# Upside Research > Original research from real B2B deals. Upside looks at the CRM and every connected system behind the deals of B2B companies that use Upside, then measures what attribution models and the CRM miss: more than 500 deals for The Untracked Half, 29,367 for Enhancing messy GTM data. Each company's data is anonymized and aggregated on its own. URL: https://www.upside.tech/research --- 2 studies, newest first. Each has a full text copy at /research/.md. ## Enhancing messy GTM data Data brief · October 2026 · GTM data quality · Mada Seghete, Co-founder, Upside > What’s hiding in messy GTM data: missing touchpoints, contacts and roles, duplicates and beyond. Upside looked at the CRM and every connected system behind 29,367 new-business deals and applied touchpoint deduplication, identity resolution, buying group and touchpoint detection and recovery and measured the impact of what was missing, duplicated and unclassified. Key findings: - More than half of the people in a deal are split across three or more identity fragments: 55% of buying-group people at the typical company. - In won deals, Upside found 3x more people involved than what the CRM opportunity held: 3.3 times the contact roles at the typical company, counting everyone Upside found, including people who appeared after the deal closed. - At the typical company, about one in seven one-to-one emails existed only inside another email's quoted thread (13%), and one in six emails the buyer sent (17%). - On the deals Upside's AI analysed, about one in four touchpoints it kept existed only in emails, calls, notes or CRM text, and they carried 38% of the credit. - At the typical company, one activity record in nine on a deal was an extra copy of an interaction already logged; meetings and calls were copied most (28%). - Before a deal existed, contacts at the account got on average the same number of bids from the team. Buyers on won deals answered more: 5.0 engagements against 2.5 at the middle deal. - Page: https://www.upside.tech/research/enhancing-messy-gtm-data - Full text (Markdown): https://www.upside.tech/research/enhancing-messy-gtm-data.md - Cite: Seghete, M. (2026, October 29). Enhancing messy GTM data: What’s hiding in messy GTM data: missing touchpoints, contacts and roles, duplicates and beyond. Upside Research data brief. https://www.upside.tech/research/enhancing-messy-gtm-data ## The Untracked Half Report · October 2026 · Attribution · Mada Seghete, Co-founder, Upside > Traditional attribution models can't see half of what really creates pipeline. Upside's AI read every email, call, note and record behind more than 500 new business deals across 13 B2B companies. Here's what traditional models undervalue, overvalue and miss entirely. Key findings: - Tracked touchpoints show only 51% of what creates a deal: 49% of the credit was extracted or inferred from unstructured data such as calls, emails and form fills. - Moving from CRM data to Upside enhanced data, marketing's share of credit rises from 38% to 45% under first touch, from 15% to 25% under last touch and from 20% to 37% under linear multi-touch. - Brand and advocacy start 28% of deals, while the CRM's opportunity source field credits them with 5.6%. - Won deals involve 7.9 people, but the CRM lists only 2.7. - Last touch on CRM data agrees with AI-detected multi-touch on only 38% of the credit, and gives seller email 59% of the credit against 19% under AI-detected multi-touch. - At the typical company, marketing email is 45% of everything logged on the account but earns 3.7% of the credit under AI-detected multi-touch. - Nearly 1 in 12 deals came from someone who had used the product at a previous company; among won deals, 26% had a former user on the buyer's side. - Unstructured data matters beyond marketing: even meetings and calls earned a quarter of their credit from conversations no system logged. - The study covers more than 500 new business deals at 13 B2B companies that use Upside, read by Upside's AI over about 4,000 hours of agent work. - Page: https://www.upside.tech/research/the-untracked-half-zero-sum-b2b-attribution - Full text (Markdown): https://www.upside.tech/research/the-untracked-half-zero-sum-b2b-attribution.md - Cite: Seghete, M. (2026, October 14). The Untracked Half: Traditional attribution models can't see half of what really creates pipeline. Upside Research report. https://www.upside.tech/research/the-untracked-half-zero-sum-b2b-attribution