In the corporate marketing departments where I've worked, a bone of contention has been, "What's the Lead Source?" For any given suspect/prospect/lead/opportunity in the funnel, what or who gets credit for bringing it in?

In the blog post, "Social CRM - "Many to One" Marketing...or is it Sales?" Scott Gillum suggests that the days of tracking the Lead Source may be coming to an end, and the roles and incentives of B2B marketers are due for a refresh. Searching for additional blog wisdom on the topic, I found Jim Lenskold's article on MarketingProfs and related report on Lead Generation ROI.

Lenskold's report contains two interesting findings that beg to be considered together. 

1. 44% of marketers surveyed simply give credit to the last marketing campaign that touches a lead before it gets passed to Sales.
2. Overwhelmingly, the most highly attributed lead sources were educational in nature: webinars, white papers. (The bar graph on this page tells the story.)

Taken together, these findings tell me that we haven't come very far. Educational campaigns target the tentative buyer, who is ready, or getting ready, to buy. Naturally, educational campaigns are highly likely to be the last campaigns to touch a lead before the buyer becomes engaged and gets passed to Sales. And, since many marketers only give credit to the final campaign, these educational campaigns get the credit, while ROI isn't measured for social media (usually an early touch) or interruptive campaigns that bring the lead into the funnel.

Another of Lenskold's conclusions is that lead nurturing is under-funded in many companies. But my hunch is that educational campaigns are lead-nurturing more often than they are lead-generative; most buyers learn about the webinars and white papers through tweets and blog posts. (Is this supposed neglect of nurturing really a matter of semantics?)

My takeaway: while marketing automation, and now Social CRM, tries to make it easier to attribute revenue to marketing campaigns, the explosion of channels for promoting the brand, i.e., social media, is making it harder.So, except for the names on purchased lists, it is not much easier to select a Lead Source for a lead than it was the first time I used Salesforce.com.

But I'm hopeful that B2B marketers will continue to get better and better tools to prove the value of their efforts. Too many great minds are working on this problem. Social CRM could provide more data on the earliest stages of the funnel. The leaders in marketing automation are adding social media functionality. As Gillum suggests, though, it probably isn't practical, especially in smaller companies, to count every social media interaction. We have to make this easy.