B2B pipeline attribution is software that traces each possible deal back to the marketing that produced it. In the industry, a possible deal is called an opportunity, and all the opportunities together are the pipeline. Attribution answers a question that every marketing team in a B2B company is asked: how much of the pipeline did marketing create?
The question is hard, because B2B buyers see many things before they talk to a salesperson. A buyer may read a blog post, attend a webinar, click two ads and download a guide. Several people from the same company may each do some of these. A deal may take nine months. So the software first collects every touch, meaning every contact between the buyer's company and the vendor's marketing. It collects them from the website, the ad platforms, the marketing automation system and the CRM. It connects each touch to the right account, even when the person used a personal email. Then it gives each touch a share of the credit for the deal.
There are several ways to share the credit. First-touch gives all of it to the first touch. Last-touch gives all of it to the last touch before the opportunity was created. Multi-touch methods split it. A common split gives 40% to the first touch, 40% to the touch that created the opportunity, and the remaining 20% to the touches in between. Newer products use a model that learns from past deals which touches actually made a difference. The general idea is explained on the page on marketing attribution.
Consider an Indore company that sells software for cold-storage warehouses. In June, it creates a ₹30 lakh opportunity with a frozen-food company. Looking back, the software finds four touches from that company. In January, its operations head read a blog post about power costs. In March, he attended a webinar. In April, the company's finance head clicked a LinkedIn ad twice. In June, the operations head asked for a demonstration through the website form. With the 40-20-40 split, the blog post gets ₹12 lakh of credit, the webinar and the ad get ₹3 lakh each, and the demonstration request gets ₹12 lakh. The software adds up these credits across all the quarter's deals. The report shows that webinars appeared in 60% of opportunities above ₹20 lakh. So marketing plans more webinars.
This kind of attribution follows individual buyers. A different method, marketing mix modelling (MMM), works from total spending and total sales over time, without following anyone. Many companies use both. Pipeline attribution tools usually take their data from the marketing automation system and the CRM. Their results are often shown beside the forecast in revenue intelligence, so that the sales leader sees how much of the pipeline came from marketing.