Marketing Attribution is Blocking Marketers from the C-Suite

We’ve all seen the countless articles about B2B marketing’s relationship with the C-suite. But here’s the irony: while marketing is supposed to be the chief storyteller of the corporation, it’s failing spectacularly at telling its own story inside the organization.

Storytelling Done Right: A CFO’s Playbook

Think about a CFO on an earnings call. They condense enormous amounts of data, past performance, current strategy, and future forecasts, into an eight-minute briefing designed to inspire confidence and win trust from investors. That’s high-risk storytelling at its finest.

Now compare that to marketing. Despite being the corporate cheerleaders, when it’s time to stand in front of the board or executive peers, marketing trips over its own narrative too often.

Why? Because marketing confuses the forest for the trees.

Why Attribution Fails in the C-Suite

Attribution has become a crutch. Marketers cling to it because it’s the first place where costs and revenue appear to meet. But here’s the hard truth: besides pipeline or revenue impact, nobody outside of marketing cares about attribution, nor should they.

To continue using finance as the comparator, I don’t care how they pay invoices; I only care that vendors are paid on time, i.e., output. So why should the company care whether marketing engages an audience via webinar, email, or social post? Those are internal activities. The output is what matters.

Let me underline this: outside of marketing, our output is the only thing that matters.

And attribution? It’s not output.

• It’s incomplete. Attribution is riddled with blind spots—survivorship bias in action—because so much of the customer journey is invisible to tracking.
• It’s narrow. Attribution lives at the campaign or channel level, but the C-suite isn’t debating channels; they’re debating outcomes.
• It’s inward-facing. It answers questions marketing cares about, not the organization as a whole.

What Story Should Marketing Tell Instead?

Marketing’s story needs to be bigger than attribution. It must be:

• Future-focused. Not just what happened, but what’s next.
• Organization-wide. It is not just marketing’s impact but also how marketing drives enterprise growth.
• Revenue-centric. The language of the C-suite is dollars and cents, full stop. If marketing isn’t tied to creating revenue, it’s seen only as a cost.

Rethinking the Metrics

When marketing leaders talk about “driving revenue,” the conversation often gets lost in vanity metrics: opens, clicks, and impressions. However, in B2B, the real measure of success lies in how effectively marketing supports revenue growth across the customer journey. Here are three revenue-centric metrics every B2B marketing leader should monitor:

1. Marketing Coverage

Question to ask: Am I giving my buyers enough relevant air cover through campaigns that keep them moving?

Marketing Coverage measures the percentage of your audience records that have received meaningful outreach or nurturing. It’s about ensuring prospects don’t go cold and that your team is accelerating them along the customer journey.

Coverage doesn’t work in isolation—sales and marketing need to coordinate without overlap or conflict. When done right, combined coverage creates momentum that keeps opportunities advancing.

2. Marketing Campaign Contribution

Question to ask: Are my campaigns influencing revenue, and am I investing in the right ones?

Campaign Contribution assesses how marketing efforts impact deal progression, deal size, and closed revenue. This metric tells you whether your campaigns are doing the heavy lifting: accelerating lifecycles, helping win more deals, and consistently showing up in revenue-generating activities.

Each company can define this differently. For example, some only count campaign contribution when multiple campaigns have influenced a deal; others focus on whether campaigns helped re-engage stalled opportunities or resonated with their ICP. Flexibility is key—but the principle remains: contribution means connection to revenue.

3. Marketing Influence

Question to ask: Are the campaigns I designed for specific audiences and channels performing as expected?

Marketing Influence evaluates whether the right campaigns are landing with the right segments. Unlike campaign contribution, which looks at closed deals, influence focuses on campaign and channel performance trends over time.

By analyzing these patterns, marketing leaders can see how campaigns drive middle-of-funnel conversions, accelerate MQL prospects, or hit other strategic goals. Influence helps you answer whether your strategy is aligned with audience response—not just deal outcomes.

The Bottom Line

Marketing has the skillset to be the best storyteller in the C-suite, but as long as attribution is the central character, marketing will be stuck on the sidelines. To earn a seat at the executive table, marketers must step out of the weeds and into the boardroom with metrics and narratives that speak the universal language of business: revenue, growth, and profit.