The LeanScale Podcast · Episode 1

Why Is Multi-Touch Attribution So Hard? And Is Anyone Actually Doing It?

Bernardo Alves on what actually makes multi-touch attribution difficult — and the pragmatic first steps most teams should take instead

Bernardo Alves · Engagement Manager, LeanScale · LeanScale Hosted by Anthony Enrico
Published Updated 00:09:51 9 min read 1,748 words
Demand Generation Revenue Operations GTM Strategy
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Executive Summary

The one-paragraph brief, extended

Why this conversation matters — and who should spend the hour.

In the first-ever episode of The LeanScale Podcast, co-founder Anthony Enrico sits down with Bernardo Alves — an engagement manager at LeanScale who came up through customer success before moving into operations and business intelligence — to tackle the topic that sits at the top of nearly every marketer's wish list and the bottom of almost no one's actual implementation: multi-touch attribution. Everybody wants it, everybody has a definition for it, and yet very few companies actually run it.

Bernardo frames multi-touch as a way of tracking every step in an increasingly long, non-linear buying journey — every touch that nudged a prospect from first engagement all the way to a signed deal. He grounds it in a car purchase (research, review and aggregator sites, safety ratings, then a dealership visit), and Anthony adds his own Apple Watch journey — website research, an in-store visit to check sizing, then the buy. Both expose the blind spot of single-touch models: first-touch and last-touch each capture one end of the story and lose everything in the middle.

The pair then separate the two genuinely hard problems. Capturing activity is the easy part — most teams already know when someone joined a webinar, downloaded a white paper, or got an SDR outreach. The hard part is what you do with all of it: weighting the credit. Deciding which of, say, 20 touches earned a $50,000 deal is 'a science and an art' that demands real technology (sometimes even a data-science team), and it routinely turns political as sales, marketing, and events fight over the same win. It also has an operational prerequisite — marketing has to be a well-oiled machine, capturing campaigns and events cleanly, or signals slip through the cracks.

Their practical answer is a crawl-walk-run on-ramp. Before attempting a fully weighted model, get first-touch and last-touch right, then stand up campaign influence ('influenced by') reporting in Salesforce or whatever CRM you use — an easy, best-practice move that tells you whether a lead source is helping push opportunities over the line and lets you assign a rough ROI to an event or program. The closing principle is a theme the show returns to often: data can't tell the whole story, but if it gives you enough signal to justify the spend behind a marketing source, that's the best you can get from the exercise. Essential listening for marketing and RevOps leaders wrestling with attribution for the first time.

Key Takeaways

8 things worth stealing

The load-bearing ideas, each with the business implication and who should care.

01

Everyone wants multi-touch attribution — almost no one actually implements it

It's top of mind for nearly every marketer LeanScale works with; everybody has an idea of what it is and wants to do it, yet in practice very few companies actually stand it up. The gap between intent and implementation is the whole reason the topic is so fraught.

Why it matters: Don't assume attribution is a solved, table-stakes capability. Treat standing it up as a real project with a maturity curve, not a switch you flip in the CRM.

Marketing LeadersRevOps Leaders
02

Multi-touch means capturing every influencing touch from first engagement to signature

Buying decisions are taking longer and getting more complex. Multi-touch attribution is simply the practice of seeing all the touch points where a company nudged a prospect — from the very first engagement all the way to getting the signature in the door — rather than crediting a single moment.

Why it matters: Map the full journey before you buy tooling. If you can't name the stages a buyer moves through, you can't capture the touches that matter across them.

Marketing LeadersRevOps Leaders
03

First-touch and last-touch each tell only half the story

In the car-buying analogy, first-touch credits the review site or ad you first clicked, and last-touch credits the salesperson at the dealership — but neither captures the research, the test drive, or the in-between steps that actually moved the decision. Anthony's Apple Watch purchase (website research, an in-store sizing visit, then the buy) makes the same point.

Why it matters: Single-touch models are a starting point, not the answer. Their systematic blind spot is the middle of the funnel, which is often where the real influence happens.

Marketing LeadersRevOps Leaders
04

Tracking is a prerequisite — and marketing has to be a well-oiled machine to support it

You need a crisp sense of every stage and clean tracking across all of them. If campaigns aren't capturing attribution and events aren't showing up in the system, you get gaps and signals slip through the cracks. Operational and organizational discipline is the foundation multi-touch is built on.

Why it matters: Fix data capture at the source — campaigns, events, and engagement logging — before layering any weighting model on top, or the model inherits your gaps.

RevOps LeadersMarketing Leaders
05

Capturing activity is easy; weighting the credit is the hard part

Most teams already have a decent handle on activities — a webinar signup, a white-paper download, an SDR outreach. The difficulty appears the moment something becomes a sales-qualified lead or a closed-won deal and you have to decide who gets the credit. That, not tracking, is where attribution becomes almost impossible without serious technology behind it.

Why it matters: Direct your energy at the credit-allocation problem, not just activity logging. That's where attribution efforts actually succeed or fail.

RevOps LeadersMarketing LeadersRevenue Executives
06

Weighting credit is a science and an art — and it needs real tooling

A single customer might show 20 touches; deciding which ones matter and how much is its own discipline, much like managing lead or health scores. There's ongoing learning, management, and growth demanded by the methodology, and doing it well often requires a lot of technology or even a data-science team — which is exactly why many teams shy away from it.

Why it matters: Budget for the management overhead. Assigning the wrong weights leads to wrong decisions, so treat the weighting model as something you tune over time, not set once.

RevOps LeadersMarketing Leaders
07

Attribution turns political — departments fight over the same deal

Because credit maps to budget and recognition, attribution gets contentious. LeanScale has seen it go political inside companies: the SDR claims the deal, marketing says it was the webinar, events says they met the buyer at a trade show — and everyone wants credit for the same win.

Why it matters: Set the credit rules and governance up front, cross-functionally, so the model arbitrates disputes instead of becoming the battleground for them.

Revenue ExecutivesMarketing LeadersSales Leaders
08

Start with first + last touch and campaign influence before a full weighted model

For anyone stepping into attribution for the first time, jumping straight to a fully weighted model is too many moving parts. The pragmatic on-ramp: get first-touch and last-touch in place, then stand up detailed campaign data and campaign-influence ('influenced by') reporting in your CRM. That alone lets you look at an event, see how many attendees bought, and assign it a rough ROI. The goal isn't perfection — it's enough data to justify the spend behind a marketing source.

Why it matters: Sequence attribution as crawl-walk-run. Campaign influence reporting is cheap, best-practice, and delivers most of the early decision-making value without the complexity of full weighting.

Marketing LeadersRevOps LeadersRevenue Executives
Frameworks Discussed

3 named models

Every framework Jimmy names, defined and time-stamped.

First-Touch, Last-Touch, and Multi-Touch Attribution

02:48

Three lenses on crediting a deal: first-touch credits the initial engagement (often an ad or third-party/aggregator site), last-touch credits the final interaction (the dealership conversation that closed it), and multi-touch tries to credit every influencing step in between.

Using the car-buying journey, Bernardo shows that first- and last-touch each capture only one end of the path and miss the research, test drive, and other steps that actually shaped the decision — which is the entire case for multi-touch.

Weighting the Credit: Peanut-Butter Spread vs. Weighted Model

06:41

The problem of distributing credit across many touches. You can 'peanut butter spread' it evenly across lead sources, or build a weighting mechanism that assigns more credit to the touches that mattered most.

This is the genuinely hard part of attribution — 'a science and an art' akin to health/lead scoring. With 20 touches on a single customer, choosing which matter (and by how much) usually requires real technology or a data-science team, and getting the weights wrong leads to wrong decisions.

The Pragmatic Attribution On-Ramp

07:52

A staged approach for teams new to attribution: get first-touch and last-touch tracking in place, add detailed campaign data and campaign-influence ('influenced by') reporting in the CRM, and only then reach for a fully weighted model.

First and last touch won't tell the full picture, but having both puts you ahead of nothing. Campaign influence reporting is easy, best-practice, and lets you tie an event to downstream purchases for a rough ROI — enough to justify marketing spend without the complexity of full weighting.

Best Quotes

12 lines worth clipping

Pulled verbatim. Copy or share any of them.

“Hi, I'm Anthony. Welcome to the LeanScale podcast, where we talk about everything RevOps. Thanks for listening.”
Anthony Enrico 00:00
“Multi-touch attribution is essentially just a way of tracking all of the steps that take place in today's ever more complex buying experience. All of those touches that happen, from first engagement all the way to getting that signature in the door, is really what multi-touch is all about.”
Bernardo Alves 01:34
“Very few people are going to just go into the first dealership that they see in the streets. You're generally going to have a sense of what car you're looking for, do some research, look at safety ratings — all of these things that help influence you to make a decision.”
Bernardo Alves 02:16
“Your last touch would be you were just at the dealership and you talked to somebody to get the deal done. But it wouldn't capture all of the other steps that might have taken place in between.”
Bernardo Alves 03:22
“We started doing a little bit more health tracking at the Enrico home, and my wife was saying, hey, you need to have an Apple Watch. There were a lot of steps along that journey that definitely weren't captured, or should have been captured.”
Anthony Enrico 03:56
“Marketing has to be a well-oiled machine in order to even support it. If your campaigns aren't capturing attribution, your events aren't showing up in the system, you're going to have gaps in there.”
Bernardo Alves 04:37
“I might have 20 touches that show up under the customer — which ones matter? How do I determine that? That's a science and an art all of its own.”
Bernardo Alves 05:10
“Let's say you close a $50,000 deal. Who gets the credit for that $50,000? That's the part that becomes almost impossible unless you have a lot of technology behind it, or maybe even a data science team.”
Anthony Enrico 05:53
“You could peanut butter spread it across the lead sources, or you could come up with some weighting mechanism — but that's the part where I feel like it really gets tough.”
Anthony Enrico 06:41
“Departments will fight over it. We've been in companies where we've seen that turn a little bit political, where people were fighting over the same attribution and wanting credit for a deal.”
Bernardo Alves 07:15
“First touch and last touch are not going to tell the full picture, but if you have both of those, you're in a better position than not. And getting really detailed campaign data in Salesforce — being able to track influenced-by — is a really powerful feature.”
Bernardo Alves 07:52
“Data cannot tell the whole story, but it tells part of the story. As long as you have enough data to justify the spend you're putting toward a marketing source, that's the best you can get from this exercise.”
Anthony Enrico 09:16
Practical Advice

What should you actually do?

The playbook, split by the seat you sit in.

Marketing Leaders

  • Map your full buyer journey and its stages before buying attribution tooling — you can't capture the touches that matter if you can't name the stages they happen in.
  • Don't jump straight to a fully weighted model. Nail first-touch and last-touch first, then turn on campaign influence ('influenced by') reporting to see which sources push opportunities over the line.
  • Use campaign influence to assign rough ROI: look at who attended an event and how many of them bought, and let that justify (or kill) the spend behind that program.
  • Accept that the goal is enough data to make better-informed spend decisions — not a perfect, fully attributed picture.

RevOps Leaders

  • Fix data capture at the source first: campaigns capturing attribution, events flowing into the system, engagement logged cleanly — otherwise any weighting model inherits your gaps.
  • Treat credit-weighting like scoring: it's a science-and-art discipline you tune over time, and it may need real technology or a data-science partner to do well.
  • Sequence attribution maturity as crawl-walk-run so the org sees value early instead of stalling on a big-bang weighted model.

Revenue Executives

  • Expect attribution to get political — set the credit rules and governance cross-functionally up front so the model arbitrates disputes instead of becoming one.
  • Remember wrong weights drive wrong decisions; hold the attribution model to the standard of informing spend, not settling internal credit fights.
Operations Takeaways

By function

The same conversation, filtered for RevOps, pipeline/marketing ops, and customer ops.

Revenue Operations

  • Clean capture first. Attribution lives or dies on operational hygiene — campaigns capturing attribution, events flowing into the system, engagement logged — before any model sits on top.
  • Weighting is the real work. Activity tracking is largely solved; distributing credit across ~20 touches per customer is the science-and-art discipline that needs technology or data science.
  • Crawl-walk-run. Stand up first/last touch and campaign-influence reporting to deliver early value, then graduate to a weighted model.
  • Govern the credit. Because credit maps to budget and recognition, define the rules cross-functionally so RevOps arbitrates disputes rather than owning the fight.
Metrics Mentioned

The numbers, with context

$50,000
Example deal value

The hypothetical closed-won deal Anthony uses to frame the core question: who gets the credit for it?

~20
Touches per customer

Bernardo's example of how many touch points can show up under a single customer, illustrating why weighting which ones matter is hard.

Entities

Companies, people & tools mentioned

Auto-extracted and linked into the knowledge graph.

Companies

LeanScaleGTM Operations

Bernardo Alves is an engagement manager at LeanScale; the firm works with marketers for whom multi-touch attribution is consistently top of mind.

00:20Company →
AppleConsumer Electronics

Anthony's Apple Watch purchase — website research, an in-store visit to check sizing, then the buy — used as a personal multi-touch journey whose in-between steps mostly go uncaptured.

03:56Company →

People

Bernardo Alvesguest

Engagement manager at LeanScale; came up through customer success into operations and business intelligence, focused on attribution and usage-based tracking.

Engagement Manager, LeanScaleProfile →
Anthony Enricohost

Co-founder of LeanScale and host of The LeanScale Podcast.

Co-FounderProfile →

Tools & software

SalesforceCRM

Where Bernardo recommends capturing detailed campaign data and turning on campaign-influence ('influenced by') reporting as the easy, best-practice first step toward attribution — applicable to whatever CRM you use.

Website ↗
Related LeanScale Services

Where this shows up in the work

Fractional RevOps

Embedded, field-facing RevOps leadership and execution — the operator model Jimmy describes, delivered as a service.

Standing up attribution — clean campaign/event capture, campaign-influence reporting, and a credit-weighting model in the CRM — is exactly the systems-and-data RevOps work LeanScale embeds to run.

Forecasting & ARR Definition

Define a raise-worthy ARR and build a reliable consumption forecast across finance, data science, and go-to-market.

Attribution turns messy multi-touch signals into a defensible number you can act on — the same measurement rigor LeanScale brings to defining revenue metrics and justifying spend.

Frequently Asked Questions

Straight answers

Generated from the conversation, marked up for search and AI extraction.

What is multi-touch attribution?

Multi-touch attribution is a way of tracking all the steps in a buyer's increasingly long and complex journey and crediting each touch point that influenced the decision — from the very first engagement all the way to the signed deal. Unlike single-touch models, it tries to capture the many interactions in between rather than crediting one moment.

Why is multi-touch attribution so hard to implement?

The hard part isn't tracking activities — most teams already know when someone joined a webinar or got an SDR outreach. It's weighting the credit: deciding which of the many touches on a deal deserve credit, and how much. That is 'a science and an art' that usually requires significant technology or even a data-science team, and it depends on marketing being a well-oiled machine so no signals slip through the cracks.

What's the difference between first-touch, last-touch, and multi-touch attribution?

First-touch credits the initial interaction (often an ad or a review/aggregator site), and last-touch credits the final one (the conversation that closed the deal). Each captures only one end of the journey and misses everything in between. Multi-touch attribution tries to credit all the influencing steps across the whole path.

How do you decide which touch gets credit for a deal?

You either 'peanut butter spread' credit evenly across the lead sources, or build a weighting mechanism that gives more credit to the touches that mattered most. Weighting is the difficult part — a single customer may show around 20 touches — and getting the weights wrong leads to wrong decisions, which is why it often takes real technology or a data-science team to do well.

Where should a company start with attribution if it has never done it?

Don't jump straight to a fully weighted model. Start by getting first-touch and last-touch tracking in place, then capture detailed campaign data and turn on campaign-influence ('influenced by') reporting in Salesforce or your CRM. That lets you see how many attendees of an event actually bought and assign it a rough ROI — most of the early value without the complexity of full weighting.

Why does attribution become political inside companies?

Because credit maps to budget and recognition. When a deal closes, the SDR, the webinar, and the trade show can all claim it, and departments end up fighting over credit for the same win. Setting the credit rules cross-functionally up front lets the attribution model arbitrate those disputes instead of becoming the battleground for them.

Can attribution data tell you exactly which marketing worked?

No — data can't tell the whole story, only part of it. The realistic goal isn't a perfect, fully attributed picture but enough signal to make better-informed decisions and justify the spend behind a given marketing source. If you can defend the spend with data, that's the best outcome the exercise offers.

Timeline

Jump through the conversation

Click any chapter to open it in the transcript.

00:00Cold open + welcome to the LeanScale Podcast 00:20Meet Bernardo Alves 01:34What multi-touch attribution actually means 02:16The car-buying analogy: first vs. last touch 03:22Anthony's Apple Watch journey 04:37What makes multi-touch so hard 05:53Who gets credit for the $50k deal? 07:15When attribution turns political 07:52Where to start: first/last touch + campaign influence 09:16Summary: data justifies the spend
Full Transcript

The whole conversation

Broken into chapters, searchable, verbatim from the audio. Speakers inferred (not diarized).

Transcript as markdown ↓ Whole episode as markdown ↓
00:00Cold open + welcome to the LeanScale Podcast

0:00 Hi, I'm Anthony. Welcome to the Lean Scale podcast where we talk about everything wrap-ups. Thanks for listening.

00:20Meet Bernardo Alves

0:20 Uh, Bernardo, thank you for being here with me today. Really appreciate it. I'm excited to dive into some of the topics here. Um, I think we have some exciting ideas to share, especially from your perspective and with your experience. Um, before we get started though, do you want to give a quick background? You know, name, role, uh, some of your past experience, just to give the listeners an idea. Yeah, absolutely. It's a pleasure to be here on the podcast. So name is Bernardo Alves. I'm an engagement manager here at Lean Scale. Uh, started out my career in customer success, gradually moved my way

0:56 into operations and business intelligence and have really been on that track ever since. So, uh, excited to share a little bit more about how we can cover some of the pitfalls and challenges of doing usage-based tracking and multi-touch attribution today. Perfect. Perfect. So let's dive right into it. I think, um, you know, this is one of the topics, especially with the marketers that we work with. That's really, really top of mind. Um, seems like everybody wants to do it, everybody has an idea of what it is, but we don't see a lot of companies actually implementing this and that's multi-touch attribution.

01:34What multi-touch attribution actually means

1:34 Um, before we go into deep, uh, could you give your perspective? What does multi-touch attribution mean to you? Yeah, absolutely. So multi-touch attribution is essentially just a way of tracking all of the steps that take place in today's ever complex buying, uh, experience, um, decisions are taking longer and longer to be made and being able to see all of the touch points in which a company might have had some influence in the prospect or nudged them a certain way, all of those touches that happen from first engagement, all the way to getting that signature in the door, uh, is really what multi-touch is all about. Absolutely.

02:16The car-buying analogy: first vs. last touch

2:16 Do you have a, something that might connect with people listening? What's a good personal experience you have maybe going through your own buying cycle? Yeah, absolutely. I think the easiest one to, to kind of bring it back to that everybody can relate is buying a car. Right. Um, I think very few people are going to just go into the first dealership that they, uh, see in the streets and just look at something, uh, you're generally going to have a sense of what car you're looking for. You're going to do some research into, um, what are the options on the market? You're going to look at safety rating.

2:48 So you're going to be looking at a bunch of information, going to different websites, all of these things that are going to help influence you make a decision, and then ultimately you're probably going to go in store and find some way of, uh, you know, getting that car purchased. So if you look at it from the lens of a first touch attribution, you're likely going to end up with, uh, an ad or a third party website in which you might have been looking at a review site or an aggregator, uh, to get some kind of information might've clicked on that link and landed on the website page. So that's how they would first hear about you.

03:22Anthony's Apple Watch journey

3:22 Your last touch would be you were just at the dealership and you talked to somebody to get the deal done. Uh, but it wouldn't capture all of the other steps that might have taken place in between of you reaching out to somebody, scheduling a test drive, anything like that might have taken place. That's a really good example, a really good example. And I think the most recent one I have is, um, I was buying a new Apple watch. So, uh, we started doing a little bit more health tracking at the Enrico home and my wife was saying, Hey, you need to have an Apple watch. We need to start, you know, competing against who's tracking steps.

3:56 And same thing, uh, went to the website to look at the most recent ones. I had been in an Apple store just to take a look at the sizing, which one makes the most sense, um, and then eventually made a purchase. But there were a lot of steps along that journey that definitely weren't captured, uh, or, or should have been captured that I'm, I'm sure Apple's doing a good job of multi-touch, but so let's talk about what makes it hard. So lots of companies are tracking activities. Um, but what, what is the critical aspect of multi-touch that makes it really difficult? Yeah, I would say that there's a couple in particular.

04:37What makes multi-touch so hard

4:37 The first one is you have to have a really clear sense of all the steps in your journey, all your tracking across those stages need to be really crisp. Otherwise you might have signals that are slipping through the cracks. So in terms of organizational and operational efficiency, marketing has to be a well loyal machine in order to even support it. Uh, so that's the biggest thing. If you don't have your campaigns capturing attribution, your events are not showing up in the system. You don't have a clear sense of what engagement happened with those prospects at different times. You're going to have gaps in there.

5:10 Um, the second part is really, what do you do with all of that information? Once you actually have it in, right? It feels very similar to, to health scores in a way in which there's a lot of management of what should I wait this as? What was the defining factor in here? I might have 20 touches that show up under the customer, which ones matter. How do I determine that? That's a science and an art, all of its own. So when you sign up for multi-touch, there just is a lot of learning management and growing over time that is commanded by the methodology. Uh, which is why a lot of people shy away from it. Yeah. I think, I think you hit the nail on the head.

05:53Who gets credit for the $50k deal?

5:53 I think that's the biggest part of multi-touch that makes it so difficult. So in, in my experience, what I've seen, people can track the activities. So people are usually have a good sense of when a customer joined a webinar, downloaded a white paper. If an SDR reached out to them, they typically have a good, uh, handle on that. I think it's when something moves to a sales qualified lead or something moves to a close to one opportunity. So let's say in typical SAS company, let's say you close a $50,000 deal. Who gets the credit for that $50,000? And that's the part that just becomes almost impossible unless you have a lot

6:41 of technology behind it, or maybe even a data science team. So what I've seen, there are some methodologies. You could peanut butter spread it across the lead sources. Uh, or you could come up with some weighting mechanism, but that's the part where I feel like it really gets tough. Right. And in a way it adds, you know, a human element back into it, right? If you assign the wrong weights, you could end up making the wrong decisions. So, uh, it's one of those things that requires a lot of attention to detail, a lot of management, and you're exactly right. Departments will fight over it.

07:15When attribution turns political

7:15 So we, we, I mean, we've been in companies where we've seen that turn a little bit political, where people were fighting over the same attribution and wanting credit for a deal. Right. So yeah, SDR got the deal. No, it's cause they went to the webinar, but I met them at a trade show and then who gets the credit? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So what do we do about it? Yeah. So I think for most people, um, especially if you're first stepping your toes into multi-touch, it's a bit difficult to go right into it there. There's a lot of moving parts. So generally what we recommend is if you have no experience in this before,

07:52Where to start: first/last touch + campaign influence

7:52 there's going to be a couple of places you can get started on, uh, first touch and last touch are not going to tell the full picture, but if you have both of those, you're in a better position than not, um, something else that you can do that is really easy to set up its best practices. You should be doing it anyway, is getting really detailed campaign data in Salesforce, right? Or whatever CRM you're using. Um, being able to track influence by is a really powerful feature, right? You might not have it explicitly listed as, okay, this is the thing that converted it, but if I can go back and look at an event and say, out of these

8:31 people that showed up at the event, how many of them actually ended up buying? Right. I can assign a pretty decent ROI on that event, if that's the case. Perfect. So let me sum it up. Multitouch is hard. Yes. The hard part is waiting the credit. Where do you distribute? Um, and then if you can't do a full weighted attribution model, the next best thing, make sure you're tracking first touch, make sure you're tracking last touch and at least have campaign influence reporting set up. So that way, you know, is that lead source helping move that particular opportunity or that particular lead over the finish line and ultimately helping you close more business.

09:16Summary: data justifies the spend

9:16 And just like anything, and we'll, we'll talk about this a lot. Um, and data cannot tell the whole story, but it tells part of the story. And as long as you have enough data to justify the spend you're putting towards a marketing source, that's the best you can get from this exercise. Absolutely. Yeah. Every time that you can get some data and be able to make better informed decisions, you're in a good spot, even if it's not perfect. Awesome. Thank you so much, Bernardo. Really appreciate it. Enjoy diving deep on this topic with you and looking forward to the next one. Absolutely. My pleasure, Anthony.