Proving marketing works when the sale takes two years

Every water company that spends money on marketing eventually faces the same question from a CEO/CFO or board: what did we get for it? In marketing, attribution is everything... but the problem in this industry is that the answer usually arrives 18 to 36 months after the spend, which is longer than most budget holders are willing to 'gamble.'

Who gets the credit over a utility sales cycle that runs through a nine-person buying committee and two budget cycles? Should a webinar reminder email get credit for a contract that a conference talk started two years earlier? These are two examples of HUNDREDS I've personally dealt with over my career in water; you can see how marketers have a tough time tracking attribution - and then get in hot water for sounding shaky when asked to report on what channels are performing and then request big budget increases for the next year.

What attribution misses

At my own water ventures the deals we won rarely tracked to a specific ad pixel or webinar. A plant manager heard a talk at ACE or WEFTEC, mentioned it to a consultant eight months later, and the consultant put us on a shortlist. Our CRM recorded a single inbound form fill dated the week the RFP dropped as the reason for winning.

In other words, attribution typically misses the trust variable that's so critical in the water industry. Self-reported attribution, the plain "how did you hear about us" field, is crude, but it's probably the closest source of truth to what we're actually trying to track.

Given that, the fix is to make self-reported attribution a first-class field instead of an afterthought. Put a free-text "how did you hear about us" on every form, have sales ask the same question out loud in the first meeting, and log the answer verbatim in the CRM. Verbatim matters. "Saw your CEO's post about lift station monitoring" tells you exactly which channel is working; a dropdown would have converted that answer to "Social" and thrown the information away.

Software attribution still has a job. It tells you which pages convert, which campaigns produce form fills, where the funnel leaks. Use it to tune execution, and stop presenting its deal-credit math to a board as though it explains why you win contracts. Most of what actually wins them is trust built in public over months, by people rather than logos.

A nine-person committee also means nine different first touches. The operations lead met you at a booth, the consultant heard the podcast, the finance director googled you the night before the vote. Asking which one "sourced" the deal misses the point. What matters is whether the accounts you targeted keep showing up in evaluations.

The indicators that lead revenue

Since the lagging metric of success (a project or sale - a.k.a. revenue) can take two years or longer, the case for marketing needs to focus on leading indicators of success. Here are the ones your marketing group needs to be tracking.

Qualified conversations with named target accounts is the first. Count the meetings held with people who can influence a purchase at accounts you chose in advance. This is the closest thing to revenue that marketing can move within a quarter.

Agree on the definition with sales before the counting starts, or the number gets argued instead of used. A workable bar: a scheduled conversation, with someone who sits on or briefs the buying committee, at an account chosen in advance, where a next step was discussed. Booth drive-bys and webinar registrations don't clear it. For most water companies, fifteen of these in a quarter is a strong quarter, which surprises teams calibrated on SaaS benchmarks.

Target-account engagement is the second. Are the specific utilities, engineering firms, and industrial operators on your list consuming your content, showing up at your sessions, and replying to outreach? Conversations with accounts you never targeted are nice, but REAL engagement from accounts on your high profile list is crucial.

Instrumenting this takes less tooling than it sounds like. Run conference registration and attendee lists against your target list. Watch content downloads and newsletter signups by email domain. Keep a per-account tally that someone updates monthly. A shared spreadsheet that sales actually reads beats an intent-data subscription that nobody does.

Branded search and direct traffic growth is the third. When people type your company's name into Google, or more routinely ChatGPT/Claude each quarter, your presence compounds. Nobody searches with intent for a brand they've never heard of.

The assistants deserve their own line here, because they're increasingly drafting the shortlist during early research, and the engineers asking them questions are invisible to your analytics until the day they show up searching your name. Branded search growth is the lagging proof that all those invisible touches are landing.

Report in cohorts, judge in quarters

The reporting structure that survives CFO scrutiny ties each quarter's spend to the cohort of accounts it targeted, then follows that cohort forward: how many entered a first conversation, how many reached a technical evaluation, how many arrived at a budget cycle with your name already in the plan. After a few quarters you can put cohorts side by side against accounts you never touched, and the difference is the defensible read on whether marketing is working.

The mechanics fit in a spreadsheet. One row per target account, columns for the quarter it entered the cohort, the campaigns and events aimed at it, and the farthest stage it reached in each quarter since: first conversation, technical evaluation, pilot discussion, budget line. Thirty minutes a month keeps it current. After a year it becomes the most persuasive document marketing owns, because it reads like a sales forecast instead of a marketing report.

The trap to avoid is grading cohorts too early. A cohort that entered in Q1 will look like dead spend in Q3; that's the sales cycle, and everyone in the room knows it when the timeline is printed on the table. Set the expectation at kickoff that cohorts get their first honest grade at 12 months and their real one at 24.

Two numbers belong in front of the board: pipeline sourced or influenced within target accounts, and cost per qualified conversation. Everything else, traffic, impressions, follower growth, is steering data for the marketing team. Report it weekly inside the team and keep it out of the boardroom, because the moment a board learns to expect impression charts, impressions become the goal.

The "what did we get" question usually arrives around month nine, after real spend and before real revenue. That's the moment this structure earns its keep. Accounts visibly moving through stages, and a cost per qualified conversation trending down, is a very different conversation than defending an impressions chart, and it's one marketing can win.

The companies that keep marketing funded through a long cycle are the ones that set this structure up before anyone asked. By the time the question comes, the cohort table already has three quarters of history in it.

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Adam Tank is the founder of Full Flow Marketing, a marketing agency built for the water industry. If the "what did we get for it" question is coming and the cohort table doesn't exist yet, ask for a free pipeline diagnostic and get one started from your own numbers.