Budgets are defended with data, not anecdotes

Your buyers are forming opinions about you long before they ever show up in your CRM. Maybe it’s a podcast they listened to on their commute. Maybe it’s a Slack thread where someone mentioned your product. Maybe it’s a LinkedIn comment they saw from a peer. By the time they finally land on your website and fill out a form, the most influential touches have already happened, and your dashboards have missed most of them. 

You are expected to explain what’s working, but the evidence rarely tells one clear story. Marketing shows campaign influence, sales points to outbound, finance focuses on revenue, and somehow none of it quite lines up. 

If you’ve ever walked into a leadership meeting and felt that mismatch between numbers and narratives, you know this is bigger than a reporting problem. The thing is, attribution isn’t a ‘technical nuisance’; without a credible way to connect investment to impact, budgets become harder to defend. This makes attribution a strategic concern. 

In this short read, I’ll cover:  

• The B2B buyer journey isn’t linear 

• Attribution goes beyond building pretty dashboards 

• Stop asking “what caused this deal?”

• Set the course and let tools do the heavy lifting for you 

• Challenge your current attribution model, often 

The B2B buyer journey isn’t linear

Attribution models don’t usually fail because you pick the wrong one. They fail because the buying journey itself refuses to fit into a neat formula. 

A B2B deal often unfolds across months, touching multiple people and countless interactions along the way. Reducing that complexity into a first-touch or last-touch view collapses a rich story into a single, misleading datapoint. 

On top of that, influence doesn’t belong to just one person. Modern buying decisions are made by committees, where each member consumes different content and weighs in at different times:  

• One may attend a webinar,  

• another may speak to a partner,  

• and a third may quietly read the pricing page.  

And so, credit is dispersed across roles, and any attempt to pin it to a single action could distort reality. 

Even when you have robust digital tracking, some of the most powerful moments leave no trace at all. A dinner conversation, an introduction from a partner, or a quick phone call can tip the balance. Those signals requiring manual input rarely find their way into your dashboards. And when systems themselves are disconnected attribution has little chance of producing a story that makes sense. 

The cracks accumulate, and what could be clear becomes confusing. 

And it costs. 

Attribution goes beyond building pretty dashboards 

Now, fixing attribution isn’t about making dashboards prettier; it’s about giving you the means to make better decisions based on what really fuels your growth. From experience, weak attribution can make it difficult to:  

• Defend your budget: without a clear ROI story, marketing budgets are harder to justify at the board level. 

• Build more confident forecasts: you will lose confidence in pipeline forecasts when the inputs are inconsistent. 

• Maintain cross-functional trust: if marketing, sales, and finance each bring their own version of the truth, alignment frays and collaboration suffers. 

Attribution is not about chasing a perfect model. It is about building enough trust in the numbers that leadership can make bold, confident decisions. And that starts with reframing the way you think about ROI. 

Stop asking “what caused this deal?” 

The mistake I think most teams make is looking for a single, perfect answer to the question: “What caused this deal?” A better approach is to ask two different questions: 

• Which activities consistently increase the probability and velocity of deals? 

• How confident are we in that evidence? 

This shift changes attribution from a quest for certainty to a framework for decision-making. Instead of arguing over whether an ad or a webinar deserves the credit, leadership can ask whether the mix of channels is working together to move deals forward, and whether the data is strong enough to back a budget decision. 

Set the course and let tools do the heavy lifting for you 

Building a high-trust attribution model comes from layering different types of evidence. 

Rely on your CRM 

Use multi-touch attribution in your CRM to distribute credit across tracked activities. A good practice is to keep it simple (position-based or time-decay could be enough) and to document your process, so that anyone looking at the data would be able to understand the weight of each interaction. 

HubSpot has a built-in attribution reporting tool (available in Marketing Hub Enterprise) that lets you assign credit across different touchpoints in the customer journey. You can choose between several standard models, including: 

• Position-based: Emphasizes the first and last touch, while still giving partial credit to the interactions in between. 

• Time-decay: Gives more weight to touches that happen closer to the conversion. 

These models are already available in HubSpot’s reporting dashboards, so you don’t need to build complex custom logic. You can filter by campaigns, content types, channels, or deal stages to see which efforts influenced pipeline and revenue. 

The goal is not perfection in any one layer, but convergence across them. When declared, modeled, and experimental evidence all point in the same direction, you can reallocate budget with confidence. 

This is where HubSpot becomes a powerful enabler. HubSpot unifies campaign data, contact activity, deal progression, and revenue in one system. When every touchpoint is properly associated, when campaign costs are synced in, and when deals are linked to contacts and companies, leaders finally see the connection between spend and revenue. HubSpot doesn’t eliminate the complexity of attribution, per say, but it provides the operating hub that makes attribution credible at the executive level. 

Ask buyers directly (and involve AI to aggregate the data) 

Consider what’s called declared attribution.  

Ask “How did you hear about us?” Capture free text, keep the raw answers, then categorize them separately. This often reveals peer referrals, community influence, and other touches you’d otherwise miss.  

Now, declared attribution isn’t perfect as response rates vary and answers can be biased by a number of factors outside of your control. But it’s a valuable complement to modeled and experimental evidence. 

To make it scalable, use AI to aggregate responses into themes, but pair that with periodic human review to catch misclassifications and maintain trust in the categories. 

Challenge your current attribution model, often 

Attribution isn’t something you set once and trust forever.  

Left unchecked, models drift (often in ways that undermine trust long before anyone notices).  

• One early warning sign is reporting sprawl: dashboards multiply, yet no single view becomes the accepted source of truth.  

• Another common pattern is channel bias, where last-touch activities suddenly emerge as the “heroes” of the story, capturing undue credit simply because they sit closest to the conversion.  

• And then there are the data hygiene gaps: campaigns missing cost data, or buyer-reported sources that never reconcile with what shows up in the system. 

Each of these signals points to the same problem: a model that’s slowly drifting away from reality. A good hygiene practice is to set quarterly or bi-yearly reviews to prevent your focus from drifting away and recalibrate your attribution and reporting system before trust erodes further. 

Turning attribution into your growth advantage 

Attribution in B2B will never deliver perfect clarity, and it doesn’t need to.  

What marketing and sales need is confidence: enough evidence, layered and repeatable, to guide budget decisions, defend investments, and align teams. 

When HubSpot sits at the center, connecting campaign data, deals, and revenue, attribution becomes more than a marketing report. It becomes an executive tool for growth. Add in declared, modeled, and experimental layers, and suddenly the story is not just clearer, it’s credible. 

The payoff is significant. Budgets are defended with data, not anecdotes. Forecasts become more reliable. Sales, marketing, and finance align on one version of the truth. And instead of debating reports, you can focus on where to double down and where to pull back. 

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Learn how we helped Katana solve an attribution issue and turned it into a strategic advantage. Building a partner management system in HubSpot for Katana.