Credit is not cause

Open the attribution report before a pipeline review. The activity at the top has a credit figure beside it. You asked what that work caused. The report answered what that work was near.

Those are different questions. The distance between them is where forecast calls go soft. A team starts managing the credit, because the credit is what the page shows.

Credit is bookkeeping

First touch, last touch, an even split, a split that favors what happened lately, a split that favors the ends, even a fancy share of the whole: these take the deals that closed and divide them among the touches that were present. Useful bookkeeping. It cannot tell you how many of those buyers would have moved without that touch.

To answer that, you need a baseline. What happens for a comparable account when the activity does not occur. You also have to name the things that cause both the activity and the result. The usual one in RevOps is simple to see and easy to forget.

The trap you already run

Accounts that are already likely to buy get more meetings and more notes. Those touches are present when the deal closes. The report gives the touches the credit. The readiness was doing a lot of the work. This is not a moral failure of the team. The report answered the easier question, and the room treated it as the hard one.

Presence is not a cause. A touch can be in the story and still not be the reason.

What the review should demand

• A baseline, kept somewhere the room can point to. No baseline, no claim of lift.
• The confounders, named. Stage, source, and intent that existed before the activity are the ones to start with.
• The uncertainty. A single figure with no range is a slogan.
• A refusal. If the case is not shown, the page says so. Pending is a complete answer.

Where a model fits, and where it does not

A model can draft the sentence under the chart. It can list the touches. It cannot turn a nearby touch into a cause, and it should not be allowed to print a number the method has not earned.

The agent drafts. The rules decide which claim is allowed into the pipeline review.

Four questions for the meeting

• How do we separate cause from a touch that was merely present?
• What baseline is this claim measured against, and where is that baseline kept?
• Where is the uncertainty on this figure?
• What does the report do when the case is not proven? Does it refuse, or does it still print a number?

In The Circuit Method™ this question lives at ground, after the outcome comes back. If you skip it, the loop is open. You built the motion. You have not proved it.