B2B SaaS · Logistics

Sales team attributing 90% of closed-won deals to "referral" in Salesforce because UTM parameters weren't being captured and passed through to the CRM, the default attribution model was whoever spoke to the prospect last. LinkedIn and the content programme couldn't prove ROI, zero attributed pipeline despite ₹8L/month in LinkedIn spend and a 6-person content team. Three SDRs spending 4+ hours/week manually tagging lead sources in Salesforce by checking browser history and asking prospects in discovery calls. Two channels had been proposed for elimination by the CFO due to "no measurable ROI."

UTM hygiene audit first: found that UTMs were being captured in GA4 but not passed to Salesforce because the HubSpot-to-Salesforce sync wasn't mapping the UTM fields. Fixed the field mapping, added a GTM trigger to capture the full UTM string as a hidden field on every form, and back-populated 8 months of form fills. Built a multi-touch attribution model in Looker with three views: first-touch (demand generation credit), last-touch (conversion credit), and 40/20/40 linear (shared credit). Applied the model retroactively to 8 months of closed-won data.

LinkedIn first-touch attribution: 34% of all closed-won opportunities in the past 8 months had a LinkedIn content touchpoint as their first interaction. ₹8L/month of "zero-ROI" LinkedIn spend reclassified, 3 campaign types retained with ROI evidence, 1 eliminated. SDR manual tagging: 4 hours/week → 0. The two channels proposed for CFO elimination were both shown to have measurable pipeline contribution, neither was cut. Content programme now has ₹1.4Cr of influenced pipeline attached to its articles in Looker. The word "referral" as a catch-all attribution label is gone.