Attribution is still the fastest way to start a fight inside a B2B company. Not because measurement doesn’t matter—but because the way most teams use attribution is a trap: endless “who gets credit?” debates that don’t change revenue outcomes.
In today’s Revenue Marketing Raw livestream, Dr. Debbie Qaqish and I said the quiet part out loud: revenue teams are still stuck in a Hatfields-and-McCoys loop between marketing, sales, and finance. And until companies stop treating attribution like a courtroom drama and start treating revenue performance like the real scoreboard, this doesn’t get better.
I opened with a confession: in pushing “marketing’s seat at the table” for years, the industry also fueled a kind of obsession—marketers chasing the “holy grail” of attribution as proof they matter. That may have been easier when there were fewer channels and fewer buyers. In 2025 B2B reality, it’s increasingly impossible to “prove” contribution with high confidence across long, messy, multi-stakeholder journeys.
Here’s the distinction we made that most organizations blur:
Attribution for optimization
Attribution can help you understand which channels, touchpoints, and content perform better so you can adjust spend and cadence. That’s rational.
Attribution as definitive revenue proof
Trying to claim “this exact mix caused that exact revenue” in complex B2B sales cycles is where things break down—statistically and operationally—because there are too many variables and too much missing data.
Deb and I revisited a simple example: two loyal customers can shop the same store every week, spend roughly the same amount, and still take totally different paths—different aisles, different products, different timing. That doesn’t mean one aisle “caused” loyalty. What matters are higher-order outcomes: loyalty, average order, repetition, and growth. B2B journeys are exactly like that—except with 10–20 people, 6–24 months, and countless online/offline influences.
Yes, data and tech are part of it. But the bigger problem is how teams think and how leadership sets goals.
When a CEO gives marketing a lead number and sales a revenue number, they’ve basically engineered conflict. It becomes “I did my part” theater:
“We hit 600 MQLs.”
“We ran five trade shows.”
“We spent the budget.”
None of that guarantees revenue. It guarantees activity.
We argued for something simpler and more grown-up: shared objectives and shared accountability. If growth is the goal, the revenue number is the number. And sales + marketing should be mutually accountable for how they get there.
Even if marketing wanted to play the attribution game perfectly, many orgs don’t have the basics in place. I called out a reality we still see: a huge percentage of opportunities have zero contacts associated—or one name when there were actually 10–15 stakeholders. If the opportunity record doesn’t reflect the buying committee, attribution isn’t “hard.” It’s fiction.
And that leads to the real punchline: companies often demand precision from marketing that they don’t demand from sales operations and CRM hygiene.
We landed on this: boards may ask for proof, but they don’t win with attribution charts. They win with business performance and stewardship.
The better conversation is:
“Here’s what we invested.”
“Here’s what we changed.”
“Here’s what revenue performance did as a result.”
Not “we influenced pipeline” gymnastics. And not “trust me blindly,” either—trust plus discipline: coordinated go-to-market planning, a real customer journey (not a forgotten PowerPoint), and programs run tightly enough that you can optimize weekly.
If attribution is your North Star, you’re navigating by a flashlight pointed at the wrong wall.
Use attribution to optimize channels. But run the business on revenue outcomes, shared accountability, and clean operating fundamentals. That’s how you get out of reporting theater—and into revenue truth.