Revenue attribution is the practice of assigning credit for pipeline and closed-won revenue to the touchpoints that influenced a deal. It looks beyond first/last touch for the primary deal contact and instead considers the full buying journey across marketing, sales, and partners, for every member of the buying group.
How to build a revenue attribution model
- Capture signals across systems: ad interactions, website visits, emails sent and received across both sales and marketing, events, sales meetings, sales calls, and partner activity.
- Resolve identities and unify records to the account and buying group.
- Reconstruct the journey into a time-ordered timeline of buyer activity and team outreach.
- Apply an attribution approach (rule-based or data-driven) to distribute credit tied to pipeline and revenue.
- Keep it auditable with evidence from the underlying interactions and validate with experiments where possible.
Business applications
- Channel and campaign ROI tied to revenue for budget allocation.
- Deal diagnostics: what activated an opportunity, what accelerated it, what stalled it.
- Board-ready narratives with traceable evidence.
- Cross-team alignment by showing how marketing, sales, and partners contributed to outcomes.
Note: To assign a specific revenue or pipeline value to each activity, you must apply a weighting model. These weightings can easily become a point of contention among GTM leaders if not agreed upon in advance, which can undermine trust in the results. Before implementing any weighting, align with GTM leadership on the methodology and assumptions to ensure consistency and buy-in.