This affects how they demonstrate ROI, handle channel conflict, address long sales cycles or multi-year deals, and ultimately what information is communicated to CFOs.
marketing-revenue-value marketing metrics vs cfo metrics
Here’s a breakdown of the most common:
First-touch attribution: This model gives 100% of the credit to the first marketing interaction. While useful for understanding initial awareness drivers, CFOs often dismiss it because it ignores the nurturing and decision nepal telemarketing database -making phases. It also doesn’t speak to long sales cycles.
Last-touch attribution: This assigns all credit to the final interaction before conversion. Like first-touch, it oversimplifies the buyer journey and is rarely sufficient for financial evaluation.
Multi-touch attribution: Multi-touch attribution considers all the channels and touchpoints a customer engages with before they convert. This is a great solution for addressing channel conflict because it evaluates and weighs touchpoints differently. It also shows you how they worked together to influence their journey.
Linear attribution: This distributes credit equally across all touchpoints. It provides a balanced view but doesn't account for varying influence levels of each touchpoint, which limits strategic value.
Time-decay attribution: More credit is given to interactions closer to the conversion. This model is useful for long sales cycles, highlighting the final nudges that convert prospects. CFOs value its logical progression, but it also may minimize the influence of early marketing touches.
W-shaped attribution: This gives heavier weight to three key moments: first interaction, lead conversion, and opportunity creation. It aligns well with sales stages and is favored by finance for its structure.
Custom attribution: Custom models assign weights based on actual revenue impact and business logic. When built collaboratively with finance and RevOps, these models are the most CFO-friendly and suitable for board-level reporting.
sample w-shaped attribution report
Source
Regardless of which model you choose, remember: CFOs tend to care less about which campaign touched a lead first and more about how marketing influences revenue outcomes across the entire buying journey.
This speaks to the importance of your work from awareness to sale, rather than just focusing on first impressions.
Marketing Reporting Templates
Excel, PowerPoint, and Google Drive Templates to Make Your Monthly Reporting Faster and Easier
Track leads.
Measure CVR.
Track channel performance.
How to Show Marketing’s Impact to the CFO Step-by-Step
1. Choose your attribution model.
With everything we discussed earlier, determine which attribution model would be best for your needs. Not sure? Ask your financial leadership flat out what is most important to them.
2. Set up your attribution reporting.
Attribution reporting is complicated. Manual spreadsheets and one-off presentations lack credibility with their room for human error and are difficult to scale.
Thankfully, there are many tools to help make it easier these days. In fact, with HubSpot’s Marketing Hub you can even automate your attribution report to do things like:
Tie marketing activities directly to closed revenue deals
Attribute influence across first, lead-creating, and deal-creating touchpoints
Integrate with CRM for accurate, real-time reporting
Offer multi-touch views that align with actual buying behavior
This automated attribution creates a consistent system CFOs can rely on and trust — a foundational step in earning their confidence. Plus, it just streamlines your workflow.
Glints, a tech career development company in Southeast Asia, improved its reporting efficiency and increased lead conversion rate by 40% by using HubSpot.
2. Create visuals of marketing’s revenue impact.
Visuals are powerful. They make it easier to digest complicated information and are more engaging and memorable than just numbers on a report. That said, take the time to create board-ready visualizations of your data (i.e. charts, graphs, pie charts).