Before the spotlight hit the SIGNAL 2025 keynote stage with Attribution CEO, Ryan Koonce and Chief Growth Officer at Rocket Lawyer, Deborah Holstein—and before our partnership with Twilio Segment was officially announced—the real action started virtually.
Dubbed the Attribution Smackdown: Myth vs. Reality, this pre-SIGNAL gathering brought together some of the sharpest minds in marketing, growth and go-to-market (GTM) to answer one deceptively complex question that’s widely debated in the space:
“What actually is attribution and how important is it?”
What followed was part masterclass, part myth-busting session, part real-talk therapy. Hosted by Ryan Koonce, Founder & CEO of Attribution, the panel featured:
- Aaron Cort, Operating Partner, Marketing & Growth at Craft Ventures — a former operator who scaled ClickUp from $4M to $150M ARR at Head of Marketing and VP of Operations, now guiding top SaaS companies like Replit and Supabase on growth architecture, marketing positioning and organic, viral growth.
- Bill Macaitis, former CMO / CRO at Slack and CMO at Zendesk, and former SVP of Marketing at Salesforce — the only CMO to lead three SaaS giants to IPO, known for pioneering brand-first GTM strategy and operational alignment.
- Kyle Poyar, Co-founder and Operating Partner at Tremont, former Operating Partner OpenView and author of Growth Unhinged — a trusted advisor to almost 100K+ leaders, helping price, package, and more effectively grow.
Together, they tackled what multi-touch attribution (MTA) gets right, where it still fails, and what modern growth teams must do to make it work in today’s fragmented funnel.
For the top 10 takeaways from the event, take a look below.
1. Attribution ≠ Just Ad Spend
The session kicked off with a foundational truth bomb: If your attribution model ends at paid clicks, you’re missing the majority of the buyer journey.
Bill Macaitis put it bluntly:
“Ad spend is only one part of the journey. Brand, content, social, community—these channels are doing heavy lifting, but go completely unrecognized in most models.”
— Bill Macaitis, former CMO & CRO at Slack/Zendesk, Founder at SaaS CMO Pro
Most attribution models are optimized for tracking spend — not understanding influence. But what moves modern buyers often lives outside the spreadsheet:
- A tweet that makes someone curious
- A podcast episode shared in a Slack group
- A comment on LinkedIn that builds credibility
- A peer referral during a happy hour
- A branded search triggered by weeks of dark social
None of these show up in standard clickstream data. But every one of them shapes buying intent.
Attribution Has to Match How People Actually Buy
Today’s buyers don’t follow a funnel. They follow curiosity — across platforms, communities, and conversations. Attribution systems must evolve to track that real-world, nonlinear behavior.
That means:
- Supplementing click data with self-reported attribution
- Incorporating influence-based signals like content engagement and community activity
- Connecting product usage and sales touches with brand and awareness inputs
- Moving beyond “last non-direct click” and into multi-touch, intent-based models
💡 Key Principle: If it influences buying behavior, it belongs in the model — regardless of whether it has a UTM.
Track What Drives Growth — Not Just What’s Trackable
Great attribution doesn’t just measure what’s easy. It measures what matters. Because in today’s GTM landscape, brand is performance.
2. MTA Isn’t Just for Big Companies
A common myth? That multi-touch attribution (MTA) is reserved for enterprise teams with data warehouses, reverse ETL tools, and a bench of analytics engineers.
Kyle Poyar dismantled that notion:
“You don’t need Snowflake, DBT, and three data engineers to get value from MTA.”
— Kyle Poyar, Co-founder & Operating Partner at Tremont, Writer at Growth Unhinged
In fact, some of the most resourceful attribution setups are coming from companies under $10M ARR. These teams aren’t building complex pipelines — they’re stacking scrappy, smart tactics to find clarity without overkill.
What Scrappy MTA Looks Like:
- Branded search lift analysis: Run YouTube, podcast, or community campaigns and measure the lift in branded queries — it’s a real signal of intent.
- Geo holdout experiments: Launch campaigns in a few test regions and hold others constant to evaluate impact.
- Self-reported attribution: Add “How did you hear about us?” to your demo form — then actually read the responses.
These approaches may not be statistically perfect, but they are directionally powerful — and often more actionable than what a GA4 dashboard provides.
Aaron Cort echoed the mindset:
“If you’re not ready for data-driven models, triangulate. Compare three models and find signal in the overlap.”
— Aaron Cort, Operating Partner at Craft Ventures, First Head of Marketing and VP of Operations at ClickUp
The Bar Isn’t Precision — It’s Progress
Attribution isn’t binary. You don’t need to pick between “sophisticated” and “nothing.” The best GTM teams simply start with what they have, ask better questions, and layer in complexity as they scale.
Because clarity beats complexity — especially when you’re still building product–market fit.
3. Data Without Alignment Is Just Noise
Attribution data is only as powerful as the alignment it creates. When marketing, sales, and finance operate off different versions of the truth, attribution becomes noise — or worse, a political weapon.
Bill Macaitis described how this disconnect plays out inside many companies:
“Attribution isn’t just a marketing tool. It’s a shared language between functions.”
— Bill Macaitis, former CMO & CRO at Slack/Zendesk, Founder at SaaS CMO Pro
At Slack, he used attribution not just to measure campaign performance, but to inform headcount planning, budget allocation, and even product roadmap discussions. When attribution became a shared framework across the GTM and exec team, it unlocked confident, coordinated decision-making.
Ryan Koonce added:
“It’s not a dashboard — it’s an alignment engine.”
— Ryan Koonce, Founder & CEO at Attribution
Attribution Only Works When Everyone Buys In
It’s easy to build attribution that works for marketing. The real challenge is building a model that:
- Finance trusts for CAC and payback analysis
- Sales sees reflected in pipeline performance
- Product leaders can reference for activation insights
- Executives rely on to forecast and prioritize
When attribution lives only in the marketing silo, it leads to finger-pointing and misallocated resources. But when it’s built into the core GTM operating system, it becomes a strategic asset.
The New Bar: Cross-Functional Attribution
To get there, you need:
- Shared data definitions (What’s a “lead”? What counts as “sourced”?)
- Mutual visibility across departments
- Attribution models mapped to business questions, not just funnel stages
- Tools that connect to sales, product, and finance systems, not just ad platforms
Attribution done right isn’t about proving marketing’s worth.
It’s about creating shared confidence in where growth is really coming from.
4. MLG = Marketing-Led Growth
If the last decade was defined by PLG and SLG, the next wave is unmistakably here: Marketing-Led Growth (MLG). And it’s not just a buzzword — it’s a reality for modern GTM teams.
As Bill Macaitis declared:
“Where is MLG? Why is it always product-led or sales-led? Marketing is what creates interest — category, brand, community. We need to recognize that.”
— Bill Macaitis, former CMO & CRO at Slack/Zendesk, Founder at SaaS CMO Pro
In today’s market, more buying journeys are initiated by marketing than ever before — through brand, content, community, and social influence. If you’re only measuring clicks and forms, you’re missing the front half of the funnel.
What MLG Actually Looks Like:
- Organic social posts that spark curiosity or share product insights
- Thought leadership that earns trust before a demo is booked
- Community engagement in Slack groups, Discord servers, or Substacks
- Peer referrals via dark social, DMs, or word-of-mouth
These touches don’t always show up in Salesforce. But they create intent — and that’s where growth begins.
Attribution Must Catch Up
Traditional attribution models are built to capture responses — not influence. But MLG flips that paradigm. The actions that drive revenue often happen before the conversion event. If you don’t model for that, you’re flying blind.
Smart attribution systems now incorporate:
- Self-reported attribution fields
- Engagement scoring across community and content
- Influence mapping for non-click journeys
- Integration of brand and social signals into cohort analyses
Measure What Creates Demand — Not Just What Captures It
If you only optimize for what’s trackable, you’ll end up overinvesting in bottom-funnel harvesting—and underinvesting in the brand, content, and community work that actually drives intent.
Marketing is no longer a support function. It’s a growth engine.
And attribution needs to reflect that.
5. There Is No “One Model”
When asked which attribution model is “correct,” Kyle Poyar didn’t hesitate:
“None. And all of them.”
— Kyle Poyar, Co-founder & Operating Partner at Tremont, Writer at Growth Unhinged
Attribution models aren’t binary choices — they’re lenses. Each one brings a different part of the buyer journey into focus. The smartest teams don’t pick one model and declare victory. They triangulate insights across several models to make more informed decisions.
What Each Model Tells You:
- First-Touch → What generated demand in the first place?
- Last-Touch → What accelerated the final decision?
- Linear → What’s consistently influencing the journey?
- Time-Decay → What’s driving urgency near the point of conversion?
- Data-Driven/Algorithmic → What’s statistically significant over time?
Each model has strengths. Each has blind spots. The key is using them in concert — not in isolation.
Clarity > Complexity
That said, complexity can quickly become a liability. Bill Macaitis cautioned against overengineering models that sound smart but collapse under scrutiny:
“If the model isn’t explainable to the board, it’s not useful.”
— Bill Macaitis, former CMO & CRO at Slack/Zendesk, Founder at SaaS CMO Pro
Attribution is not about dazzling the exec team with AI or regression charts. It’s about getting alignment around what’s driving growth — in language the business understands.
Attribution Models Are Tools — Not Truth
There’s no one model to rule them all. But with the right mix — and the right level of explanation — attribution becomes a strategic asset, not a reporting burden.
The goal isn’t to be perfect. It’s to be directionally accurate, explainable, and actionable.
6. GA4 ≠ Ground Truth
Some of the sharpest critiques during the session were reserved for a tool nearly every team uses — and few trust: Google Analytics. The panel made it clear: GA4 is not a system of record for attribution.
“GA4 gives you directional web data,” said Ryan Koonce.
“But it ignores product usage, CRM events, and sales touches.”
— Ryan Koonce, Founder & CEO at Attribution
GA may be useful for surface-level web metrics, but it simply doesn’t capture the full B2B journey — especially in product-led or multi-threaded sales motions. It can’t connect ad spend to pipeline, or campaign engagement to retention.
Bill Macaitis illustrated the stakes with a hard truth from his own experience:
“We under-reported conversions by 30% just relying on GA. It’s not unified. It’s not accountable. It’s not truth.”
— Bill Macaitis, former CMO & CRO at Slack/Zendesk, Founder at SaaS CMO Pro
Directional ≠ Strategic
The issue isn’t that GA is wrong — it’s that it’s incomplete. And when marketing, finance, or the board uses it as the primary attribution source, it warps decisions.
GA4 lacks:
- Connection to product usage
- Visibility into CRM lifecycle events
- Tracking of sales-assist or post-signup journeys
- Support for multi-touch or cohort-based models
Attribution Belongs in the Stack — Not the Browser
The panel’s consensus: attribution should be powered by real customer events, not sampled session data. That means moving it into:
- CDPs like Segment or RudderStack
- Data warehouses like Snowflake or BigQuery
- CRMs like Salesforce or HubSpot
- Your product itself, to capture usage-to-revenue patterns
With that foundation, you gain:
- Precise CAC and payback modeling
- Visibility into GTM + product motion
- Shared context for sales, marketing, and finance
GA can still play a role for directional web insights. But when it comes to reporting pipeline, payback, and LTV?
Build attribution where the real data lives.
7. Your Stack Matters—But Keep It Simple
Modern attribution doesn’t require a 12-tool maze. In fact, complexity often becomes the enemy of clarity.
Today’s top-performing teams are winning with lean, elegant attribution stacks like:
Twilio Segment → The Attribution Platform → Snowflake → Salesforce/HubSpot
This kind of architecture offers everything you need — without drowning your ops team in integrations or manual work:
- Event integrity — Clean, deduplicated tracking across all GTM systems
- Real-time activation — Surface insights directly into your sales and marketing workflows
- GTM + Finance alignment — A shared truth across revenue, ops, and leadership
- Executive visibility — Board-ready answers without backend wrangling
Simple = Scalable
As Aaron Cort put it:
“If your attribution model takes more time to explain than it does to use, it’s probably too complex.”
— Aaron Cort, Operating Partner at Craft Ventures, First Head of Marketing and VP of Operations at ClickUp
Attribution should accelerate decisions — not stall them in dashboard debates. If your team is spending more time fixing the plumbing than driving insights, it’s time to streamline.
The best models work because they’re understood by the people who need to use them: marketing, sales, finance, and leadership.
Attribution That Scales Is Attribution That’s Simple
You don’t need 50 reports.
You need one source of truth, shared across the go-to-market motion.
And the simpler your stack, the faster you get there.
8. SDRs and Sales Belong in the Attribution Model
One of the most overlooked truths in B2B attribution: sales activity is a growth touchpoint.
Yet most models treat it like a black box—cutting off attribution the moment a lead enters the pipeline. That’s not just outdated. It’s wrong.
Aaron Cort shared how this played out in practice at ClickUp (read more on this in ClickUp’s Attribution case study):
“At ClickUp, some of our best converting paths were demo-to-trial-to-close. But marketing never got credit because the CRM didn’t feed attribution.”
— Aaron Cort, Operating Partner at Craft Ventures, First Head of Marketing and VP of Operations at ClickUp
GTM ≠ Just Marketing
Attribution that ignores sales is attribution that underreports reality. Full-funnel models must capture both sides of the motion:
- SDR email cadences — often the first human touch, and a trigger for deeper engagement
- AE-led demos — high-intent signals and major conversion moments
- Post-event or content outreach — turns interest into momentum
- Expansion meetings — a key touchpoint in driving LTV and retention
These aren’t just sales activities. They’re growth levers. When modeled correctly, they can reveal how GTM teams truly influence funnel velocity, CAC, and payback.
Attribution Is a GTM System, Not a Marketing Report
If you only measure marketing touches, you’re only seeing half the journey. Worse, you’re under-empowering sales and misallocating credit.
Great attribution models don’t divide credit by department — they unify GTM around impact. Sales and SDRs aren’t outside the model.
They are the model.
9. Campaign > Channel
Kyle Poyar surfaced one of the most common—and costly—mistakes in marketing measurement: optimizing by channel instead of by campaign.
“All Google Ads aren’t equal. Creative, targeting, and intent vary by campaign. We need to optimize at the decision level.”
— Kyle Poyar, Co-founder & Operating Partner at Tremont, Writer at Growth Unhinged
Too often, attribution models treat channels as monoliths: “Google is working,” “LinkedIn isn’t.” But within every channel lives a mix of strategies, audiences, and assets—some of which outperform dramatically, others that quietly waste budget.
Smart Attribution Thinks in Campaigns, Not Channels
Effective GTM teams don’t just ask “Which channel is working?” They ask:
- Which ad copy drove the highest LTV?
- Which CTA reduced CAC by 20%?
- Which creative resonated with mid-market buyers?
- Which offer performed best in expansion regions?
That’s not just better measurement — that’s a foundation for real experimentation.
Campaign-Level Attribution Powers Smart Decisions
When attribution is measured at the campaign level, it stops being a retroactive scorecard and starts being a strategic lever. You’re not just reporting results — you’re learning what drives outcomes.
Because channels don’t make decisions. Campaigns do.
10. Pass the Board Slide Test
Ryan closed the session with a pointed challenge for marketers and growth leaders alike:
“The reality is a lot of the board members don’t come from a background where they really understand attribution… Whatever data they are shown, they will take, sometimes it’s just full faith… Even if it’s a last touch or first touch model… It’s just a very distorted view.”
— Ryan Koonce, Founder & CEO at Attribution
In other words: your attribution model is your narrative. If it can’t stand up to board scrutiny — or worse, if it’s misleading — you’re not just missing the mark; you’re undermining your credibility.
Attribution Isn’t for Interns. It’s for Executives.
Attribution isn’t a campaign report buried in a dashboard. It’s a strategic system for answering executive-level questions like:
- How much does it cost to acquire a customer — and how long until that cost pays back? (CAC and LTV)
- Which campaigns or programs should we double down on — or shut off? (Budget reallocation)
- Which segments convert fastest, retain longest, and expand the most? (Product–market fit signals)
- Where is demand accelerating by region, industry, or buyer profile? (Market expansion & sales strategy)
Attribution Should Drive Strategy — Not Just Reporting
If your model doesn’t help justify spend, predict outcomes, or guide roadmap conversations, it’s too tactical. Worse — it may be steering your team in the wrong direction entirely.
Modern attribution should connect every dollar spent to business outcomes the board cares about. If it can’t do that, it’s time for a new model.
From Debate to Direction: Where We Go Next
The Attribution Smackdown wasn’t just a lively debate—it was a signal (pun intended) of how attribution is evolving.
It’s no longer about finding a perfect model. It’s about:
✅ Creating alignment
✅ Reflecting full-funnel influence
✅ Empowering better decisions
✅ And making marketing ROI visible to the business—not just the team
Whether you’re an early-stage startup building from branded search + self-reported inputs, or a $500M ARR org running multi-model triangulation across CRM, product, and paid—attribution is your GTM telemetry system.
And with tools like Attribution (now as a (one of only two) Twilio Segment Preferred Partner), it’s never been faster to get started.
Sign up and try Attribution today — pinpoint CAC by channel, audit funnels and conversion rates, scale revenue-driven content marketing, measure affiliate LTV and CAC (and more).
