We all want to know which marketing effort led to which business, but marketing attribution, as we know it, is dead.
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If you are still crediting closed deals the same way you always have, you are making budget calls on data that no longer tells the truth.

I know this firsthand. I have silently influenced millions of dollars in software purchases. A brand I use, a software I kept seeing, a friend's recommendation, a platform I used at an old job and wanted again. The vendors never saw any of those marketing touches, yet their attribution report likely credited a direct visit simply because the data was available.

So how many anecdotes does it take before we call it data? Every time someone talks about a brand, or you pass one along yourself, that touch is anecdotal. Do not underestimate it. Every story is an anecdote, and every story is also a piece of data.

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Radio and billboards figured this out long ago. They never claimed to know which exact commercial closed the sale. They asked customers, made platform-specific offers, and watched whether business went up. That was enough to make good decisions, and it still is.

Digital tracking convinced us we could skip the asking. That gift has expired.

The fix is what I call Decision Point Marketing. You make sure that you have content in their path at every decision point.
You stop leaning on the dashboard and start asking customers about the decision points that led them to you. The data may catch a click or two, but the customer remembers the whole path, and they will tell you if you ask.

Three places to start this week:

1. Put a freeform "how did you hear about us?" question on every contact form. No dropdowns, just open text.
2. Have your Sales reps ask two questions on discovery calls: what made you start looking, and what did you do right before reaching out?
3. Capture the answers in the customer's exact words. An AI tool can group hundreds of messy answers into categories you can count.

Where the humans and the dashboard disagree, trust the humans.

The full breakdown, including how to turn these answers into a report your leadership will actually trust, is here:

​Read: Why Your Marketing Attribution Is Useless (and What To Do Instead)​

Yours in Revenue,
​A. Lee Judge

ALeeJudge.com | ContentMonsta.com

Author of CASH: The 4 Keys to Better Sales, Smarter Marketing, and a Supercharged Revenue Machine​