powerful growth tools B2B marketers have.

The rants might get the engagement.

But the insights? They get the revenue. 💰

#b2bmarketing

Your organic LinkedIn posts are driving revenue.
You just can’t see it.

Struggling to show the impact of your company’s organic LinkedIn program?

Here’s an overlooked but very impactful trick many B2B teams miss:

👉 Add UTMs to the links pointing to your website from your social profiles.

This lets you accurately measure:

Lead source – see which posts drive MQLs and SQLs

Pipeline contribution – connect organic activity directly to revenue

Content performance – understand what actually resonates

Don’t let your organic work live in the “nice but unproven” bucket.

Add UTMs to your social profiles and start showing real ROI.

#B2BMarketing #LinkedInMarketing #socialselling

What is the purpose of your Marketing team?

Too often, "Marketing" becomes a catch-all department for anything that isn't direct sales. 

That's a shame - and it is going to make the marketing team both inefficient and stressed - if there's no clear definition of their purpose within your company.

Here are the three pillars we use to define our marketing purpose at Dreamdata and why they matter for B2B growth:

1. Ensuring the Sales team never goes hungry Marketing’s first job is to build a reliable "demand engine." 

We don't just look at vanity metrics or top-of-funnel leads; we focus on high-intent actions like Inbound Demo Calls and Free Trials.

Why? 

A sales team is an expensive resource. Their time should be spent closing, not hunting. By measuring success through the lens of Sales Pipeline, we ensure Marketing is directly aligned with the company’s bottom line.

2. Creating genuine product excitement Demand is temporary, but excitement is a moat. 

We’ve moved beyond standard brand awareness to focus on "Product Love." 

We track this through customer reviews, social shout-outs, and success stories captured in Gong recordings.

Why?

In a crowded MarTech market, features are easily copied. Community sentiment and social proof are not. 

When the market is genuinely excited about your product, your cost per acquisition (CAC) drops because your customers start doing the selling for you.

3. Maximizing reach random broad reach is a waste of budget. Our goal is to be stay top of mind among the people who can actually buy from us. 

That's why we measure this specifically by following "Qualified accounts reached per quarter."

The Why? 

B2B buying committees are getting larger. It’s no longer enough to reach one person; you need to surround the entire account. 

By focusing on qualified reach, we ensure our budget is spent influencing the specific companies that fit our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

When Marketing has a clear purpose, it stops being a "cost center" and starts being a "growth engine." 

It’s about more than just filling a funnel, it’s about building a brand that the right people actually care about.

What's the purpose of Marketing at your company?

A Dreamdata song?

Yes, a Dreamdata song.

Have a great Friday!

Customer marketing in B2B SaaS is one of those topics everyone agrees is important…

…but very few companies do intentionally.

We spend a lot of time and money on demand gen:
 • getting new logos
 • filling pipeline
 • feeding sales

The more customers, the more important customer marketing should become, right?

But after the deal is closed, things often get fuzzy.

That’s where customer marketing should step in.

To me, customer marketing is about:

 – helping customers get value faster
 – increasing adoption and stickiness
 – reducing churn risk ahead of renewals
 – enabling expansion in a way that actually helps the customer
 – and turning happy customers into proof, stories, and advocates

In other words:

Protecting and compounding revenue, not just creating it.

I also feel this is an area where marketing, CS, product, and sales often have unclear ownership - and where many B2B teams (including us) could learn a lot.

So I’m thinking about hosting a LinkedIn Live where I mostly show up curious and ready to learn.

If you’re:

 • running customer marketing in a B2B SaaS
 • deeply embedded with CS / product / revenue teams
 • opinionated about what works (and what doesn’t)
 • practical, not fluffy

…who should I invite to come educate me and our audience on customer marketing done right?

Drop names (or yourself 👀) in the comments.

Min gode ven Bo og hans partner Anders har en podcast henvendt til alle dem som driver SaaS-virksomheder.

Jeg lytter selv til den ugentligt - og derfor var jeg rigtig glad da de spurgte om jeg havde lyst til at være med i SaaS Købmænd.

Vi snakker om Dreamdata's Serie B runde, hvordan man rejser sådan en runde og om den lange - ikke så "over night" - vej derhen:

- At rejse penge tager lang tid og kræver mere end man tror.

- Venturekapital betyder høj risiko og et konstant pres for at vokse hurtigt.

- Det hjælper virkelig at have en klar plan for, hvad pengene skal bruges til.

- Investorer går meget op i, om forretningen kan gentages og skaleres.

- Det er ikke helt nemt pludselig at sidde med ansvar for mange penge.

- Man skal være forberedt på at tale med rigtig mange investorer - og høre nej mange gange.

- Hvis du ikke selv tror på det, gør investorerne det heller ikke.

- Vækst kræver, at man investerer i mennesker og giver dem ordentlige rammer.

- Det er hele tiden en balance mellem at være effektiv og at trykke på speederen.

- Og ja man skal turde tage nogle chancer, hvis man vil have det til at lykkes.

Hvis lyder spændende, så giv episoden et lyt. Link er nedenfor.

Hvis du er i gang med at ansætte folk til din marketingafdeling - eller du vil vide hvordan du lander dit næste job...

Så er her en stor anbefaling af Halfdan og Kristian's episode i Marketingpod.dk om emnet: 

Hvordan ansætter du de rigtige til dit marketing team?

De kommer blandt andet ind på_
• Hvordan du udvælger de rigtige personer
• Attitude vs. erfaring
• Senior eller junior
• IQ vs. EQ
• Drive og motivation
• Bias i ansættelser
• Hvor meget onboarding er nok
• Hvornår du skal stoppe samarbejdet

Hvad er dine bedste tips til at ansætte marketingfolk?

Find linket til episoden nedenfor.

We’ve started doing a simple monthly ritual on our marketing team:
A 1-hour “AI in Marketing” session.

Nothing fancy. No big strategy decks.

Just people showing each other what they’re actually doing with AI: 
What worked, what didn’t, and where it saved (or wasted) time.

The rule that matters most:
Everyone does a live demo.

One slide is fine.

But then you actually click the buttons, show where the feature lives, what the input looks like, and what comes out the other side.

That’s what makes AI feel tangible instead of abstract.

Some of the things people demoed this time:

Enriching accounts and contacts using HubSpot Breeze

Creating simple video cases with Google Vids

Letting OpusClip do the heavy lifting on video snippet creation

Analyzing customer calls with NotebookLM

And yes… using Nano Banana to bring my son’s Pokémon figure to life digitally 😄

None of this is groundbreaking on its own.

That’s kind of the point.

The real value unlock is that someone else on the team might be sitting with the perfect use case --> they just haven’t seen how simple it can be when it’s demoed live.

AI adoption doesn’t happen because of big vision statements.

It happens when a teammate says:

“Aha. That button. I can use that tomorrow.”

If you’re a marketing leader (or just someone curious):

I’d strongly recommend a recurring, low-pressure session like this.

Show, don’t tell.
Demo, don’t explain.
Small wins compound fast.

How are you getting your company to embrace the powers of AI?

Andrew (Drew) Smith

CEO Attributa | Helping organizations prove the value of marketing through attribution

Founder/CEO

Save the date!!

We'll be hosting a webinar in partnership with Marketing Ops Community on Wednesday, Feb. 4th at 11am PT/2pm ET. The topic is...

"How to figure out if your company needs multi-touch attribution or not"

I'll be speaking with someone who is asking that question in their org right now... and walking them through the various decision points that an organization should work through to determine if multi-touch attribution is right for them or not.

So... if you're wondering this yourself, or just want to see how we go through that process, check it out!!

More information to come, including the registration link.

CEO Attributa | Helping organizations optimize marketing performance through measurement and operations

Should your organization actually be using multi-touch attribution?

Join me and Andrew Dimmick as we talk through real-life reporting needs and break down the framework for deciding how much value your org would get from multi-touch attribution, and if it's right for your org.

You'll walk away with...

☑️ Critical considerations before committing
☑️ Key decision points
☑️ How to apply it in your org

Date: February 4
Time: 11am PT | 2pm ET

Registration Link:

Open article: Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Does your Organization Need Multi-Touch Attribution?. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. by us02web.zoom.us

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Does your Organization Need Multi-Touch Attribution?. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

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The Battle

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Andrew (Drew) Smith

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Engagements

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Steffen Hedebrandt's LinkedIn Performance

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