Attribution is a decision, not a feature
Everyone knows the scene: marketing presents the 80,000 euro deal in the monthly report, won through the demo request from the landing page form. Applause for the campaign. What the report doesn’t show: before that form came eight touchpoints. A podcast, two webinars, a colleague of the buyer at a trade show, three newsletters, a LinkedIn post from the founder. The last click won. All the others lost, even though they carried the deal.
Last click lies. First touch lies just as much, only in the other direction, then the podcast from 14 months ago gets all the credit and the sales sequence that actually closed the deal shows up nowhere. Both models are convenient. Both are wrong.
And now the part no vendor tells you: this is not a tool problem. Dreamdata, HockeyStack, the attribution module in your suite, they can all collect touchpoints and crunch them through any model you like. What none of them can do: decide which model is right for your business. Do you sell in three weeks to a single decision maker or in nine months to a buying committee of five? Does half your pipeline come through referrals that never leave a click? Those are definition questions. A tool doesn’t answer them. It only calculates what you tell it to.
That’s why the order is non-negotiable. First, set the attribution logic, and not marketing alone in a quiet back room, but together with sales and leadership, because all three have to work with the number afterwards. Which touchpoints count, how they’re weighted, what happens with offline contacts, at what point a deal counts as influenced. That’s an afternoon of arguing in a conference room. Uncomfortable, but cheap.
Whoever flips the order buys the tool first, measures something, and ends up optimizing toward a number nobody in sales believes. That’s exactly what happens all the time. Marketing steers budget by a model sales considers fantasy, and every quarterly meeting features the same debate about whether the campaign brought the deal or the colleague with the good rapport with the customer. That debate costs more than any attribution license.
A model everyone has agreed on beats a precise model only marketing understands. Every time.
So, before you trial the next attribution tool: have you written down the logic it’s supposed to calculate?
