Marketing Sourced vs Marketing Influenced Pipeline

What Sourced vs Influenced actually means

Sourced pipeline counts opportunities where marketing generated the original contact. Influenced pipeline counts every opportunity marketing touched at any point, including deals sales found first. Both are legitimate measures. Reporting only influenced pipeline is not, because in most companies marketing eventually touches nearly every deal, so the number approaches total pipeline and stops meaning anything.

Worked example

A quarter produces 12,000,000 dollars of pipeline. Marketing sourced 4,000,000 of it and influenced 10,500,000. Leading a board slide with the larger figure invites the obvious question of what the other 1,500,000 was doing, and the credibility cost of that question is higher than the credit gained from the bigger number.

Why the board cares

Boards accept influenced pipeline as context and sourced pipeline as accountability. Presenting both, with the definitions written on the slide, is the standard that avoids the awkward follow-up. A marketing leader who volunteers the smaller sourced number first buys credibility for everything else in the deck.

Common mistakes

• Reporting influenced pipeline alone, which rounds toward total pipeline and stops discriminating between programs.
• Failing to state the attribution rule on the slide, so the numbers cannot be reproduced next quarter.
• Adding sourced and influenced together into a single total, which is arithmetically meaningless.

Related terms

• Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA)
• Pipeline Coverage Ratio
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
• Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)

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