Your Marketing Is Guessing. The Answers Are Already in the Building.
Tara Lilly
September 17, 2026
A deal closes. Somebody asks what worked.
Whatever happened last gets the credit. They found us through a Google search. They filled out the form after the webinar. Great, do more of that.
Except that’s just the last thing you could see.
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Before they filled anything out, they’d read a few of your posts. Ignored a couple of emails. Asked someone in their network whether they’d heard of you. Looked you up on their phone, twice, months apart. Sat on the whole thing through a budget cycle.
Research on B2B buying journeys puts the number of touches in the dozens, spread over months. The buying group has grown too. Challenger’s research puts the typical B2B buying team at nearly twelve people, more than double what it was a few years ago.
Different studies land on different numbers depending on how they count, so I wouldn’t get attached to a specific figure. The direction is what matters. It’s not a handful of touches and it’s not one person deciding.
And then there’s the finding that should make you uncomfortable. According to 6sense’s 2024 buyer experience research, 81% of B2B buyers already have a preferred vendor before their first direct interaction with a sales rep.
They picked before you knew they existed.
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Most companies still credit the last touch. It’s the easiest thing to measure and it produces a clean answer, which is exactly the problem.
Here’s how it plays out.
Branded search looks incredible. Low cost, high conversion. Of course it does. Someone who types your company name into Google has already decided you’re worth a look. The channel that closes gets credit for a decision that was made somewhere else entirely.
Meanwhile the content, the LinkedIn presence, the referral relationships, the thing somebody read a year ago that made your name familiar, all of that shows up as nothing. No attribution, no clear ROI, no defense when someone’s looking for cuts.
So you fund what closes and defund what created the demand in the first place. It works fine for a while, because the pipeline you’re harvesting was created by spend you’ve already stopped.
Then twelve to eighteen months later the pipeline dries up and nobody can explain why. The reports all looked good.
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Attribution is genuinely hard and a lot of the journey is permanently invisible.
You will never track the conversation where someone recommended you at a conference. You can’t measure the person who read three of your posts and never engaged. Someone asking a peer “have you heard of these guys” leaves no data anywhere.
Anyone selling you perfect attribution is overselling. That’s not what I’m arguing for.
What I’m arguing is narrower: if the only thing you can measure is the last step, don’t build your entire budget around it.
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You don’t need a new platform. You need a few questions asked consistently.
Where did our last ten customers actually come from? Not the form they filled out. Ask them. “How did you first hear about us” answered by an actual human beats any dashboard you own.
What did they touch before they talked to sales? Even a rough picture is better than crediting the final click. If your CRM can hold first touch alongside last touch, that alone changes the conversation.
How long is the gap between first contact and closed deal? If it’s six months, then this quarter’s results reflect last spring’s marketing. That single fact reframes how you read every report you get.
What would we stop doing if we had to cut 30%? The answer reveals what you actually believe is working, which is often different from what the reports say.
None of this is complicated. It’s just nobody’s job.
Your agency reports on their channel. Your ads person reports on ads. Neither is going to tell you their work is getting credit that belongs somewhere else, and neither has visibility into the whole picture anyway.
Connecting marketing to revenue across channels is a leadership function. It requires someone who can see all of it, has no stake in any single channel looking good, and is accountable for the business outcome rather than the campaign result.
Without that person, you get channel reports. Channel reports are not a picture of your marketing.
The last touch is the easiest thing to see and the least useful thing to optimize for.
Your buyers are making up their minds long before they raise a hand, across more touches and more people than your reporting shows. If you fund only what you can trace, you’ll slowly starve the work that made the trace possible.
Measure what you can. Stay honest about what you can’t. And don’t let the clean number make the decisions.
If your reports look fine but the pipeline doesn’t, that gap is usually where the answer is. Let’s talk.
Nothing, as long as you know what it’s telling you. It shows the final step, not what caused the decision. Problems start when budgets get built on it.
For most companies under enterprise scale, first touch alongside last touch plus asking customers directly gets you most of the way there. Full multi-touch modeling is usually more machinery than the decision requires.
It depends on your sales cycle, which is why knowing your own average gap between first contact and close matters more than any benchmark.
Usually not. Most companies already have a CRM that could hold this data. What’s missing is someone deciding it matters and making sure it gets captured.
Founder, Tara Lilly & Co. · Fractional Marketing Leader
Tara Lilly is the founder of Tara Lilly & Co. and a fractional CMO for B2B companies. She leads strategy and brings a senior team of specialists who use AI to execute. Before starting the company, she spent 15+ years leading marketing teams across credit unions, agencies, and startups, including work on Volvo Trucks North America.
