Attributing pipeline to a single source (Marketing, SDR, AE) oversimplifies a collaborative process. This reporting style identifies team underperformance but offers no insight into *why* it's happening or how to fix it, rendering it strategically useless for scaling or problem-solving.

A modern data model revealed marketing influenced over 90% of closed-won revenue, a fact completely obscured by a last-touch attribution system that overwhelmingly credited sales AEs. This shows the 'credit battle' is often a symptom of broken measurement, not just misaligned teams.

The battle over attribution isn't a personality conflict but a systemic issue. It's caused by measuring marketing on MQLs and sales on closed revenue. Unifying both teams under a single, shared revenue goal eliminates this friction and fosters collaboration.

Believing attribution fights are culturally damaging and unproductive, Hightouch's leadership team has banned them. Instead of arguing over credit, they measure marketing's success by tracking account progression through six defined, data-verifiable pre-opportunity stages, creating a shared view of momentum.

Direct attribution models are flawed because platforms like Google and Facebook use tracking pixels to claim credit for sales that would have occurred anyway. Smart marketers are returning to older methods of measuring lift from campaigns rather than relying on misleading platform data.

Marketing leaders often sense that attribution models are broken, but they lack the financial language and models to prove it to leadership. The key challenge is moving from "feeling" that a model is wrong to "articulating and demonstrating" why with a cogent financial argument.

CloudPay stopped attributing opportunities to single sources like "marketing" or "sales." Analysis showed multiple departments influenced every deal, rendering attribution a source of pointless internal arguments. They still use multi-touch attribution at the campaign level, but not to assign inter-departmental credit.

Attribution models, even multi-touch, are fundamentally designed to answer "Who gets credit?" and often become weaponized internally. Causality analysis asks a more strategic question: "What sequence of events causes a deal to progress faster?" It focuses on optimizing the process, not distributing credit for the outcome.

Relying on outdated metrics like "marketing sourced" or "SDR sourced" pipeline creates departmental silos and credit disputes. This flawed measurement system prevents teams from understanding the true sequence of events and collaborative patterns that actually lead to conversions.