The B2B Marketing Leader’s Guide to Attribution

Do you have questions about what marketing attribution modeling means for your organization?

Are you tired of fighting for budget with no clear evidence of the impact on pipeline and revenue? Can you relate to these questions? Your team ran a successful ABM campaign. You hosted 3 webinars with hundreds of attendees. You spent $20K on a paid search sprint. Your sales team says “leads are coming in hot,” but leadership still asks:

• Which campaigns actually contributed to this quarter’s pipeline?

• What is the pipeline impact of the digital marketing spend?

• Where should we reinvest next quarter?

• Which campaigns are helping accelerate the pipeline?

• How do we know if this channel is truly working?

If you don’t have a confident answer backed by data, you’re not alone. Our guide, the B2B Marketing Leader’s Guide to Attribution is an attempt to share our knowledge and expertise from our marketing analytics consulting services practice.

Given the intricately connected world we inhabit today, the manner in which we gather and process information has evolved dramatically.

These marketing touches encompass a wide array of interactions, starting from digital engagement metrics such as website visits and clicks. Each visit to a webpage or click on a link signifies a moment of interest and engagement that could potentially lead to a conversion. Moreover, the journey doesn’t end with mere web engagement. Email marketing has become a cornerstone of communication strategies, where personalized email campaigns are crafted to nurture leads and keep them informed about products or services. The effectiveness of email engagement is often measured through open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, providing marketers with valuable data on how their messages resonate with the audience. In addition to digital touchpoints, other forms of engagement such as webinars, e-books, and white papers serve as critical educational resources that empower potential customers by providing them with in-depth knowledge and insights. These resources not only establish a brand’s authority in its field but also create opportunities for direct interaction and feedback from the audience. Webinars, for instance, allow for real-time engagement and Q&A sessions, fostering a sense of community and trust. Furthermore, in-person events, such as trade shows, conferences, and networking gatherings, play an essential role in building relationships and facilitating face-to-face interactions. These events often provide a unique opportunity for brands to showcase their products and services while allowing potential customers to experience the brand firsthand. The impact of these in-person engagements can be profound, as they often leave lasting impressions that digital marketing alone may not achieve.

As we consider the multitude of marketing tactics available, it becomes evident that each touchpoint carries a varying degree of influence on the overall success of winning deals. However, it is crucial to recognize that all these marketing efforts come at a cost. This reality prompts a significant challenge for marketing leaders: the need to allocate their budgets effectively across different tactics. Without a clear understanding of how each marketing strategy performs in terms of contributing to successful deal closures, it becomes nearly impossible to make informed decisions. Gone are the days when a marketer could rely solely on intuition or personal feelings about what strategies might work best.

And in this blog, we’ll break down everything you need to choose and implement the right attribution model from first-touch to multi-touch—to turn your marketing from a cost center into a growth engine.

1. Why Attribution Matters More Than Ever in B2B Software

2. Why B2B Marketing Attribution Is Broken

3. Why Off-the-Shelf Tools Fail the Modern CMO

4. The Real Value of Attribution: It’s Not the Dashboard

5. marqeu’s Time-Series Attribution Framework

6. Designing Attribution From the Ground-Up (Not Top-Down)

7. A Better Way to Measure ROI Across the Funnel

8. How to Operationalize Attribution With Marketing, Sales & Finance

9. Real-world Use Cases across some our clients

1. Why Attribution Matters More Than Ever in B2B Software: B2B buying journeys have changed and that’s no secret. Buyers complete 70% of the journey before talking to sales. 6–10 stakeholders now influence most enterprise deals. Pipeline complexity is exploding across ABM, PLG, and traditional demand generation motions. In the middle of this complexity sits the modern B2B marketer, asked to prove which touchpoints work, which personas convert, and which channels actually drive revenue. And the biggest obstacle? Lack of unified, accurate attribution. Attribution is how B2B marketers earn trust at the executive table and demonstrate the quantifiable impact of the work they are doing. Marketing can no longer just say, “We had 1,000 webinar attendees.”

2. Why B2B Marketing Attribution Is Broken: If you’re like most marketing leaders in B2B software, you’ve heard the same pitch a hundred times: “Our attribution tool will finally tell you what’s working.” But after implementation, what you actually get is a set of rigid dashboards that tracks first and last-touch contributions in Salesforce. Maybe it integrates with Tableau or Looker. It looks sleek. But it doesn’t answer your actual business questions:

• Why are some campaigns performing better for one persona versus another?

• Which channels influence deals that close faster?

• Are we overspending on tactics that inflate engagement but don’t convert pipeline?

Most attribution tools stop short. They show what happened, but not why. And they rarely help you act on the data. At marqeu, with our marketing analytics consulting services, we believe that’s where attribution should begin, not end.

3. Why Off-the-Shelf Tools Fail the Modern CMO: Off-the-shelf attribution platforms are built for the lowest common denominator. They assume:

• Your GTM strategy is simple

• Your marketing funnel is linear

• You’re okay aligning with how the tool works, not how your business runs

But your business isn’t basic and it is unique. You run ABM programs, persona-based nurture tracks, multiple product lines based PLG campaigns, digital, events, outbound SDRs, partnerships and they all drive influence at different stages of the funnel. Off-the-shelf tools reduce all of that complexity into pre-defined rules or ML models you can’t inspect or align with how your business operates. That makes marketers conform to tools, instead of tools adapting to the marketing strategy.

4. The Real Value of Attribution: It’s Not the Dashboard: Many marketing leaders think attribution is the final step of analytics maturity. A shiny dashboard in a tool like Tableau or Looker that shows pipeline by channel. A slide in the QBR that proves marketing influenced 64% of revenue. But that’s just optics. The real value of attribution comes after the dashboard.

• Real ROI calculations (not just spend vs. clicks)

• Persona-based demand waterfall funnel conversion paths

• Playbooks for GTM teams based on historical journey patterns

• Confidence in where to increase or reduce spend

• Alignment with sales on pipeline goals

Every touch is logged with a timestamp and persona, and linked to campaign, channel, and opportunity data.

Too many marketing teams buy attribution tools because “it’s what analytics says we need.” We flip that. Marketing should lead attribution strategy and data should follow. Our engagements start with your team, your needs, and your GTM motion. We then design the framework with you, not for you.Because a dashboard you don’t trust or don’t understand is worse than no dashboard at all. We don’t just deliver a model. We build a muscle.

6. Designing Attribution From the Ground-Up (Not Top-Down): marqeu’s philosophy is simple: your business should drive the model not the other way around. We don’t start with a model. We start with a workshop. We ask:

• What is your GTM strategy?

• How do your campaigns and sales motions work?

• What does your buying journey really look like?

• What data sources already exist?

• Where is marketing actually influencing pipeline?

From there, we co-design the right framework whether that’s position-based, W-shaped, machine learning-driven, or a custom algorithm built for your ABM or PLG strategies. And we don’t “customize” pre-built tools. We build from scratch using modern data platforms like Snowflake, BigQuery, Looker, Tableau, PowerBI, SQL, Python and more.

7. A Better Way to Measure ROI Across the Funnel: Traditional attribution ends with “influenced pipeline.” But the smart CMO wants to know:

• What does the marketing mix looks like for the full customer journey?

• Are we accelerating deal cycles?

• Which campaigns engage key personas earlier vs later in the deal cycle?

• What’s the lag between first touch and last touch—and can we shorten it?

Because we track attribution as a time-series dataset, we can measure:

• Time to engagement by persona

• Stage-to-stage velocity

• Channel-based acceleration

• Multi-threading effectiveness

This is not possible with static first/last-touch models. It’s only possible when attribution becomes a comprehensive behavioral dataset encompassing all touchpoints across the customer journey.

8. How to Operationalize Attribution With Marketing, Sales & Finance: Attribution must be operational not just analytical. We build workflows that integrate into:

• CRM & Marketing Automation: Attribution rollups tied to opportunities

• Tableau/Looker dashboards: For CMOs, campaign managers, and finance

• Weekly/monthly planning rituals: Budget reviews, campaign retrospectives, go-to-market check-ins
  
  

And we document playbooks so everyone from CMO to performance marketer to SDR manager knows how to interpret and apply the insights.

9. Real World Use Cases: Turning Attribution Into Strategy. Let’s talk about what this actually enables for you as a marketing leader.

   
   Use Case #1: Build Conversion Playbooks by aggregating engagement journeys across closed-won deals. Then we cluster them by dimensions like campaign type, persona, industry, sale regions, segments, funnel velocity etc. You learn what campaign types (e.g., product webinars, ABM ads, events) drive conversion for each persona and when. You learn that Engineering leaders in mid-market accounts tend to engage with technical documentation and demos after an SDR intro, not before. You adjust your ABM journey accordingly.

Use Case #2: Spend Reallocation Based on ROI. We connect attribution touchpoints with actual spend data (from Google Ads, LinkedIn, content syndication vendors, etc.). You now have cost-per-engaged-deal by tactic not just CPL. Your content syndication leads drive high engagement, but convert at 1/10 the rate of paid search. Your cost per pipeline dollar is 3x higher. Now you know to reduce investment—or demand higher quality from vendors.

Use Case #3: Strategic Budget Planning with Finance. When attribution data is trustworthy, you can walk into a finance meeting and say: “Based on last quarter’s model, our $200K investment in webinars generated $3.1M in pipeline and $780K in closed-won revenue. Here’s how that compares to digital channels.” That changes the conversation from justifying marketing to allocating for growth.

If you’ve made it this far, you probably believe, like we do that attribution is more than just a data project. It’s a way to make marketing more confident. More credible. More strategic. At marqeu, with our marketing analytics consulting services, we’ve helped some of the most innovative B2B companies build attribution frameworks that don’t just track the past—but help shape the future.

And we’re just getting started.

Ready to go beyond the dashboard?

Let’s build attribution around your GTM strategy and not the other way around.

Book an Attribution Readiness Audit