Original article written by Miles Kailburn, CEO of OTM, on Substack here.
Attribution counts contacts. Influence counts accounts. Most firms never build the second one, and that gap is where good channels get killed for the wrong reasons.
In nearly every strategy conversation OTM has with a prospective client, the topic turns to marketing channels: what they're running, and what they've been tracking against it. It usually looks like six or seven lines, a budget against each, a KPI on every row. Most have numbers. Some don't. Often the numbers are genuinely good. Then OTM asks where this year's pipeline actually came from, and the answer is referrals, the founder's network, and unknown.
That pattern shows up across dozens of firms, in service categories with nothing else in common. It's consistent enough that OTM's founder, Miles Kailburn, says the same thing in most of those meetings: this isn't a channel selection problem. It's a measurement problem. Every line on that scorecard is judged on its own metrics, and a channel's own metrics can't tell you whether it worked.
OTM runs R&D campaigns on itself before asking a client to trust the same thinking. Here's one.
Performance Is Not Proof
Earlier this year, OTM ran a digital PR campaign, built as a test rather than a committed program. An April press release landed more than 150 placements, including AP News and the Bloomberg Terminal. By any standard measure of pickup, placement, and quality, that's a strong result.
Then the team pulled the pipeline. No direct attribution to the release anywhere. It never showed up as a referral source. It never showed up as a traffic source.
Which is roughly what OTM expected. Nobody should expect a press placement to produce form fills. B2B has never run on single touch attribution. A new client is won across dozens of touches, most of which the buyer never mentions and a CRM never sees.
So the placement count doesn't prove the channel worked, and the empty source field doesn't prove it didn't. Neither number is about the thing that actually matters: whether the right accounts moved.
Influence Has a Data Set
Pipeline influence gets dismissed as a soft measure because most firms never build the data behind it. It ends up as a belief about the channels a firm can't track, rather than a set of numbers it can pull.
It starts by changing the unit. Attribution counts contacts. Influence counts accounts. Once a firm is watching accounts, a campaign like this one has a real scorecard: traffic from companies that match the ICP, not total sessions; branded search volume before and after the placement window; known pipeline accounts returning to the site, and how deep they read when they do; new accounts entering from the segments the campaign was aimed at. Building that scorecard means instrumenting the CRM to see it, not just the ad platform.
Then the three numbers that connect back to revenue. Influenced pipeline, meaning the value of open deals where the account touched the channel at any point, not just the last one. Close rate by touchpoint depth, which shows whether more exposure actually converts better. And deal cycle compression, because the clearest sign awareness work is doing its job is a shorter sales conversation. This is the core discipline behind account-based marketing: watching specific accounts move, not aggregate traffic.
None of that requires a better attribution model. It requires deciding, before the campaign runs, which accounts a firm is trying to move and what movement would look like.
OTM didn't have all of it instrumented when the release went out, and that's itself the finding. Depending on which number gets pulled, that campaign reads as a fantastic success, a pile of vanity metrics from something that never produced, or a contributor to the pipeline lift OTM did see. Same campaign, three answers.
That's the pattern OTM sees across most firms in the Traction stage of the Professional Services Growth Lifecycle™. When a channel reads three different ways depending on what you look at, the problem isn't the channel. It's that account level measurement was never built before the campaign ran.
Two Reasons the Question Never Gets Answered
In those early conversations, the reflex is to question the channel selection. That's the wrong instinct when the real gap is in how a firm is measuring, not in what it picked.
The first reason is intensity. Six or seven lines running at a fraction of the effort any single one needs to produce a readable result. Every line gets a budget, a KPI, and a status column. None gets enough behind it to tell you whether the channel was wrong or the execution was thin. What comes back is soft reporting and a busy team. The wasted spend is recoverable. The time isn't, and in a market where the buying cycle runs 120 to 180 days before anyone finds out whether they were right, time is the whole game.
The second reason is that most of the decision happens where a firm can't see it. Buyers now make first contact with a seller around 61 percent of the way through their process, down from 69 percent a year earlier. By the time they call, 94 percent of buying groups have ranked their shortlist, and 95 percent of deals go to a vendor who was on that list from day one.
That's the dark funnel. The evaluation a firm thinks it's competing in is mostly a confirmation of a decision made before anyone knew the account existed. Credit lands on the last channel, and the work that built the preference never appears on the report.
Put the two together and the failure mode OTM sees most often comes into view: defund by dashboard readout, and there's a high chance the thing doing the persuading gets cut, followed by the trackable channel that stops converting, with no one connecting the two.
The One Channel That Passes the Test
There's a channel that clears every bar just described, and almost nobody manages it.
Referrals move the right accounts, repeatedly, and they do it almost entirely inside the invisible part of the process. They're also the most common answer OTM hears to that early question about where the pipeline came from. And they're the one line with no owner, no target, no cadence, and no review. Something that happens to a firm, like weather.
That's the tell. The only channel most firms can prove is working is the one they never measured, which means the test isn't being run anywhere. The firm then builds a paid program to replace it and holds that program to a standard benchmarked on the referral channel's success. Karrikins Group ran into exactly this before building a scalable engine alongside its referral base instead of in place of it.
The firms outgrowing the market do the opposite. Median growth in professional services has cooled to just under 10 percent, the lowest since 2018. The ones outrunning it grow faster and put around 12 percent of revenue into marketing while everyone else treats it as a cost center.
Consistency Before Volume
This is the diagnostic work underneath The OTM Path to Growth®, specifically the discipline OTM calls Prove the Tactics: no channel earns scale until there's account level evidence it moved the right buyers, not just proof it performed.
In practice, that starts with a firm's last significant campaign. Run it back. Not what it converted, but whether ICP traffic rose, whether branded search moved, whether accounts already in the pipeline came back to read. If a firm can't answer that, that's the finding, and it's more useful than the click rate.
Then the standing rules. Every conversation with a prospect covers not just how they got there, but what they know about the firm and where they heard it. Referral gets an owner and a number like any other line, because that source has to be protected and managed while the paid effort builds alongside it. And nothing gets more budget until it has moved the right accounts more than once, because scaling on a sample set of n equals one doesn't answer the question. It just buys a larger version of it.
Working through this at your own firm? If you're not sure which of your channels you could defend with evidence right now, that's usually the first thing OTM diagnoses together with a client. Talk to OTM about your growth engine →