TL;DR
Forensic attribution is a new way of doing B2B large opportunity and ABM attribution. Instead of using your existing data and applying models to it, a forensic attribution system pulls every signal from different data sources (your CRM, marketing tools, email tracking or meeting video recording, and so on) and recreates what happened to understand what actually worked.
Why do we need a new way of doing attribution?
I recently posted something on LinkedIn about my struggles as a B2B CMO: showing what works and knowing where to spend my budget. The post went viral because every marketing leader from all over the world faces this problem. And the reason is simple: attribution for B2B is broken and needs a new solution. We are proposing forensic revenue attribution as the answer.
Why We Need a New Category of Attribution
Several years ago, I was CMO and a co-founder at Branch. During a board review, I was asked a question every CMO is asked over an over:
“But which of your initiatives actually created revenue? And what can you cut?”
Despite well-designed slides and a working multi-touch attribution model, I could not provide a clear, evidence-based answer. The systems built to measure GTM efforts are broken and antiquated and built for leads, not for the complexity of B2B large enterprise deals.
That experience, while humbling, set me on a path to create what I believe is a more rigorous approach to attribution—one designed for the complexities of B2B sales and buying behavior.
Why Traditional Attribution Models Fall Short
1. Incomplete Data Capture
CRMs and marketing automation tools capture only a fraction of the buyer journey. Informal interactions—executive outreach, Slack conversations, calendar events, partner emails—often go untracked, leaving attribution models to operate on partial data. The current systems also rely too much on humans and humans are fallible. AEs miss adding people to CRMs, marketing teams upload contact to a campaign days after it happened, meetings are not always logged.
2. Inadequate Modeling for Complex Journeys
First-touch and last-touch attribution oversimplify buyer behavior, especially for large deals with over hundreds or even thousands of touchpoints. Even multi-touch models (e.g., U-shaped, W-shaped, time-decay) focus on weighting algorithms rather than reconstructing what actually occurred. These models are blind to the reality of multi-stakeholder buying groups and non-linear sales cycles.
3. Metrics Without Strategic Utility
Attribution dashboards frequently become internal scorecards rather than strategic tools. Marketing, sales, and finance interpret the same data differently, often undermining trust and alignment. Worse, attribution rarely informs real-time decision-making around spend, headcount, or pipeline risk.
What Is Forensic Attribution?
Forensic attribution is a methodology using data signals and reconstructive techniques for B2B revenue attribution. It starts by creating a knowledge graph for a company’s GTM data and uses it to read signals across different systems and tools. The next step is to recover unlogged or fragmented touchpoints and reconstruct the buying account’s journey at a multi-person, multi-channel level. Lastly the model uses all the data and applies contextual analysis to identify what truly influenced pipeline and revenue outcomes.
In contrast to traditional models that apply weighted models like first touch or last touch to existing incomplete data, forensic attribution builds a complete picture by first understanding what happened, then interpreting what mattered.
How It Works: Upside’s Forensic Attribution Framework
1. Ingest raw data and unify it
While many different vendors claim to unify data, much of that unification is bringing data together in one place without much thought, resulting in duplicate contacts, campaigns, accounts and beyond, and making it even harder to get insights.
A true forensic model like Upside cleans up, deduplicates, and unifies data at the record level,finding ways to resolve and merge even duplicate contacts with different information — like a contact with different emails or titles.
2. Signal Recovery
Upside connects to your full GTM stack including CRM, marketing automation, email tracking or video recording. This enables recovery of touchpoints that never made it into your CRM, in most cases being the touchpoints that actually drove deals forward.
3. Genesis™ Person and Actions Knowledge Graph
Recovered signals are cleaned, deduplicated, and organized into a unified graph that links every buyer persona, timestamp, system, and channel. This structure accommodates role changes, buying group dynamics, and cross-functional collaboration within an opportunity.
Most organizations have data scattered across various systems, formats, and schemas. Knowledge graphs provide a powerful way to integrate and harmonize this disparate information into a coherent, queryable whole, creating not just a central physical repository, but a normalized single source of truth in a common level of semantic meaning.
4. Visual representation of the deal that helps detect when momentum inflections happen
Each opportunity is reconstructed as a chronological journey, highlighting influence inflection points, internal alignment shifts, deal momentum, or deal deceleration, transforming attribution from a model to a story that you can zoom in at any point and understand what happened - who was involved, how did they engage with sales and marketing and in many cases WHY they did it.
5. Dragonsight AI™ Analysis of the the momentum shifts and clean data to understand what happened
Our proprietary AI agent acts like a virtual analyst, evaluating causality, velocity shifts, and spend to generate concise, explainable insights, such as “campaign X drove re-engagement with a stalled buyer group” or “executive outreach accelerated deal velocity post-stall” by looking at the clean, enhanced and unified data.
6. Strategic Reporting
Upside surfaces campaign ROI, rep influence, channel effectiveness, and momentum decay in decision-ready formats for campaign managers, but also leaders including CMOs, RevOps, and CFOs.
Why This Matters in 2025
- Go-to-market complexity is growing: Buyers operate across community, peer referrals, partner ecosystems, and AI-driven sequences, most of which aren’t captured in structured Salesforce or HubSpot fields.
- Buying groups have multiplied: Enterprise deals involve on average 7+ stakeholders, often spanning functions, roles, and geographies.
- Budgets are under scrutiny: In an era of efficiency, boards and CFOs expect attribution models that can stand up to executive review and audit and won’t allocate budgets without clear ROI.
- AI content saturation demands evidence-based measurement: Marketing output has increased tenfold with more content, emails and engagement than ever before making it even harder to understand what actually works. A forensic model can distinguish noise from real influence.
Outcomes: What You Can Do With Forensic Attribution
Executive Question
Forensic Attribution Insight
Traditional Models
“What should we double down on?”
Channel and campaign ROI linked to closed-won revenue—not just MQLs.
Each weighted model will give different results, the best channels might not get the right credit depending on how weights are assigned.
“Why is this deal stalling?”
Timeline flags missing champions, executive drop-off, or a cold gap in activity.
No way of showing deal level attribution or engagement.
“Where’s the budget waste?”
Cost-per-influence and momentum analysis highlight non-performing spend.
Impossible to tell, every model shows a different result.
“Can we trust the data?”
Yes. Every insight is backed by system-level evidence, traceable to original interactions.
Most insights are a black box.
How can you try out forensic attribution with Upside?
- Connect GTM systems (OAuth-based; minimal configuration) - 1-2 hours
- We ingest and prepare your data (no manual or cleanup data prep) - overnight
- Review and map data - 1-2 hours kickoff meeting
- Access dashboards for Marketing, RevOps, and Finance - after kick-off
- Act on insights: Reallocate spend, recover stalled deals, prove impact - ongoing
Conclusion: From Attribution Guesswork to Evidence-Based Growth
Forensic attribution is not just a model—it’s an operating framework for GTM leadership in modern B2B organizations. It equips teams with the evidence to make confident decisions, eliminate internal misalignment, and unlock real growth.
If you’re ready to move beyond attribution debates and start acting on what truly works, we’d be happy to walk you through it.