Here’s the problem: attribution means something completely different depending on the size of the company and the stage it’s at. And most teams are trying to force one model to answer two different questions.

What attribution actually needs to tell you

There are really only two questions worth asking:

1. What is marketing contributing as a whole? (Board level. CRO conversation. Total spend vs total influenced revenue.)
2. Which specific campaigns or levers are working, and which should we do again? (Marketing team level. Optimisation conversation.)
3. At the later stage – what levers impact the buyer journey at what stage.

One dashboard doesn’t answer both well. Trying to make it do so is where most attribution projects go wrong.

Where multi-touch attribution genuinely earns its keep

At enterprise level, with multiple stakeholders and multiple buyer personas moving through a long journey, a proper multi-touch model does useful work. It links the different people in a buying committee to the different content and channels that reached them, and gives you a real read on where information is landing and what’s working. That’s a fair use of the model — the complexity of the buying group matches the complexity of the model.

Where it falls apart at early stage

I’ve sat with founders who say some version of “I don’t know where my money’s going,” and the response is usually a marketer reaching for a martech tool — DreamData, HockeyStack, or (a few years back) Visible — and bolting on a first-touch, last-touch, or linear model. In my experience it fails for three specific reasons, not just because “attribution is hard”:

1. Not enough deal volume for a model to mean anything. A multi-touch model needs a statistically meaningful number of closed deals flowing through it before the weighting means anything. At Series A or B, you might be closing a handful of deals a month. Run a model against that and you’re not looking at a pattern — you’re looking at noise dressed up as a percentage.

2. No one owns the data hygiene to make it honest. Multi-touch attribution is only as good as the touchpoint data feeding it — every ad click, every email open, every event scan tagged and flowing cleanly into the CRM. Enterprise companies have RevOps teams whose job is exactly that. Early-stage companies don’t. So the model runs on patchy, inconsistently tagged data and hands back numbers that look precise and aren’t.

3. Different campaign types need different logic, and one model can’t flex between them. A single point campaign — a trade show, say — is clean. Someone attends, becomes a lead, becomes an opportunity. You can draw a straight line from the trade show to the deal it created.

An influence campaign is a different animal. A prospect sees a few ads along the way. Good signal, but it’s a different channel with a different budget, doing a different job. Now stretch the journey out: a Google ad six months ago, a webinar, a trade show, then — right at POV stage, deep in contract conversations — you bring them to an executive dinner, and they sign.

Run a last-touch model on that and the dinner gets credited with the deal. It shouldn’t. The dinner didn’t create most of that value — the six months of work before it did. Believe the model and you’ll conclude you need a hundred more executive dinners, while quietly starving the Google ads, the webinar, and the trade show activity that actually built the pipeline in the first place. You’ve optimised for the wrong lever, because you asked one model to treat a single-touch campaign and a long-influence campaign the same way.

Two levels, two jobs

At the top, aggregate level — marketing budget against revenue associated with campaigns, whatever they are: ads, events, webinars, content, community — that’s useful. It’s good for board numbers, good for budget conversations, good for saying “this is what we spent, this is what we contributed.”

At the individual campaign level, the job is different again. When we run an event, we look at what it actually generated and delivered: opportunities created, deals progressed, deals influenced. Those are good buyer signals, and they tell us whether that lever is worth using again next month or next year. But you can’t take something like an executive dinner and force it into a first-touch or last-touch framework. It just doesn’t hold up.

The multi-touch over-counting problem

There’s a second issue that rarely gets talked about. If a deal has, say, seven touches across the journey, and you run a multi-touch model that spreads credit across all of them, then roll those numbers up across every campaign — you can end up reporting more total revenue than you actually generated. The maths of “share of credit per touch” doesn’t sum cleanly across a whole pipeline once journeys get long and messy.

That over-count isn’t really the point, though, and it’s not worth chasing perfection to fix it. The real issue is that you’re using one model to try to answer both of the questions above, and it can’t do either one properly as a result.

Stop buying a model. Start answering two questions.

If you’re pre-Series B, I’d argue a multi-touch attribution tool is probably a waste of your money and your marketer’s time — you don’t have the deal volume or the data hygiene to make it honest, and you’re trying to make one model answer two jobs it was never built to do at once.

What you need instead is two separate, much simpler views:

• Aggregate influence reporting, for the board and the CRO conversation — what did marketing spend, and what revenue did it touch.
• Individual lever evaluation, for the marketing team — did this specific campaign produce or progress an opportunity, yes or no. Tracked in a spreadsheet, not a dashboard.

Neither view needs to be perfectly precise down to the pound. They need to be honest, consistent, and built for the decision they’re actually informing. That’s a very different design brief to “buy a multi-touch attribution tool and turn it on.”

The post Attribution isn’t broken. You’re asking it to answer two different questions. appeared first on Tilliot.

The argument for marketing owning the SDR function isn’t about territory. It’s about goals. And to understand why it works, you have to start there.

Why the Reporting Line Matters

SDRs sit at the exact boundary between marketing activity and sales activity. They take the leads that marketing generates, qualify them, and open opportunities for sales to close. That sounds clean. In practice, the team they report to shapes everything about how they operate, what they prioritise, how they measure success, and who they feel accountable to.

SDRs inside a sales team get measured on activity. Calls made. Emails sent. Meetings booked. The sales leader needs pipeline and needs it quickly, so volume becomes the proxy for performance. SDRs learn to book meetings. Not necessarily good meetings. Meetings. The pressure to hit booking targets pushes qualification down the priority list because a booked meeting counts whether or not the prospect was ever going to buy.

SDRs inside a marketing team, measured on pipeline generated alongside the rest of the function, operate differently. They have a stake in quality. A poorly qualified opportunity that sales rejects reflects on them the same way it reflects on the demand gen manager who sourced the lead. The whole team wins or loses on the same number, so the whole team starts asking the same question: are we talking to the right people?

That shift in accountability is the point. It’s not about where the SDR sits on an org chart. It’s about what goal they are working towards.

The Counter-Arguments Are Real

There are two genuine objections to this model and they deserve a straight answer rather than being glossed over.

The first is that marketing owning SDRs only works when marketing owns a pipeline number. This is completely true, and it is the most important caveat in this entire post. If your marketing team is still being measured on MQL volume or website traffic as its primary metric, handing them the SDR function will not fix anything. The SDRs will inherit a misaligned goal alongside the rest of the team. The model only works when marketing is accountable for pipeline, because that is the only condition under which quality matters more than volume to everyone in the room. This is why getting the goal right comes before restructuring anything.

The second objection comes from the SDR’s perspective rather than the business’s. SDRs want to become Account Executives. That is the career path for most people in the role, and it’s a reasonable one. The argument is that SDRs develop fastest when they’re sitting alongside experienced reps, learning how deals are run, absorbing how a sales leader thinks. If they’re embedded in marketing, they miss that. They learn campaigns and lead gen but they don’t learn to sell.

This objection has merit and it points to something that has to be built deliberately into the model. SDRs who report into marketing need structured exposure to the sales team. Joint calls. Regular time with AEs and the sales leader. A clear and visible path to moving into a closing role when they’re ready. The reporting line is in marketing but the development relationship has to include sales. Where this is done well, SDRs actually develop faster because they understand both sides of the handoff, they know how leads are generated and they know what good qualification means to the person who has to close the deal. Where it is done badly, the objection is valid and the SDRs will leave for a sales team that invests in their progression.

This is precisely why sales and marketing alignment isn’t just a nice-to-have when marketing owns the SDR function. It becomes operationally necessary.

What Good Looks Like in Practice

When the model is working, a few things are consistently true.

The SDR and demand gen teams are in regular conversation about lead quality. Not a monthly report. An ongoing dialogue about what is converting, what isn’t, which campaigns are producing the right conversations, and which target account lists need revisiting. Marketing uses that intelligence to sharpen campaigns. SDRs use it to prioritise their outreach.

The SDR leader has a seat in pipeline reviews alongside the head of demand gen. Both are accountable to the same pipeline number. Neither can blame the other for a bad quarter without implicating themselves.

SDRs have a development plan that includes time with the sales team. A defined cadence of joint calls, deal reviews, or time shadowing AEs. The path to a closing role is explicit, not implied.

And the qualification standard is agreed in writing between marketing and sales before any of this is set up, because without a shared definition of what a qualified opportunity looks like, the whole structure is built on loose ground.

When It Doesn’t Work

Marketing owning SDRs fails in predictable ways.

It fails when marketing doesn’t own pipeline. The SDRs inherit a volume-focused culture from a team that is measured on leads, and nothing changes except the org chart.

It fails when sales leadership isn’t bought in. If the CRO or VP Sales sees the SDR move as a loss of resource and spends the next quarter trying to claw it back, the team will feel the tension and performance will suffer.

It fails when the SDR career path into sales closes off. If the move into marketing makes an SDR feel like they’ve stepped away from a sales career rather than toward it, the best ones will leave. The development relationship with the sales team isn’t optional. It’s what makes the model sustainable.

And it fails when the alignment between marketing and sales is surface-level rather than structural. Shared pipeline reviews on paper but separate scorecards in practice. Joint planning meetings that produce no shared commitments. The model requires genuine alignment, not just the appearance of it.

The Answer

Yes, marketing should own the SDR team. With the condition that marketing owns a pipeline number, that the SDR career path into sales is actively managed, and that the alignment between marketing and sales is real rather than nominal.

Get those three things right and the reporting line takes care of itself.

The post Should Marketing Own the SDR Team? appeared first on Tilliot.

Assuming you’re with me on pipeline: here’s how to build an MQL definition that works.

Diagnosing the Problem First

Most teams don’t need a new MQL definition. They need to understand why their current one isn’t working. Before building anything, it’s worth being honest about which of these situations you’re in.

Your MQL volume looks healthy but pipeline isn’t growing. This almost always means the definition is too loose. Leads are being marked as MQLs based on activity that looks like intent but isn’t. A prospect who downloaded three pieces of content and attended a webinar is engaged. They are not necessarily ready to talk to anyone. If your SDRs are spending time chasing those people and converting very few of them, the definition is doing harm. This is leading to bad Sales and Marketing Alignment and lack of pipeline.

Your MQL volume is low and sales is complaining about not enough leads. This is sometimes a genuine pipeline problem, but it’s more often a sign that marketing is being conservative with the definition to avoid handing over leads that get rejected. The definition has become a defensive mechanism rather than a commercial one.

Sales regularly rejects MQLs or ignores them entirely. This is the clearest signal that marketing and sales don’t agree on what an MQL means, and they’ve probably never sat down to define it together. The definition was built by marketing, for marketing, and sales has no ownership of it.

If you recognise any of these, the definition you have isn’t fit for purpose. Here’s what fit for purpose looks like.

What an MQL Actually Is

An MQL is a hand raise. Nothing more, nothing less.

It is the moment a prospect has explicitly signalled that they want to talk to someone. A demo request. A contact form submission. A pricing page inquiry. A direct reply to an outbound sequence saying yes, I want to know more. The prospect has done something active and deliberate that says I am interested enough to engage with a human being from your company.

That is the threshold. Below it, you don’t have an MQL. You have a lead who is doing what leads do, which is consuming information, evaluating options, and not yet ready to talk.

The reason this definition works is that it removes interpretation. You don’t have to decide whether a lead score of 47 is high enough, or whether three content downloads indicate intent, or whether someone who visited the pricing page twice in a week is ready for a call. The prospect has told you. That is the signal. Everything else is noise that belongs somewhere else in your system, and we’ll come to that.

Once an MQL is created, the SDR picks it up, qualifies the conversation properly, and books the meeting. The MQL is the trigger for that process. The meeting booked is the outcome. Marketing owns the MQL. The SDR owns the conversion from MQL to meeting and from meeting to opportunity.

What an MQL Is Not

This is where most definitions fall apart, because the boundary between MQL and not-MQL gets blurry when you’re trying to show volume.

An MQL is not someone who opened four emails. It is not someone who downloaded your buyer’s guide. It is not someone who attended your webinar and didn’t ask a question. It is not someone who visited your website multiple times this week. All of these are signals worth tracking. None of them are hand raises.

These leads have a home. It’s called a Marketing Accepted Lead, and treating them as such rather than MQLs is what keeps your pipeline data clean and your SDR team focused on conversations that are actually likely to convert.

The MAL: Marketing Accepted Lead

A Marketing Accepted Lead is a lead in your system who has engaged with your content or brand in a way that suggests they could eventually become a buyer, but hasn’t yet indicated they want to talk to anyone.

They’ve downloaded content. They’ve attended events. They’ve engaged with emails. They’re in your world, and that matters, because when the time is right for them, you want to be the company they think of first. The MAL sits in a nurture track. Marketing looks after them. SDRs don’t touch them. And the honest reality is that not every MAL will ever become an MQL. Some will go quiet. Some will turn out to be the wrong fit. Some will buy from a competitor. That’s fine. The point of the MAL is that you’re not ignoring these people and you’re not misclassifying them as something they aren’t.

When a MAL raises their hand, they become an MQL. Until then, they stay in the nurture track and marketing keeps them warm. This is where content strategy earns its keep, because the content that moves a MAL toward an MQL is different from the content that generates a MAL in the first place.

PQLs and AQLs: When MQLs Aren’t the Whole Picture

In some businesses, the MQL isn’t the only or even the primary lead type that feeds pipeline. Depending on your go-to-market motion, you may also be working with Product Qualified Leads or Account Qualified Leads, and understanding how these fit alongside the MQL, or sometimes replace it, matters.

A Product Qualified Lead (PQL) is used in product-led growth businesses where the product itself is the primary acquisition channel. A PQL is a user who has reached a specific threshold of product usage or engagement that indicates they’re getting value and are a good candidate for a commercial conversation. Think a free tier user who has hit usage limits, or a trial user who has completed a set of actions that correlate with conversion to paid. The PQL is the hand raise in a PLG motion. It’s just that the hand raise comes through product behaviour rather than a form fill. Where both an inbound marketing function and a PLG motion exist in the same business, you’ll often have MQLs and PQLs running in parallel, feeding different SDR workflows with different qualification criteria.

An Account Qualified Lead (AQL) is used primarily in account-based marketing. Rather than qualifying individual leads, the AQL approach qualifies accounts — meaning the whole company — against your ICP before any individual lead is created. An account gets marked as an AQL when firmographic data, intent signals, and engagement from multiple contacts within the business meet a threshold that says this company is worth pursuing. The AQL feeds a coordinated, multi-threaded outbound approach rather than a single lead nurture. It sits alongside the MQL in a hybrid motion where you’re running both inbound and ABM, or it replaces the MQL entirely in a business doing pure enterprise ABM with no meaningful inbound channel.

The mistake most teams make is treating PQLs and AQLs as variations of the MQL and folding them into the same workflow and reporting. They aren’t variations. They’re different signals generated by different motions, and they need different responses. Getting clear on which motion your business is running, and which lead type is primary, is the starting point for building a definition that actually holds.

Building the Definition Together

Whatever lead type or combination of lead types your business uses, the definition only works if both marketing and sales own it. Not marketing defines it and presents it to sales. Both teams sit down, agree on what a qualified hand raise looks like in your specific business, and sign off on it together.

That agreement should cover what actions trigger an MQL, what firmographic or ICP criteria a lead needs to meet before they’re even eligible, what the SDR is expected to do with an MQL and in what timeframe, and what happens when an MQL doesn’t convert so that the data feeds back into the definition over time.

A definition without that feedback loop will drift. The ones that hold are reviewed quarterly, challenged when conversion rates drop, and updated when the ICP evolves. They’re a living agreement, not a one-time document.

The post How to Define an MQL That Sales Will Actually Use appeared first on Tilliot.

Marketing: “We hit our MQL target. We sent over 200 leads last quarter.” Sales: “Those leads were terrible. We couldn’t close any of them.” Marketing: “That’s a sales problem, not a marketing problem.”

And round it goes. Marketing and sales alignment in B2B is one of the most persistent and expensive problems in go-to-market. It burns time, creates internal friction, and it doesn’t generate revenue. The root cause isn’t attitude. It isn’t communication. It’s misaligned goals. Fix the goals and the rest starts to follow.

Before we go further, one thing needs to be said clearly. The purpose of marketing is revenue. Every campaign, every piece of content, every event, every demand gen programme exists because the business needs to grow. Nobody in marketing should ever lose sight of that. The question isn’t whether revenue is the goal. It is. The question is whether revenue is the right metric for marketing to be measured against — and that is a different thing entirely.

Marketing doesn’t close deals. Sales does. The best marketing function in the world generates opportunities that a weak sales team will fail to convert. Holding marketing accountable to closed revenue means holding them responsible for a number they can influence but never fully control. That produces one of two outcomes: marketers who spend their time gaming attribution models to claim credit for revenue, or marketers who are penalised for things that happen after the lead leaves their hands. Neither is useful.

The reverse is equally true and worth saying out loud. A great sales team with strong outbound capability, deep relationships, and a founder who can sell can hit a revenue number with very little marketing support at all. It happens constantly at early stage companies. But that isn’t evidence that marketing is working. It’s evidence that sales is carrying it. And when that sales leader leaves, or the market gets more competitive, or the business needs to scale beyond what a handful of great reps can personally reach, the absence of a functioning marketing engine becomes very expensive very quickly. Revenue can flatter marketing the same way it can punish it.

Revenue is why marketing exists. Pipeline is how you know if it’s working.

The Problem with MQLs

Marketing Qualified Leads aren’t a bad idea. The concept is sound: identify signals that suggest a prospect is worth sales attention, and pass them over. The problem is in execution.

Most MQL frameworks are built around what marketing can measure, not what sales can convert. Lead score thresholds. Email open rates. Content downloads. Form fills. These are activity metrics. They tell you someone did something. They don’t tell you whether that person has a problem your product solves, the budget to buy it, or the authority to sign anything. And when MQL volume becomes marketing’s primary success metric, the incentives go wrong fast. Definitions get stretched to hit targets. Lower-quality signals get included. The numbers look good in the board deck and do nothing for revenue.

Sales stops trusting the leads. Marketing stops trusting sales to work them. Both teams are busy. Nothing closes.

I actually like MQLs. I believe that they have a have a role as an early-stage signal in a longer qualification process. The mistake is treating them as an outcome rather than an input. I also believe that when we define an MQL correctly and have a tight threshold they can be useful. For example a client I worked with, we decided that a lead would qualify as an MQL only if it filled in a “hand raiser form” examples, Demo Request, Contact Us, Quote. Basically, they are asking for assistance. The other qualification route was when they accepted a BDR meeting.

Pipeline Is Marketing’s Goal

Marketing’s primary goal should not be MQL volume. It should be pipeline generated.

Not revenue. Revenue is a company goal and it sits with the whole go-to-market team. Pipeline is different. It’s the set of qualified opportunities that sales is actively working. It’s the output of good marketing and good qualification combined. And when it becomes marketing’s number, everything about how the function operates starts to shift. Demand gen leaders start asking whether campaigns are generating conversations with the right companies, not just generating clicks. Whether a trade show produced actual opportunities or just badge scans. Whether the ICP definition is tight enough, or whether they’re flooding sales with people who will never buy. Quality stops being something that sits in a values statement. It becomes a commercial imperative, because it’s what marketing is being measured on.

This Changes Your Team Structure

If marketing owns pipeline, there’s one logical conclusion that many leadership teams resist: marketing needs to own the BDR and SDR function.

SDRs are the only people in the go-to-market team who actually create an opportunity. They take a lead, qualify it properly (BANT, the front end of MEDDIC, whatever framework fits your business) and open a real sales conversation. They sit at the exact boundary between marketing activity and sales activity, and which team they report to determines everything about how they operate. BDRs and SDRs sitting inside the sales team get measured on appointments set, on meeting volume, on activity metrics that may or may not produce qualified pipeline. They become appointment setters, not qualifiers. Move them into marketing, measure them on pipeline created alongside the demand gen team, and the entire approach changes. Demand gen asks what leads SDRs are actually converting. SDRs feed back what signals are worth chasing. Everyone is trying to solve the same problem.

This is the structural change that makes alignment real rather than aspirational.

How the Team Starts to Think Differently

When the goal is pipeline, the mindset shift runs across the whole function. Campaign teams stop optimising for impressions and start asking what actually converts. Intent data gets taken seriously. Target account lists get challenged. Content gets built around real objections and real questions rather than because it’s in the content calendar. Events stop being measured by badge scans and start being evaluated on whether the right people were in the room and what came out of it commercially.

None of this requires hiring different people. It requires giving people a different goal.

It Starts with Goal Setting

Marketing leaders and sales leaders need to sit down and agree on three things before anything else.

What does a qualified opportunity look like? Not a lead score. A description of a real buyer with a real problem, the right company size, the right industry, the right trigger events, the right level of engagement with the business. What is marketing responsible for? Pipeline generated. MQL volume, website traffic and email open rates are inputs. Pipeline is the output. And how will progress be measured? Weekly pipeline reviews with both marketing and sales in the room. Marketing pipeline contribution tracked in the CRM. No separate scorecards that let either team claim success while the other claims failure.

When these three things are genuinely agreed, the blame game becomes structurally impossible. Both teams win when pipeline grows. Both teams lose when it doesn’t.

A Note on OKRs

Getting the goals right at leadership level is the first step. Getting them to land across the team is where most companies fall short. OKRs, done properly, are the mechanism that closes that gap. When marketing teams run on OKRs, every individual can see the direct line between their daily work and the company’s commercial goals. The demand gen manager knows what they’re contributing to. The SDR knows what success looks like. The Head of Marketing has a single view of whether the function is moving the needle. Done badly, OKRs are a bureaucratic exercise that adds meetings and subtracts motivation. Done well, they create ownership and accountability that most marketing teams have never had. Worth a separate post in its own right, but if you’re thinking about how to operationalise the alignment above, this is where to start.

The Shared Goal Changes Everything

Marketing and sales misalignment is a goal problem dressed up as a people problem. Fix the goals and the conversations change. Campaigns get more purposeful. SDRs qualify harder. Sales trusts what comes through the door. Pipeline grows.

It starts with one decision: marketing owns a pipeline goal, not just leads.

The post Why Marketing and Sales Can’t Agree — And the One Goal That Fixes It appeared first on Tilliot.