Engagement · Industrial supply
A two-year argument, ended in six weeks.
Pipeline attribution disputes resolved. Sales credited referrals, marketing credited paid search, and the board trusted neither number — until a reconciled definition of qualified opportunity gave both sides the same figure.
The situation
Two functions, two spreadsheets, no agreement
Sales ran its own tracking of which opportunities came from account manager referrals. Marketing ran its own tracking of which came from paid search. The two totals, added together, exceeded the actual number of opportunities the business had.
The dispute had been running for roughly two years before we were brought in. Sales maintained that most new opportunities came from existing account manager relationships and referrals; marketing maintained that paid search was the primary driver, citing platform-reported conversions. Both were measuring correctly by their own definitions and incorrectly by the other’s — sales counted an opportunity as theirs if an account manager had any contact with the buyer at any point; marketing counted a conversion as theirs if a paid click had occurred within the platform’s default attribution window, regardless of what happened afterwards.
We rebuilt collection server-side, tying every opportunity to a single record in the CRM rather than to two separate systems, and worked with both functions to agree one written definition of a qualified opportunity: a specific set of criteria, agreed by both sales and marketing leadership, that had to be met before an opportunity counted toward either function’s reporting. That definition — not a change in tracking technology alone — was what closed the two-year argument, because for the first time both sides were counting the same thing.
The engagement has continued since 2021 on the measurement capability specifically, maintaining the reconciled definition as the business’s CRM and marketing stack have changed underneath it.
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