Part 2: Marketing Contribution and the Maturity Curve: What You Should Expect
Read Part 1 of this blog series to learn about the key differences between marketing attribution and contribution
As your marketing organization matures, you should expect marketing contribution to increase over time. This growth is a natural result of improvements across three key areas: systems, people, and processes. Let’s break these down.
1. Systems: The Technological Backbone
In the early stages of a marketing organization’s evolution, marketing efforts are often disconnected, with teams relying on spreadsheets, manual data entry, and disparate systems that don’t speak to each other. This makes tracking performance and understanding marketing’s impact on the business difficult.
As the organization matures, investments in marketing automation, CRM systems, and data analytics tools help integrate marketing efforts with sales and customer success. These systems allow marketing teams to measure marketing contribution more accurately by providing centralized, real-time access to data that ties marketing activities to revenue outcomes.
Increased technology sophistication allows for better data collection and the ability to refine marketing strategies based on the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). As the systems evolve, marketing teams can move from siloed reports to unified dashboards that track contribution over time, enabling marketing leaders to show their impact in a reliable and repeatable way.
2. People: Building Expertise Across Teams
In the early days of a marketing organization, people often do more with less. Marketing teams may not have the resources to dedicate to analytics or lack the expertise to track and measure revenue attribution effectively. While everyone is working hard, the impact of their efforts is harder to quantify.
As the marketing organization matures, teams develop more specialized roles, such as marketing data analysts, operations experts, and strategic planners. These specialized roles can focus on understanding and improving marketing’s contribution to the bottom line, leveraging advanced analytics and insights to fine-tune strategies and ensure that marketing is driving revenue at an optimal level.
Over time, marketing professionals gain experience creating synergies with sales, operations, and RevOps teams, improving cross-functional collaboration. This allows for more accurate tracking of marketing contribution and ensures that marketing efforts are not only aligned with the company’s overall strategy but also have a measurable impact on the revenue pipeline.
3. Processes: Streamlining Operations for Impact
In the early stages of a marketing organization, processes are often manual and ad hoc. Data is siloed, and reporting is inconsistent, making tracking how marketing activities lead to sales hard.
As organizations mature, they establish standardized processes that integrate with sales and customer success teams. With well-defined lead qualification models, a clear handoff process, and alignment with sales cycles, marketing’s efforts align more with the company’s revenue generation goals. Due to this increased efficiency, marketing’s contribution grows, as marketers are better equipped to influence the right prospects at the right time.
As the process improves, marketing teams can better demonstrate how their efforts lead to closed deals, making ROI easier to prove. Marketing contribution grows in maturity as marketing moves beyond volume-driven activity (e.g., MQL generation) to focusing on quality-driven outputs (e.g., high-converting leads, sales-ready opportunities).
As your marketing organization advances along the maturity curve, the combined evolution of systems, people, and processes leads to a measurable and increasingly significant contribution to revenue. What begins as fragmented, manual efforts transforms into a finely tuned, data-driven engine that consistently demonstrates impact. By investing in technology, building specialized expertise, and streamlining operations, marketing not only gains credibility as a revenue driver but also becomes an essential partner in achieving business growth. Ultimately, the journey toward maturity is not about reaching a finish line, but about continually refining and scaling marketing’s contribution to deliver sustained value over time.