"AccountAim delivered exactly what we needed—a flexible, practical approach to measuring marketing attribution that allows us to adapt as our strategy evolves. We can monitor our events, evaluate which initiatives drive the most revenue, and make more informed decisions about where to reinvest."
The company
Zest AI, is a private equity backed technology company that helps lenders make smarter, faster, and more confident credit decisions through AI-driven underwriting. Zest invests heavily in in-person and account-based events to reach and engage its target audience. Edie Johnson leads revenue operations, which oversees campaign measurement, performance, and budget allocation for these events.
The challenge
Zest’s marketing team needed a credible way to validate the revenue impact of events. Traditional Salesforce attribution logic, which credits only the contacts listed on an opportunity, failed to capture the real influence of in-person and ABM campaigns.
“The person you meet at an event isn’t always the buyer, but they often make the intro that leads to the deal.”
This created incomplete attribution and bias toward digital campaigns that neatly connected contacts to deals, while events went uncredited.
At the same time, Salesforce’s native reporting could not support the level of analysis Zest required. They needed joins and time-based logic that weren’t possible without major investment. Key limitations included:
- No ability to join campaign members → contacts → accounts → opportunities without expensive add-ons
- No native support for comparing campaigns across relative time logic (e.g., opportunities created by event within 30, 60, or 90 days of a campaign)
- Dependence on custom workflows and calculated fields just to simulate attribution rules
“Salesforce has no real way to do that campaign-to-campaign comparison. AccountAim makes it simple and allows us to compare events in a way that Salesforce never could.”
Zest’s Requirements
Before evaluating solutions, Zest defined clear must-haves for a new approach. They needed:
- Attribution flexible enough to credit opportunities linked to any account that engaged in a campaign
- The ability to apply time-bound logic for fair and realistic impact measurement
- Self-serve analysis without depending on an internal data & BI team
- Compatibility with Salesforce data out of the box, no ETL or Snowflake required
- Simplicity for a lean RevOps team
- Support for event-to-event comparison and campaign benchmarking
“I didn’t want to deal with data pipelines. I just wanted to work with the data I already had in Salesforce.”
The Alternatives
Before selecting AccountAim, Zest considered other analytics options:
- Salesforce Analytics Cloud – expensive and restrictive. “It was going to cost more and still felt clunky to use”
- Domo and Tableau – Too dependent on central BI teams and not built for RevOps flexibility. “We wanted to be able to run with this ourselves and not get stuck in a ticketing queue.”
“I’ve used Tableau before, and I still think the flexibility of AccountAim is far above any BI tool I’ve seen. It’s also amazing that I can spin up our own tables and data within AccountAim myself”
The Insights
After implementing AccountAim, Zest finally gained full visibility into the impact of its marketing efforts. The marketing and leadership teams can now access AccountAim dashboards directly to analyze event ROI and make budget decisions based on data instead of anecdote
“There’s literally a meeting happening right now – and I don’t even have to be in it anymore – where they’re deciding which events to return to next year using AccountAim data. We’re getting so much time back, while executives have the info they need to make calculated decisions.”
Now, the team evaluates:
- Which events generated the most revenue within 30, 60, or 90 days
- Which campaigns led to introductions that turned into deals
- Which events to reinvest in or retire
This new visibility transformed event planning from guesswork to evidence-based decision-making.
“We invest heavily in events and turn the resulting insights into a clear roadmap on where to go next.”
The Results
“We’ve moved from relying on anecdotal sales feedback to data-driven insights—allowing us to clearly demonstrate which events generate the most revenue.”
Zest achieved:
- Full visibility into event and ABM ROI
- Centralized marketing performance in one platform
- Faster, self-serve reporting without BI dependencies
- Confidence in budget planning ahead of board and leadership reviews
“We leveraged insights from AccountAim to confidently streamline next year’s event calendar—reducing our footprint by roughly one-fifth, saving 20% of our event budget, and reallocating those funds toward initiatives proven to deliver strong ROI.”