The Attribution Checklist: Marketing Grades Its Own Paper | Free Guide | Zach Strauss
Field Guide 02 · Diagnostic
24 checks. One score.

The Attribution Checklist: Marketing Grades Its Own Paper

Finance has GAAP. Ops has throughput. Sales has quota. Marketing reports on itself, with metrics it invented, in a system it configured, with definitions it wrote. Run 24 checks against your own CRM and get a Trust Score for how much of it could survive an audit. Most companies score under 50.

Format24 checks
OutputTrust Score
Length~8 pages
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What's inside

Four layers, from can you see it to can you prove it.

Layer 01 & 02

The Ledger & the Definitions

Whether you can pull revenue by source at all, and whether marketing and sales actually mean the same thing by "qualified" and "opportunity."

Layer 03

The Math

Whether you can compute CAC, win rate, cycle length, and deal size by mechanism, not just as a blended average that hides everything useful.

Layer 04

The Truth

Whether your reporting reconciles to the CRM, purges dead deals, and still shows the number when the number is bad.

The score

Yeses over 24, times 100. Then read the band.

70 to 100

Auditable to directional. You can make decisions, and you are getting close to being able to prove them.

50 to 69

Anecdotal. You are managing marketing on vibes and quarterly hope. The numbers are sincere and unverifiable.

Under 50

Fictional to unfalsifiable. Nothing marketing tells you can be proven false, which means it cannot be proven true either.

The line to remember
If a claim cannot be proven false, it cannot be proven true either.
Who this is for

For the owner managing marketing on faith.

You have tried to manage marketing and it resists, because it is the only function in your company that reports on itself using a scorecard it built. This checklist is how you find out whether that scorecard would survive contact with your raw data.

Nothing on the list requires new software. All 24 items are configuration, definition, and discipline. The median company can move from a 40 to an 80 in about six weeks without buying anything. The reason they do not is that a 40 is comfortable and an 80 is not.

Zach Strauss
GTM Architect / Revenue Portfolio Theory

Run it. Send me the score.

If it comes back under 50, we can fix it before your next board meeting. Grab the checklist, run the 24, and let's talk about what you find.

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