Jay Schwedelson: We are back for Do This Not That, and I'm excited 'cause I have an incredible guest here, and we're gonna be talking about attribution, why I think it's garbage, why she says it's not, and she's a big deal. So who's here? We got Laura Beussman here. Now Laura has possibly one of the wildest roles on the planet.

Jay Schwedelson: Why? She is at CallRail. And if you don't know CallRail, first of all, they have 220,000 customers. And you might say, "Oh, they do phone call stuff." No. They're all about trying to figure out if all this marketing stuff that you're doing is actually converting, the attribution. They're not just looking at the calls that are coming in.

Jay Schwedelson: They're looking at your forms, they're looking at everything. They're an incredible company helping hundreds of thousands of businesses. But Laura's got the job of being chief marketing officer and chief revenue officer. Would you like to own both pipeline and revenue? That would make me throw up. But she does it, and she has incredible experience over the last 15 years being at places like Dell and Blackbaud.

Jay Schwedelson: She is, like, one of the leaders in the go-to-market space for all these product-led growth companies. I mean, over $100 million in revenue, driving all of this stuff. It's her fault. We're gonna talk about attribution. Laura, welcome to the show.

Laura Beussman: Thanks for having me, Jay. Glad to be here.

Jay Schwedelson: All right, here it is. We're gonna jump right into it 'cause you and I are gonna, like, punch each other during the screen or however that works, but here it goes. I often go out there and I, I feel like I'm about to be told why I'm wrong, and I say attribution is garbage. We can't measure this stuff. Give up.

Jay Schwedelson: Throw in the towel. It's not possible. Are you on team attribution is garbage, or what team are you on?

Laura Beussman: Yeah, I'm gonna tell you the truth, Jay. I think things like "attribution is garbage," "attribution is dead," I think they're clickbait. I think they're clickbait to get marketers to come in and take a look and, and watch the podcast. Um, I would say at the end of the day, if you are a marketer, you are always going to have to be able to show how the marketing investments that you are given, that you are trusted with, are driving revenue for the business.

Laura Beussman: Um, if you cannot demonstrate that, you are probably not going to continue to have your job for very long, unless, you know, if you're independently wealthy, um, you're completely self-employed, and you really like to flush money down the toilet, um, in which case maybe you can ignore attribution completely.

Laura Beussman: But if you don't fit those, all three of those requirements, I would say you've got to be able to demonstrate how the, the investment that you have been given, has been trusted to you, is driving revenue for the business.

Jay Schwedelson: Okay. So let me dig into that for a minute though, because here's what I don't understand why I say it's garbage. So they say that only 5% of your audience is really in market at any one time, right? So you're out there putting out thought leadership on social media, on podcasts, whatever, and then you're also running, you know, a Google search ad or whatever.

Jay Schwedelson: And then the person's finally in market after a year, they click on that search ad, they then fill out the form, and then the Google search ad gets, "Oh, they came in because of the search ad." This last touch attribution, can we at least agree that that is garbage?

Laura Beussman: If you are operating on the assumption that you have a perfect last touch attribution model, I would agree that is garbage. I think there's two things that you can do that are on the extreme ends, and both of them are wrong, which is to say, "Okay, I have a beautiful model, and it spits out to me a beautiful chart, and it says that all I need to spend money on is paid search.

Laura Beussman: Branded paid search is all I'm gonna spend money on from here on out." And you're gonna take that to your CFO every month. If you're doing that, you're gonna have a problem because you're not doing anything to generate awareness and exposure prior to that last touch. Why are they having that last touch in the first place?

Laura Beussman: But the answer to that is not to throw attribution out the window and do nothing. You can do, uh, oversimplify it one way or oversimplify it the other, and neither one of those things is gonna get you to the right place. You've got to be smart as a marketer. You've got to be curious as a marketer. You've got to look at other signals.

Laura Beussman: Um, and there are a lot of other signals out there that you can pull in to be smarter and more nuanced about what is actually working, both from last touch, bottom of the funnel, to at the top of the funnel, what's driving the last touch.

Jay Schwedelson: signals. How... Like, what should we be looking for besides for just that last touch?

Laura Beussman: Yeah. So there's a few things that I'll flag. Um, for one thing, conversational AI has come a really long way. So if you are lucky enough to be at a call-based business where you are actually having conversations with your leads, and not everyone falls into that bucket, but if you do fall into that bucket where you are having conversations with those leads, conversational AI can pick up also what they're saying.

Laura Beussman: So perhaps they did a search and they clicked on an ad, and then they gave you a call, and CallRail's gonna help you understand, you know, what keyword they searched to make that call in the first place. But perhaps the reason they did that search is because they were talking to their neighbor, and their neighbor gave them a recommendation about who they use for their pest control or, or whatever the business is.

Laura Beussman: Conversational AI can pick that up. So we can identify, yes, they did this search for this keyword, and also, yes, they referenced on the call what drove them to make the search in the first place. So conversational AI really helps give you a more complete picture with things like what we call self-reported attribution.

Laura Beussman: CallRail actually has the patent for self-reported

Jay Schwedelson: So wait, what, what, what does that mean? What is self-reported attribution?

Laura Beussman: yeah. So what does the lead report cause them to contact the business? And it may not align with a last touch model. It's gonna give you a more holistic view, a more complete view, um, of what actually drove the call in the first place

Jay Schwedelson: Okay, so are we saying that, uh, forever, up until kinda AI, uh, you would go somewhere and they would have the dropdown, "How did you hear about us?" You know, a friend, social media, Facebook, whatever. And I don't even know if people even use that data a lot, but that is... Is that going by the wayside a little bit because of AI?

Laura Beussman: Yes. I mean, if you can get it directly from the conversation. One, with the drop-downs, people often will just select the thing at the top, which can skew the data and make it less helpful. Um, so if you can pick it up in the conversation, and conversational AI has come so far that they don't have to answer-- you don't have to ask them the question and have them answer it.

Laura Beussman: It can pick up on the signals from the conversation. It can pick up from the context of the conversation.

Jay Schwedelson: Like, okay, now I'm just curious about this. Totally unrelated. Now I'm just curious about it, 'cause what you all do at CallRail is so cool. Like, can you pick up on, like, tone? Like, if the person's, like, upbeat or, I don't know. Is that the weirdest question you've ever been asked? Is that something that, like, you- AI can actually pick up on, and then you could have that somehow go into your, your marketing or whatever?

Laura Beussman: AI can do so much now. Um, it is really cool. I will say, like, when I first started at CallRail five years ago, it was transcribing the call. Um, you know, pretty basic. Now you've got a transcription, you can go search the transcription and try to identify information. Now, we can pick up so much more data and provide that directly back to the business and in a prescriptive way.

Laura Beussman: So yes, for sure, um, the summary of the call, the sentiment of the call, um, did that call go well? And you can tie that back to what drove them to make the call. So are there channels that perhaps you're missetting expectation? Like it's driving calls, but the calls aren't going well. You can connect that together so you can understand what is the sentiment of the call.

Laura Beussman: It also goes further, though, um, and now we're getting a little bit away from attribution, but since you tangented it a little bit, I'll continue along the tangent, which it will also give you next steps from the call. It will generate a follow-up response to the call. It will coach you on how you should have handled the call better.

Laura Beussman: Um, so there's a lot that conversational AI can do now.

Jay Schwedelson: That's amazing. I, uh, AI's my best friend. It always tells me I'm doing great things, so I love AI. Uh, I, I, I wanna know something about... Let's, now I'm going all over the place, but it doesn't matter. You're chief revenue officer and chief marketing officer. Okay, you're like a meme. Like, you're like the two sides of the meme in that, like, you got the salesperson complaining about leads to the marketing person or whatever, but you're both those people.

Jay Schwedelson: Do you, like, have to split yourself? Do you ever get in arguments with yourself? How do you wear... Now I'm just curious, like, how do you wear both hats effectively?

Laura Beussman: So I love it. I think it is actually, like, the perfect combination. Now look, I have a VP of sales and a VP of marketing, and both of those people happen to be fantastic at their jobs. So it's not like I'm really doing these things 100% by myself here. But being in the role that I'm in, I get to follow that lead all the way through.

Laura Beussman: There is no going and blaming somebody else. Like, I'm accountable for that lead all the way through. And I love that because as a marketer, 'cause I grew up in marketing, my career grew up in marketing, um, and taking on the sales side is really less than a year old for me. Um, but as a marketer, I was always very focused on the revenue.

Laura Beussman: I was always very focused on the customers. I never was a marketer that measured myself on things like, look, I, I do care about impressions, I do care about leads, but only if they convert. They're signals to help me see that the marketing strategies are working top of funnel and then driving things through the funnel.

Laura Beussman: But at the end of the day, if you're not driving more customers and more revenue, actual dollars to the business, then you're not getting your job done. You're wasting your time. And so having accountability all the way through and actually having the levers at my disposal to make sure that we are making that happen all the way through the journey, it's a lot of fun for me.

Jay Schwedelson: know, I, and I think that that's actually the future for marketing professionals in general, is having more of an involvement on, on the revenue side. You know, especially as some of our marketing tasks kinda get taken by AI, you know, for marketers to really have a career, to, to wear that dual hat, I think is, it's, it's great.

Jay Schwedelson: I think it's a model that a lot of companies should follow. So now I'm, I'm curious now from you wearing your marketing hat, your chief marketing officer hat, um, and you trying to drive performance for CallRail as a marketer, right? Uh, you, you have attribution challenges, I would imagine, yourself, right?

Jay Schwedelson: Like, like, how does, h- what do you kind of do to try to attribute, you know, your sales and your growth? What are things that, challenges that you're trying to overcome for your own marketing?

Laura Beussman: absolutely. Look, I have the same kinds of challenges that all the other marketers have out there, which is that, look, your attribution model is going to overweight the bottom of the funnel, and if you are only looking at your pure clean attribution model, you might overinvest in things like branded paid search.

Laura Beussman: We are also trying to drive growth at the top of the funnel. We're trying to get the CallRail brand out there in more ways. We're trying to introduce ourselves to more potential customers so that we can help solve more problems for those businesses. Um, we're also trying to shape how people think about CallRail.

Laura Beussman: You made the point at the beginning of the call, moving beyond calls, um, into AI, just tracking into the lead engagement elements, actually making sure that you're driving new customers that convert and getting those capabilities visible to everybody out there.

Jay Schwedelson: you give any, do you give any, uh, uh... Like it used to be if you rewind four or five years ago, we'd all have our marketing automation platforms, and we would create all these scores. Oh, somebody opened an email, they get the, you know, they get a le- you know, a B. They, they clicked on email, they get an A. I don't know, whatever, all this stuff, and then they...

Jay Schwedelson: High scores would get over to the BDRs, whatever. So when you're kind of looking at these really, I don't know, some of them are vanity metrics, maybe they're not, I don't know. When you're building out what is a lead for your, for your organization, are you, are you-- do you still look at any of those signals, or are those kinda like that was yesterday type stuff?

Laura Beussman: We absolutely do, but we look at them all together. So for us, we define a lead as a trial. So CallRail has a free trial. You can come in and check out CallRail at any time that you want. And so at the end of the day, the marketing team is trying to drive people into the product. So we take a step back and we look at it a couple different places.

Laura Beussman: As we're, um, increasing investment, if we're spending in a specific area, we're gonna be looking at are we driving impressions up? Now, if those impressions don't convert to trials, then something's wrong, something's broken. Impressions for the sake of impressions is worthless. You can't go to the store and buy a gallon of milk with an impression.

Laura Beussman: You need money. Um, but if you're taking that investment and your impressions are growing and your trials are growing and your customers are growing, because at the end of the day, marketing can't stop at the lead either. If they're driving leads and those leads aren't converting, yes, you can say sales has a problem.

Laura Beussman: Um, you can, you can say sales needs to fix that. But if you're not willing to like roll up your sleeves and get in there and dig in there and try to figure out what's actually going on, are there certain channels, um, that aren't converting from lead to customer? Are there certain investments that we're making that are bringing in lower quality leads?

Laura Beussman: And being willing to workshop that with sales and dig in there with sales to figure out how to get the right leads over to sales, um, then you're doing it wrong. So at the end of the day, you should see the impressions grow, you should see the leads trials grow, and you should see the customers grow and the revenue grow associated with it.

Laura Beussman: If you're just bringing in smaller customers, then you've got a problem as well. But you have to look at them side by side by side, um, so that you can make sure that they're all connecting through together.

Jay Schwedelson: I think it's really important for people to hear that impressions matter. I mean, impressions, if you only have those, then it doesn't matter. But impressions do matter. They are, they are still a very relevant signal. So I'm curious about something else. Let's talk about AI, right? Um, everybody's, "Oh no, website traffic is down because everyone's just staying on, you know, Google's, uh, AI overviews," and this, that, whatever.

Jay Schwedelson: Are you being very intentional in your efforts to have your organization show up in AI results? And are you then track, trying to track attribution from the different LLMs that people are going to?

Laura Beussman: Yes. Yeah. This is a super interesting topic, both from the sense of like what we're providing to our customers and then how we're thinking about it internally, um, as a marketing team as well. And what we're seeing right now across our customers and for ourselves is leads from LLMs are still pretty small.

Laura Beussman: They're growing and they're growing really rapidly. We actually published a report earlier this year that, um, folks can check out that go through some of the data on like what are the LLMs that are really driving the traffic, um, and what are the changes and trends over time. Um, so we're seeing rapid growth, um, but it's still, it's still relatively small.

Laura Beussman: We still see people Doing discovery, um, and then still coming back to it later. I do think that behavior is gonna change every single day. Um, so there is no, like, one snapshot of this is how you do it. Uh, I think it's gonna continue to evolve. You've got to test. It's a little black boxy right now. Um, if you're in marketing and you're not curious, then you're probably in the wrong profession.

Laura Beussman: Like, you gotta get curious about that black box and try to uncover what is getting you to show up in the ways that you wanna show up, and then following through what of your leads are actually coming from there. That's right.

Jay Schwedelson: It is really, I mean, it feels like the days of early search. It is super annoying to like this cat and mouse game to try to figure out how you do show up, and it's super interesting to me that you're not really seeing a lot of the, the traffic, if you will, the conversions coming from the LLMs yet. But yet I think it's like this whole discovery phase, which obviously factors in.

Laura Beussman: Mm-hmm.

Jay Schwedelson: like it doesn't stop. It's like every day is something new, but that's why companies like CallRail are around, right? That makes a lot of sense. So, um, I'm curious about something else, but now we're going completely bonkers here. Uh, I've seen you at lots of different events and stuff. You're, you're out there doing all these crazy events.

Jay Schwedelson: So when you're at events, are you like... 'Cause I just went to one and it was time for dinner, and I got invited to a dinner, and I lied to everybody and I said I had plans, 'cause I really just wanted to hide in my room and order room service. Are you the type of person when you go to like industry events, you're like, "Oh yeah, I'm ready to go.

Jay Schwedelson: Invite me to dinner," or are you a hide-in-your-room person like me?

Laura Beussman: great question, Jay. Um, I would say that I'm probably by nature more a hide-in-your-room person, but, um, if I'm there representing CallRail, I gotta push myself to go be a I'm-gonna-go-to-the-party kind of person. Um, so to push yourself out of your comfort zone sometimes.

Jay Schwedelson: All right. So if I invite you out to dinner and you say, "No, I'm doing something else," I'll, I'll take it that you're probably lying, and I'll be okay with it. I'll be okay with

Laura Beussman: I like you, Jay, so I would go. I would go.

Jay Schwedelson: It'd be, it'd be awkward right now like, "Yes, I'm telling you I don't wanna go and I'm lying to you." That would be super awkward right now.

Jay Schwedelson: Um, well that's amazing. Listen, everybody, a couple things. First of all, you need to go and connect with Laura, uh, on LinkedIn. We're gonna put her full name in the show notes. I'm going to spell Beussman, which I probably just butchered, but it is B-E-U-S-S-M-A-N. Okay? We're gonna put it in the show notes, but also CallRail's awesome, and for the listeners of this show, you can go to callrail.com/dothis and there is a free trial there.

Jay Schwedelson: callrail.com/dothis. CallRail's a great company, great culture, great people. Laura's great. Uh, appreciate you being here.

Laura Beussman: having me, Jay.