What you’re working toward.
A report with a clear decision, an explicit population, and a visible coverage gap.
- Bring these people
- Marketing operations, revenue leadership, and the reporting owner
Have these inputs ready
- A specific budget or channel decision the report will support.
- Campaign naming and tracking conventions, plus contact-to-deal relationships.
- A pipeline total from the same date window and currency basis.
Choose the decision
Distinguish acquisition source, campaign influence, and revenue credit. They are different questions and may require different reports. State the date window and the population of records included.
- Choose whether you are explaining first acquisition, interactions before a milestone, or allocated revenue credit. Write the question above the report so readers do not substitute a different one.
- Define the denominator: which deals, which close dates, which pipeline, and which exclusions. Record whether the measure is bookings, invoices, or cash collected.
A report contract with decision, population, time window, and metric definition.
Preserve evidence
Document campaign naming, URL tagging, source capture, contact-to-company links, and deal associations. Avoid overwriting original source fields to make an individual report look cleaner.
- Create a campaign register with naming rules, channel, tracking parameters, owner, and start date. Test a tagged link through conversion to the resulting record.
- Check contact-to-company and contact-to-deal associations. Create a queue for opportunities without usable contact evidence instead of silently dropping them.
A tracking checklist and a measured association-coverage gap.
Reconcile with the pipeline
Sample opportunities back to their underlying contacts and interactions. Identify offline touches, missing tracking, and unassociated records. Report these gaps as limitations instead of treating absence of evidence as zero influence.
- Trace a sample of closed opportunities from the summary chart back to records and touchpoints. Include one with no tracked touch and one with offline activity.
- Explain differences between the report’s eligible deal total and the source pipeline total. Separate excluded records, missing associations, currency treatment, and date-window differences.
A reconciliation note that a business reader can follow without rebuilding the report.
Maintain the definitions
Agree who owns campaign taxonomy and who reviews changes. Compare models only when their inputs and windows are understood. Confirm the reports available in your subscription before promising a specific attribution view.
- Assign an owner to campaign taxonomy and association quality. Review new channels and tracking changes before they produce another naming convention.
- Present model outputs alongside unassigned records and known gaps. Compare models as different allocation rules, not independent proof that a channel caused revenue.
A recurring reporting review with visible limitations and change history.
Make the denominator visible
Illustrative reconciliation for 100 closed opportunities; these numbers are teaching examples, not customer results.
Know when the work is ready.
Use these checks in the handover. Keep evidence of the result and assign an owner to anything that still fails.
- The title states the business question and date basis.
- The eligible population reconciles to the pipeline with documented exclusions.
- Readers can see missing or unassigned evidence.
- No model is presented as proof of causation.
Catch the problems early.
Mixing influence with revenue credit
A campaign can influence several deals while an allocation model assigns it only part of their value. Label the measure so readers do not add incompatible numbers.
Cleaning up the chart by overwriting source data
Preserve acquisition evidence. Use an explicit reporting transformation or classification rather than rewriting history for a tidier chart.