Attribution leak

An attribution leak is an event-sourced lead or opportunity that entered the CRM outside the standard capture path, so the CRM loses its connection to the event and understates the event’s contribution.

You find a leak only by looking for it. Your rep has a good conversation at the booth and skips the scanner. Later, they find a record in the CRM (often the wrong one) and create an opportunity from it. The deal may close, but the event that produced it never appears on the record. If you answer for the show’s return, you never find out.

“I’ll never see it.”

A director of marketing events at a company above $200M ARR, on leads worked outside the process

Why does it happen?

Reps skip the capture path for different reasons, with the same result. Some are in a hurry. Others want to dodge round-robin assignment and keep the lead. And some skip the scanner because it would hand the credit to someone else.

Leaks turn up at well-run companies too, including one with a universal scanner in place. A universal scanner records only what your reps choose to put through it.

How do you detect it?

Look for CRM records from the event’s dates and accounts that didn’t come from the event’s captured list. Your pre-show plan already named the target accounts. So an opportunity that appears on one of them in the days after the show, with no capture behind it, is a possible leak.

FieldXM’s reporting lists those possible leaks for you, the events leader. You review each one and make the call.

Why does it matter?

Every leak undercounts your events, and undercounted events lose the budget argument. Your event-driven revenue is only as believable as the capture path behind it. The event conversation capture rate measures the context you lose from captured conversations. Attribution leaks count the leads that vanished entirely.