The four-part framework that ended marketing's "is this our opportunity" debate with sales

Summary: Four attributes per opp: pre-opportunity touch (yes/no, 90d window), sales-acknowledged contribution (rep self-reports), origination (inbound/outbound), business-type (net-new/expansion). Different reports answer different questions. Marketing-sourced and marketing-influenced are both real numbers. Stop calling either one "marketing's contribution" alone.

Makes sense? More detail below.

Setup. Mid-market B2B SaaS. Marketing was claiming roughly 60% of opportunities as "marketing-influenced". Sales pushed back, said it should be more like 30%. CFO asked the two leaders to reconcile. The reconciliation kept failing because both sides were defending vague claims. We needed a framework, not a percentage.

The framework, four parts.

Part one. Pre-opportunity touch. Did marketing touch the eventual decision-maker (or any buying-committee member at the same account) prior to opportunity creation? "Touch" defined as: tracked email engagement, content download, webinar attendance, attribution-tagged web visit, or paid-ad-click. Time window: 90 days before opp creation. Yes/no per opp.

Part two. Sales-acknowledged contribution. Did the sales rep on the opp note any marketing involvement during the sales cycle? This is a manual flag the rep sets. "Marketing collateral was useful in this deal" or "the prospect mentioned X content" or similar. Self-report, optional but encouraged. Yes/no per opp.

Part three. Outbound vs inbound origination. Was the original lead generated by an SDR's outbound activity (cold call, cold email, LinkedIn outreach) or by an inbound channel (content, paid, organic, partner)? Single-attribute per opp.

Part four. Net-new vs expansion. Is this a new logo or expansion (upsell, cross-sell, renewal-with-uplift)? Single-attribute per opp.

The reporting cube has four columns. Marketing-touched, sales-acknowledged, origination, business-type. Every opp gets a row with the four attributes filled in.

Different reports answer different questions.

"Marketing-sourced opportunities" = origination is inbound AND net-new. Strict marketing claim.

"Marketing-influenced opportunities" = pre-opportunity touch is yes (regardless of origination). Wider claim.

"Sales + marketing co-contributed" = pre-opportunity touch is yes AND sales-acknowledged contribution is yes. The most defensible claim.

"Outbound-only" = origination is outbound AND pre-opportunity touch is no. Pure sales contribution.

What changed once we ran this framework.

Marketing's "60% influenced" claim turned out to be technically defensible (pre-opportunity touch was yes on roughly 58% of opportunities). Sales's "30%" claim turned out to be technically defensible (sourced was about 32%). Both numbers were right and both leaders had been talking past each other for a year.

The framework gave the CFO four numbers instead of one. The four numbers told a clearer story than any single claim. The leadership conversations became "what are we doing about the opportunities marketing influenced but sales did not acknowledge" rather than "whose number is right".

The non-obvious learning. Two leaders fighting over one number is almost always two questions in disguise. Forcing the question structure to match the data structure ends most of these fights.

What does your opportunity-attribution framework look like? Curious whether anyone tracks sales-acknowledged contribution as a separate dimension.