Account Story
A chronological, context-rich narrative of every interaction and touchpoint associated with an account, from first engagement through close (and beyond). Unlike a simple activity log, an account story connects the dots across teams and tools to reveal how a deal actually unfolded.
Read more →Buying Group
The collection of individuals at a target account who are involved in a purchasing decision. In B2B, deals are rarely driven by a single person - buying groups typically include champions, influencers, decision-makers, and gatekeepers across multiple departments.
Read more →CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
The total cost of acquiring a new customer, including all sales and marketing expenses. In B2B, CAC calculations must account for long sales cycles, multi-touch attribution, and the involvement of multiple teams.
Read more →CAC Payback Period
The number of months it takes for a customer to generate enough gross margin to cover the cost of acquiring them. This metric is critical for understanding unit economics and making informed investment decisions.
Read more →Forensic Attribution
A methodology that reconstructs the full customer journey from raw signals across multiple data sources, rather than relying solely on pre-captured CRM data. Forensic attribution infers missing touchpoints and builds a complete picture of what actually influenced a deal.
Read more →Impact-Weighted Attribution Model
An attribution approach that assigns credit to touchpoints based on their actual impact on deal outcomes, rather than using arbitrary rules like first-touch or last-touch. Impact-weighted models use AI and statistical methods to determine which activities truly moved the needle.
Read more →Revenue Attribution
The practice of connecting revenue outcomes (closed deals, expansion, renewals) back to the marketing and sales activities that influenced them. Effective revenue attribution goes beyond simple lead source tracking to understand the full, multi-touch journey.
Read more →Touchpoint
Any interaction between a prospect/customer and your organization - including website visits, emails, meetings, events, content downloads, ads, and more. In B2B, many touchpoints are invisible to traditional tracking, making comprehensive touchpoint recovery essential for accurate attribution.
Read more →Zero-Sum Attribution
An attribution approach where every dollar of pipeline or revenue must be assigned to exactly one source or channel, so that all credit 'squares' to the total. While intuitive, zero-sum models force teams into competition over credit and often misrepresent how B2B deals actually close.
Read more →First-Touch Attribution
An attribution model that assigns 100% of the credit for a deal or opportunity to the very first interaction a prospect has with your brand. Simple to implement but often misleading in complex B2B sales cycles where dozens of touchpoints influence a buying decision.
Read more →Last-Touch Attribution
An attribution model that assigns 100% of the credit for a deal or opportunity to the final interaction before a conversion event, such as an opportunity being created or a deal closing. Like first-touch, it oversimplifies multi-stakeholder B2B journeys.
Read more →Multi-Touch Attribution
An attribution methodology that distributes credit for pipeline or revenue across multiple touchpoints in the buyer journey, rather than assigning it all to a single interaction. Models range from simple rule-based approaches (linear, U-shaped, W-shaped) to advanced AI-driven systems.
Read more →Dark Funnel
The collection of buyer activities and influences that happen outside the reach of traditional tracking and analytics tools. This includes word-of-mouth referrals, private community discussions, podcast mentions, peer conversations, and other channels where intent is formed but never captured in your CRM.
Read more →Self-Reported Attribution
A qualitative attribution method where prospects are asked directly how they heard about your company, typically through a form field like 'How did you hear about us?' It captures signals from the dark funnel that system-based tracking cannot see, but is subject to recall bias and inconsistency.
Read more →Identity Resolution
The process of matching and merging fragmented person records across multiple GTM systems — CRM, marketing automation, email, call recordings — into a single, unified profile. Also called persona resolution, it ensures that the same human isn't counted as three different leads just because they appear in Salesforce, HubSpot, and Gong under slightly different names or emails.
Read more →Pipeline Velocity
A composite metric that measures how quickly qualified opportunities move through the sales pipeline and convert to revenue. It factors in the number of opportunities, average deal size, win rate, and length of sales cycle to produce a single dollar-per-day figure that represents the speed of your revenue engine.
Read more →Influence Window
The configurable time period used to determine whether a marketing or sales touchpoint is considered relevant to a given opportunity. If a touchpoint falls within the influence window (e.g., 90 days before opportunity creation), it receives attribution credit. Also called a lookback window, this parameter is one of the most consequential — and debated — settings in any attribution system.
Read more →Campaign Influence
A measurement framework that connects marketing campaigns to the pipeline and revenue they helped generate, regardless of whether the campaign was the original source of the lead. Campaign influence models track which campaign members later appeared on opportunities, providing a more complete picture than simple lead-source tracking.
Read more →Sourced Pipeline
Pipeline that is directly attributed to a specific team, channel, or campaign as the originating source of the opportunity. In most B2B organizations, sourced pipeline is distinguished from influenced pipeline — sourced means the activity created the opportunity, while influenced means the activity touched the deal but didn't originate it. The distinction drives budget allocation and team credit.
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