184: Nadia Davis: How To Decide If Attribution Data Is Good Enough To Guide Strategy Humans Of Martech podcast

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184: Nadia Davis: How to decide if attribution data is good enough to guide strategy

3d ago 1:09:07

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What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Nadia Davis, VP Marketing at CaliberMind.

(00:00) - Intro
(01:12) - In This Episode
(02:53) - Understanding the Attribution Periodic Table Framework
(07:49) - Why Marketing Teams Face Higher ROI Pressure Than Other Departments
(20:15) - Why Attribution Fails Without Data Stewardship
(33:02) - Treating Multi-Touch Attribution as an Analytical Tool
(39:05) - Exploring Chain Based Attribution Models for B2B Marketers
(46:31) - Why Customizing Markov Chain Attribution Improves Accuracy
(50:56) - How to Decide When Attribution Data Is Good Enough to Guide Strategy
(01:00:00) - Why Marketing Operations Defines Multi Touch Attribution Success
(01:04:50) - Why Time Management Drives Career Fulfillment

Summary: Nadia learned early that attribution keeps you in business, proving to executives why the budget, the team, and the work matter. Seeing “attribution is dead” posts, she built her Attribution Periodic Table to show data modeling, measurement rules, and cross-team alignment as one connected system. In B2B, where budgets are treated like investment portfolios, she uses multi-touch attribution to connect brand and demand to revenue in CFO terms. For her, it’s an analytics tool, not a scoreboard, shaped by sequences like her govtech playbook where event conversations plus on-demand webinars moved deals forward. Chain-based and Markov models help her cut noise, drop vanity metrics, and ground decisions in logged, meaningful touches, all anchored in strong marketing operations that make multi-touch attribution something teams actually trust.

About Nadia

Nadia Davis is the VP of Marketing at CaliberMind, where she leads demand generation, ABM, and marketing operations. She is known for building teams from scratch, overhauling martech stacks, and creating data-driven programs that sales teams can act on immediately. With over 15 years in B2B marketing, she has worked across SaaS, IT automation, healthcare tech, and data platforms, consistently delivering measurable growth by aligning marketing execution with revenue goals.

Her career includes senior roles at PayIt, Stonebranch, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Informa, and ND Medica Inc., as well as nearly a decade as an ABM and digital strategy consultant. She has led global campaigns, designed persona-driven targeting, run high-profile industry events, and built marketing programs that continue to deliver pipeline well beyond launch. A former Girls in Tech board member, Nadia combines hands-on technical expertise with the leadership skills to grow both teams and results.

The Periodic Table of Marketing Attribution Elements

Nadia has worked in revenue marketing long enough to know attribution is a survival tool. In every demand generation and performance role, she carried it like part of her standard kit. It was how she justified headcount, protected budgets, and kept the lights on in her department. Attribution helped her prove progress in a language executives understood.

When she took over marketing at CaliberMind, she noticed the volume of “attribution is dead” posts climbing in her feed. The pattern felt familiar. Marketing tactics often get declared obsolete the moment they fail for someone, then replaced with whatever is trending. From her perspective, most of those posts came from SMB marketers moving on after a bad run. Meanwhile, enterprise teams were applying attribution with discipline, pairing it with strong data modeling, and getting measurable results. They simply were not talking about it publicly.

That split in sentiment drove her to dig deeper. She wanted to measure the gap between what people were saying and what they were actually doing. The outcome was the State of 2025 Attribution report, anchored by her Revenue Marketing Periodic Table. Nadia built it to show attribution as part of an integrated framework, not a lone tactic. She broke it down into interconnected components:

Data modeling that improves accuracy and removes noise
Measurement frameworks that define terms and keep reporting consistent
Cross-functional alignment that ensures teams interpret the data the same way

"So many things may seem completely disconnected, yet they all come together within a bigger ecosystem."

The iceberg metaphor stuck with her. Most marketers focus on the visible metrics, but the real forces driving success are below the surface. Choosing the periodic table format brought this idea into focus. It showed each element as part of a larger system, each with its own role and complexity. Nadia even remembered struggling with chemistry in school, to the point where she once cheated on a test because she could not memorize the valency of certain elements. That frustration helped her appreciate the value of a clear visual framework when dealing with something complicated. The periodic table worked because it grouped related elements, revealed their relationships, and made the whole system easier to navigate.

Key takeaway: Build attribution like a connected ecosystem. Pair it with precise data modeling, clear measurement frameworks, and strong cross-team alignment so every metric connects to a broader strategy. Map your system like a periodic table, where each element has a defined purpose and a place in the structure, that way you can spot gaps, diagnose problems faster, and prove impact without relying on surface-level numbers.

Why Marketing Teams Face Higher ROI Pressure Than Other Departments

Marketing leaders manage one of the most lopsided jobs in business. One half of the work runs on instinct, creativity, and the psychology of memory. The other half is rooted in measurement, analytics, and financial accountability. Nadia points out that most marketers do not come from a statistics-heavy background, yet they are expected to operate as if they did. The pressure is not just to build campaigns that inspire but to show how those campaigns directly affect the bottom line.

In B2B, the stakes climb even higher. Sales cycles can drag for months or even years, and the money behind your budget often comes from venture capital or private equity. Those investors see marketing spend as growth capital, not operational overhead. That means they expect a return. Nadia compares it to giving a retirement manager your savings. You would not leave them unchecked. You would want to see exactly how those dollars are working and why certain investments are made.

Other departments do not face the same revenue-tied scrutiny. Finance manages operating budgets. Sales has smaller discretionary pools for travel and entertainment. HR spends what it takes to keep the team functioning. None of those groups is routinely asked to tie their activities to closed-won revenue. Marketing is, because its budget is treated as a bet on future growth, not a cost of maintaining the business.

The challenge is translating marketing results into terms that matter to the C-suite. Nadia frames it clearly:

“You are here because you got money to spend that we invested with you, and we want to have the responsible output from how this money is performing.”

But that translation is rarely straightforward. Engagement, recall, and psychological impact are powerful, yet they do not speak the same language as pipeline targets and closed deals. In SaaS and tech, that disconnect is shrinking fast as investor pressure mounts. Marketing leaders who can quantify the financial impact of creative work are the ones who keep their budgets, and their seat at the table.

Some people struggle with making decisions without near-perfect certainty, relying on data ...

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