I’d frame it slightly differently; it’s not exactly “the right guy.” B2B marketing is frequently about getting a critical mass of people at a company to come to consensus. The best strategy here is frequently getting 1 person very excited and 10 people aware enough to not pitch a fit when they hear a deal is happening.

The best B2-large-B marketing strategy I ever heard was fundamentally account-based. This guy sold a $1m+ product, and he had a list of the 1,000 companies that could possible afford it. His metrics revolved around a hierarchy of countries > sales territories > accounts. He’d literally evaluate programs based on “have we scheduled enough demos with IBM this quarter?” If the answer was no, they’d run a smaller campaign focused on just the accounts they were behind on. Sales loved him.

The hard part about attribution is so much of the internal discussion is opaque. So especially in large accounts, you have to develop some feel for what is “enough” activity in an account that sales won’t have a hard time of it.

(And fwiw, you don’t have to do this through pure marketing. Bottoms-up products aka freemium is a great signal that sales should reach out — Datadog, New Relic, Github, and more do this.)