Why a bigger stack hasn’t fixed your reporting
For years the promise was simple: consolidate onto one CRM, plug in the right tools, add AI, and fragmented reporting would disappear. It hasn’t. As Adrianne told host Taryn Breetzke, it’s a change management problem, not a technology one.
As a business changes its strategy, services and tools, the data model inside its CRM rarely changes with it. Fields that mattered two years ago stop being collected, new ones appear, and nobody checks whether the model still supports the reporting you’ll need.
Adding more tech makes this worse. Data arrives from more places but doesn’t line up, so when you try to report on an 18 to 24 month journey, you’re working with gaps.
Marketing isn’t a gumball machine
A VP of marketing we’ve worked with described the board’s expectation well: put money into the gumball machine and wins come out the other side. Unfortunately B2B doesn’t work like that, which is why ROI is so hard to explain.
A single deal might involve six or seven campaigns over two years. One person who knows you pushes the conversation forward, while their team researches in the background, downloading content and showing intent at different stages. Most of that activity has stayed hidden.
What mapping the B2B buyer journey revealed
Before HaloIQ existed, clients asked us to do this by hand. They’d choose five or ten accounts, and we’d plot every sales and marketing interaction across each opportunity in what we called fishbone diagrams. Internally, the same exercise could take someone a month.
The results were an eye-opener. Clients could finally see when marketing handed over to sales, which contacts played which role, and how larger businesses, smaller businesses and different industries behaved differently.
Manual mapping was slow and costly, so we set a North Star: automate it for every account in the CRM at once. HaloIQ now ingests CRM data, normalises and standardises it into a consistent schema, and shows every interaction for any account, across multiple opportunities and after the sale.
Why attribution breaks down
Attribution assumes consistent data, and most businesses don’t have it. That’s why around half of CMOs say they don’t trust their attribution model, either because it’s too simple or because it misses what they think matters.
Once you can see real account activity, you can build attribution around it. Take a £1m campaign. You can look at accounts where it was the last touch before conversion, accounts where it was the very first touch, and accounts that engaged with it mid-cycle while still researching.
Bring those groups together and you can see how much revenue that campaign genuinely influenced across the B2B buyer journey. It’s usually a very different story from a last-touch report.
Show the board impact, not lead counts
Boards often ask for lead numbers and campaign counts, but those figures don’t support the conversations they actually want to have about growth. Sometimes marketing needs to lead with what matters instead: attribution and impact.
It changes the relationship with sales, too. When both teams can see the same journey, attribution stops being a fight over credit and becomes something sales and marketing achieve together.
Tighter budgets are sending teams back to foundations
We’ve seen the share of CMOs naming foundational processes as a core focus jump from around 11% to 31%. A lot can be done here with minimal budget.
Clients are also adding KPIs to their contracts with tech suppliers. They want vendors to act as partners with skin in the game, accountable for the goals they promised to help reach over the next 12 to 24 months.
Tech audits are evolving as well. Marketing buys one events tool for analytics and another for registration, IT buys a third, and an acquisition adds two more. Nobody wants to give theirs up.
A governance framework for selecting tech, informed by interviews with each user group, cuts through that. Sometimes the answer is none of the five tools you have, but a sixth that does everything you need.
Why AI won’t fix what your foundations haven’t
There’s plenty of fear of missing out around AI, but Adrianne’s view is that it’s too early to remove tech on the assumption AI has it covered. Many businesses still have no framework for how marketing should use it.
Too often the approach runs backwards: bring in AI and ask it to find problems. Start instead with where things are leaking or inefficient, then choose the AI that fixes those. Many of the agents being built today are solving automation problems, not AI ones.
Get the foundations right and AI earns its place. Taking even 20% of the routine work off someone’s day gives them room to think about better reporting, sharper insight and better service.
The dark funnel is getting darker
Buyers increasingly research in Perplexity, Claude, Gemini or Copilot before they reach your website. By the time they make first contact, they’re often at the bottom of the funnel, and you can’t see what shaped their view of you.
That calls for new measures. Alongside first touch and keyword intent, track how AI platforms reference and position your brand, and which natural-language questions surface you.
How to show up in AI answers
Most websites are shop windows, with businesses talking about themselves. Buyers asking AI want answers to specific questions, so content needs rebuilding around the problems your ICP is discussing internally.
Comparisons are harder to control. AI draws on review platforms such as G2 to weigh up similar providers, so reviews and recommendations matter more than ever.
People matter too. Employees sharing wins and client stories, and respected industry voices, give buyers something generic AI content can’t: a real opinion from someone they trust.
The one belief to let go of
When asked what B2B marketing leaders should change in the next 12 months, Adrianne’s answer was clear. Stop treating attribution and tech as the thing that will save you, and put governance and foundations first.
Build frameworks flexible enough to review every six months, especially after an acquisition or a change in services. The right attribution model and the right tech follow from that work, and so does a clear view of the B2B buyer journey.
You can hear the full conversation on Ep.94 of the Enterprise Thought Leadership podcast. For more on what CMOs are telling us, read our Revenue Impact Report.
