The meeting every ops team knows

Marketing reports a number. Finance reports a different number. Sales has a third. All three are defensible, all three are computed correctly, and the next forty minutes go to reconciling definitions instead of deciding where to spend. This is not a data quality problem. It is a measurement architecture problem: three systems answering three different questions and being read as if they answered the same one.

The three instruments

A measurement practice needs all three, and needs to be explicit about which question each one answers. Multi-touch attribution answers which touches preceded revenue. It is granular, it is fast, and it cannot establish causality. Treat it as a routing and diagnostic tool, not a budget authority. Marketing mix modeling answers what happens to revenue when spend moves. It is causal-adjacent, it handles offline and brand, and it needs years of data plus real variance in spend to say anything useful. Incrementality testing answers did this specific thing cause lift. It is the only one that establishes causality, and it is expensive: you are deliberately withholding marketing from people who might have converted. The practice is knowing which instrument the question calls for, and refusing to let one answer a question it structurally cannot.

Architecture decisions that matter

• Account-level, not lead-level. In B2B the buying unit is the account. A lead-level model will systematically undercount committee purchases and overcount whoever happened to fill in the form.
• Sourcing versus influence, named separately. Sourced credit and influenced credit are different claims. Reporting one number that silently blends them is how the reconciliation meeting starts.
• Lookback windows derived from closed-won data. The window should come from the observed distribution of deal cycles, not from a round number someone picked. If the median cycle is 140 days, a 90-day window is discarding evidence.
• Cost accrual that matches the revenue. Spend recognized in the month it was incurred, matched against pipeline it plausibly influenced, or the efficiency ratios are noise.

How to run it

1. Establish the definitions before building anything. Write them down. Get finance to sign the document, not the dashboard.
2. Instrument attribution first: it is the cheapest and it produces the routing value immediately.
3. Layer mix modeling once there is enough spend variance to fit against.
4. Reserve incrementality tests for the two or three decisions each year that are large enough to justify withholding spend.

The takeaway for your stack

If your measurement conversation still ends in reconciliation, the fix is usually not a better model. It is deciding, in writing, which instrument owns which question, and then holding the line when someone asks attribution to prove causality.