B2B marketing attribution: how it works and how to set it up

B2B marketing attribution is how a marketing team proves its share of the pipeline to a leadership team that mostly trusts sales. This article answers one question: what should a B2B marketing team report each month, and how do you produce that report from the levelpartner.ai platform without arguing about every deal? The short answer is two numbers, sourced pipeline and influenced pipeline, defined in writing and produced from the same records sales already use.

Sourced and influenced, defined

Sourced pipeline is the value of opportunities where the first recorded touch from the buying company was a marketing activity: a campaign, content, an event, an advert. Influenced pipeline is the value of opportunities where marketing touched the buying company at any point before the deal closed, even if sales started the conversation.

Sourced shows what marketing creates. Influenced shows what marketing supports. Reporting only sourced makes marketing look small in a business that sells through relationships. Reporting only influenced makes marketing look responsible for everything. You need both, clearly separated.

Before you start

• Contacts linked to company records, with opportunities associated to the company.
• Every marketing activity tagging the contacts it touches: event attendance, webinar registration, content download, campaign reply.
• A list of what counts as a marketing touch and what does not, agreed with the sales director.
• Opportunity values entered when an opportunity opens and corrected when it closes.

Building the monthly marketing report

1. Write one-sentence definitions of sourced and influenced pipeline and get sign-off.
2. Create a contact tag for each marketing programme.
3. In each programme's form or registration workflow, add an action that applies its tag.
4. Go to Dashboard, open your dashboard and select Edit dashboard.
5. Select Add widget and add Lead Source Report from General for sourced pipeline.
6. Add a second Lead Source Report filtered on programme tags for influenced pipeline.
7. Go to Reporting, click Custom Reports and select New Report.
8. Choose to convert the existing dashboard into the report.
9. Click Save, then Schedule, and set Frequency to monthly.
10. Add the leadership team under Recipients and click Save and Schedule.

The point most B2B reports get wrong

Marketing teams usually report leads, then marketing qualified leads, then pipeline, and leadership stops reading after the first line. Lead counts invite argument about quality. Pipeline value does not. Report pipeline and won value first, and keep lead numbers for marketing's internal use.

The second mistake is counting a touch after the deal was already in late stages. A client who attends your summer event a week before signing was not influenced by it in any meaningful sense. Count only touches before the opportunity reached proposal stage. For the deal-level mechanics behind these fields, read how B2B attribution works at company level.

What it replaces

It replaces the monthly marketing slide deck built from screenshots of five different tools, and the meeting spent disputing them. Everyone sees one dashboard built from the CRM records the sales team updates. It also replaces the habit of judging marketing by cost per lead, which pushes teams towards cheap, low-intent leads.

For the layout of a marketing leader's view, see what a CMO dashboard should show.

Time to run it

Setup takes one to two days, most of it tagging historic activity and agreeing definitions. Monthly, the marketing lead should spend an hour checking that new programmes are tagging contacts and reviewing a sample of sourced deals with sales. Disputes drop sharply once the definitions are written down.

When not to use this approach

If the business wins almost all its work through partner relationships, a marketing pipeline report will undersell marketing's real job, which is keeping your name in front of partners. Measure partner engagement instead. And for very small deal volumes, report by quarter rather than month to avoid swings from a single contract.

Troubleshooting

Sales disputes a sourced deal. The first touch was a marketing download, but sales had already spoken to the client offline. Add a field where sales can record prior relationships, and exclude those deals from sourced.

Influenced pipeline is almost everything. Your newsletter counts as a touch and goes to every contact. Exclude routine newsletters from influence, or count them only if the contact clicked.

Event touches are missing. Attendance was recorded in a spreadsheet and never imported. Use platform forms or calendar bookings for registration so attendance tags itself.

Frequently asked questions

What share of pipeline should marketing source?

It varies too much by business model to give a benchmark. Track your own figure over time and ask whether it is rising as you invest. The trend matters more than any comparison.

Should we include existing client expansion?

Report it separately. Expansion from existing clients is driven mainly by delivery quality and account management, and mixing it in distorts new-business attribution.

Which model sits behind sourced pipeline?

First touch at company level. Influenced pipeline is a form of multi-touch. For more on combining the two, see the multi-touch attribution guide.