There is a quiet absurdity that underpins modern B2B marketing, and it’s the expectation that every dollar spent should return with a neatly labeled receipt. In boardrooms and dashboards alike, marketing leaders are asked to trace the path from campaign to contract with forensic clarity, as though complex buying journeys could be reduced to the digital equivalent of a breadcrumb trail.
And this theory is seductive. With data abundance and AI-powered dashboards all around us, why shouldn’t we know exactly which channel drove which deal? But this promise of precision has become marketing’s most expensive mirage. It has spawned an entire ecosystem of attribution tools, dashboards, models, and reports, none of which resolve the core issue: attribution in B2B is structurally incompatible with how buying actually happens.
And this is something I discussed with Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SparkToro. Because this isn’t a matter of needing another better technology. No technology will fix the fundamental misalignment between how humans make decisions and how businesses try to measure them. If you prefer to watch, the recording’s here:
In consumer markets, where purchase cycles are often short and buyer behaviors more easily tracked, attribution can approximate reality. A social ad leads to a click, which leads to a purchase, often within minutes. But B2B is not built for that level of simplicity. When selling to enterprise buyers, particularly in verticals like cybersecurity, fintech, or medtech, the journey is long, non-linear, and frequently invisible to any analytics software.
A typical deal might begin with a whispered vendor recommendation in a Slack thread, followed by weeks of passive lurking with a website visit here, a webinar there. A marketing leader might stumble upon a LinkedIn post at just the right time. Then, silence. Three months pass. The prospect reappears via a branded search, books a demo, brings three colleagues, and eventually, after legal, procurement, and an internal bake-off… signs a six-figure contract.
6Sense’s 2024 B2B buyer experience report found that nearly 70% of the buyer’s journey happens before they engage with the seller. In other words, by the time attribution starts tracking, the decision is mostly made. And it wasn’t your last-click ad that did the convincing; it was your brand, your presence, your reputation, and a dozen interactions no pixel can see. But ask most attribution software where the deal came from, and it will confidently proclaim: “Paid search.” And so, another quarter’s budget is handed back to Google.
This is the crux of the problem. Attribution offers the illusion of clarity, and leadership teams desperate for certainty in uncertain markets cling to it. But as Rand noted:
“Attribution is pointless. Because it’s impossible.”
A strong claim, but is it really? Because if we're being honest, far more marketers agree with it than are willing to say aloud.
It would be one thing if flawed attribution merely produced incomplete data. But it does worse: it distorts strategic decision-making, often in favor of short-term, easily measured channels. Paid search and social ads flourish, but not necessarily because they perform best, but because they’re easiest to measure. Meanwhile, the slow-burn engines of brand, content, SEO, PR, and community are relegated to “nice to have” status, precisely because they resist the kind of tidy measurement that looks good in a quarterly board deck.
Ironically, even the platforms that offer “attribution-friendly” data, meaning Google, Meta, and their increasingly expensive likes, are not passive observers in this story. They are, in many ways, the ones writing the narrative. They define the metrics, shape the reporting, and charge handsomely for the privilege. The very channels marketers rely on to prove ROI are the same ones most incentivized to claim credit for it. But As Rand quipped, and not without exasperation:
“If leadership demands attribution, then give me the budget for Google and Facebook and I’ll buy some clicks. Just don’t ask me to do anything else.”
That is the tradeoff. If you want clean attribution, you must forgo the messy, unmeasurable realities of actual human buying behavior. You cannot run brand campaigns, test new messaging, sponsor podcasts, or show up at industry events, not if your budget lives and dies by what shows up in a CRM attribution report. And if you follow Ascend2’s Marketing Attribution Report, only 29% of marketers are "extremely confident" in the accuracy of these reports. The rest… not so much, if not at all.
Which leads to the inevitable question: If attribution is this broken, what should replace it?
There is a better way, albeit one that requires marketers and, more importantly, their stakeholders to reframe what success looks like. Rather than tracing every conversion back to a source, the goal should be to observe lift: the directional movement of key metrics that indicate a healthy, functioning marketing engine.
This approach is not new. Marketers in the 20th century built billion-dollar brands without ever knowing which billboard or jingle closed the deal. They invested, watched for lift, and refined over time. What’s new is the expectation that modern marketing, equipped with its many martech tools, should produce surgical precision even in situations where chaos and consensus define the path to purchase.
Rand puts it plainly:
“The way to invest in marketing and prove that it works is to make an investment, and then see lift.”
That lift can show up across the funnel:
None of these movements will ever map perfectly to individual campaigns. But taken together, they offer a far more accurate picture of whether your marketing strategy is working, especially over time.
Ultimately, the attribution problem is also a trust problem. Many CEOs, particularly those from product or sales backgrounds, remain fundamentally skeptical of marketing as a discipline. They trust their CRMs more than their CMOs. They would rather see a bad number than a nuanced explanation. And so, marketers contort themselves into reporting gymnastics, trying to reverse-engineer ROI to appease leadership rather than inform strategy. LinkedIn’s B2B ROI Impact Research confirms that:
This skepticism, however, says more about executive culture than marketing capability. Rand’s diagnosis is, again, blunt:
“If you don’t trust and believe the people you hired, that is your fault. That is your problem, CEO. And you should fix it.”
The irony, of course, is that most CEOs demand creativity, boldness, and market differentiation, but only when it’s paired with riskless data and immediate ROI. Which is a little like asking your designer for an original logo that everyone will love instantly and no one will disagree with. Safe? Perhaps. Memorable? Never…
If your CEO views marketing as an expense rather than an engine, the path forward isn’t necessarily easy (it never is), but it is navigable. Here’s how to begin shifting the conversation:
For startups in particular, the attribution illusion creates a strategic opening. Larger competitors, bogged down by risk committees and consensus-driven messaging, often default to what is easily defensible: think bland messaging, whitepapers, paid search, generic gated content. This is where bolder firms can win. Rand said it himself,
“If big companies were braver, startups like mine would never get a chance to eat their lunch.”
If you cannot outspend your competitors, you must outbrand them. Take creative risks. Show up where they won’t. Say the thing they’re too polite (or too slow) to say. Yes, it may feel scary. But irrelevance should feel scarier.
The bottom line is simple. The obsession with attribution is costing B2B companies far more than they realize, not just in tools and headcount, but in opportunity cost. It pushes marketers toward the measurable, not the impactful. It rewards short-term activity over long-term growth. And it feeds a cycle of distrust that no dashboard can fix.
At Envy, we’ve been inside those boardrooms. We’ve built the attribution models. We’ve played the game. But we’ve also helped clients pivot from chasing data they’ll never get to showing lift that stakeholders actually understand. From defending tactics to leading working GTM strategies.
Because marketing can absolutely prove its worth… Just not in the way most CRMs suggest. So if you’re ready to stop playing the attribution game and start building marketing that earns executive respect, let’s talk.