Two categories, and only two
Every event-touched deal is classified as exactly one of two things:- Sourced: the event created the relationship.
- Influenced: the event touched a relationship that already existed.
Two separate questions: class and threshold
Classification and qualification are independent axes. Do not conflate them.- Class. Sourced versus Influenced. Which side of the event the relationship was born on.
- Threshold. Your north-star stage. The bar a deal clears to count as a win, for example closed-won, demo-completed, or qualified-opportunity. You set it in the dashboard.
Sourced
No opportunity existed at the account before the event, and one came after. The event gets origination credit. This is the hardest and rarest claim, so heyBTW applies it conservatively. The guard that keeps Sourced honest: heyBTW does not claim an event sourced a deal that sales was already actively working. If a rep or SDR had an open opportunity or recent outbound on the contact before the event, or your CRM lead source resolves to sales, the event did not source it. Mere presence in your CRM, or a dormant or old marketing touch, does not disqualify a sourced claim. An active prior relationship does. Doing the targeting is not the same as being the source. heyBTW helping you decide who to invite is decision support, not a source touch. The highest-confidence sourced signal is partner-sourced: a brand-new opportunity where a partner’s tracked invite drove the first touch and sales was not already working the account. Broader source coverage continues to expand.Influenced
The opportunity already existed and an event attendee touched it after the event. The event gets influence credit on an in-flight deal. Many events can influence one deal. Sales- and SDR-originated contacts who attend events land here, not in Sourced. This is the claim that holds up under scrutiny, and the one to lead with for in-flight pipeline.Acceleration (coming): the weight on Influenced
Acceleration is not a third category. It is a velocity weight carried by an Influenced touch. An influenced touch that preceded a faster-than-baseline jump through your pipeline stages is weighted more heavily than one that merely coincided with normal progression. This is what makes “dinners are for acceleration, not acquisition” provable. Acceleration is correlation, not causation. It describes that an event correlates with faster stage progression. It never claims the event caused it. This weight is in development. It requires per-workspace stage history and a baseline velocity to measure against, so it is not yet displayed. When it ships, it always pairs with the Influenced claim and is never shown as a standalone category.The dimensions
heyBTW reports attribution across independent dimensions. A deal can be marketing-sourced and partner-influenced at the same time, with no contradiction. This avoids the zero-sum fight where marketing and partner teams argue over a single source field.- Marketing source. Was an event the first meaningful touch on this deal, and if so, which event?
- Partner source. Did a partner drive the deal to its first touch? Partner source is ranked by signal: a tracked partner link on the RSVP (highest), the attendee’s company being an existing customer of the partner per overlap data (medium), and the partner co-hosting the event (lower alone, stronger combined with the others).
- Partner influence. Which partners touched the deal during its active cycle. The dashboard surfaces partner roles as Direct, Partner Sourced, Partner Influenced (New Business), and Partner Influenced (Expansion).
How an event is matched to a deal
When heyBTW evaluates whether an event touched a deal, it walks a ranked list of signals, strongest to weakest:- Direct attendee match. An event attendee is a contact on the opportunity. Strongest.
- New opportunity, same person, within the window. An opportunity is created after the event with the attendee as a contact.
- New opportunity, same company, within the window. A new opportunity appears at the attendee’s company, where the attendee handed off internally.
- Existing opportunity touched after the event. This is the influence signal.
Match keys and identity resolution
How attendees are matched to opportunity contacts:- Same person. Work email is the primary match. When only a personal email is provided, heyBTW resolves a current company through enrichment and matches against opportunities at that company. Personal emails with no resolvable company are excluded.
- Same company. Domain match between attendee email and opportunity contact email. Free email domains are excluded from company matching.
What heyBTW excludes
The model has explicit rules to prevent self-attribution:- Host-workspace employees attending your own events are not counted toward attribution.
- Partner employees on their own customers’ deals do not give that partner credit.
- Free email domains are excluded from company matching.
Time anchors
- Event date anchor. Event start is the consistent anchor: day one for a multi-day conference, broadcast time for a webinar, reservation time for a dinner.
- Opportunity creation. Read from the CRM.
- Time window. Caller-controlled. The dashboard asks for “this quarter,” an MCP tool for “last 90 days,” an agent for “since last QBR.” The model respects each window and imposes no default.
- Closed deals are locked. When a deal closes, its attribution is fixed at the close date and references the stage taxonomy as it existed then. Closed deals do not change retroactively, even if your CRM stage names change later.
North-star stage
Each workspace defines what “the event worked” means: closed-won, demo-completed, qualified-opportunity, or any other CRM stage. Attribution is computed against that target. A workspace where demo-completed is the north-star stage reports differently from one where closed-won is. The customer’s pipeline definition wins.Collections
Related events can be grouped into Collections, for example every event around a conference, a region, a rep, or a recurring meetup series. When more than one event in a Collection legitimately touched a deal, each can attribute at the same time. The more specific event carries the stronger signal, and the broader grouping a weaker one. The model does not force a single attribution choice when multiple events touched the deal.Revenue Lift is a separate measure
Sourced and Influenced are deal-level: they attribute specific opportunities to specific events through attendee-to-CRM matching. Revenue Lift is different. It is an account-level, population-level incrementality measure that asks one question: do accounts that touched an event spend more than comparable accounts that did not? Revenue Lift compares an event-touched cohort against a non-touched cohort, where membership is determined by event attendance. It is deliberately separate from the Sourced and Influenced model and answers a program-level question rather than a deal-level one. It surfaces on the Event Attribution Funnel.What heyBTW will not do
These are commitments, not gaps.- Never overwrite CRM revenue, stages, or opportunities. heyBTW supplements the CRM with event and partner data. heyBTW writes only events, attendees, and partner attachment metadata.
- No pre-event touch-graph attribution. SDR emails, newsletters, and ads are out of scope; marketing automation already measures those. Events are the unit of attribution, opportunities are the unit of outcome, and attendance is the link.
- Never present acceleration as a category, and never claim it caused anything. It is a weight on Influenced, correlation only.
- Never claim sourced for a sales- or SDR-originated deal, or because heyBTW drove the targeting.
Stability
The model commits to specific outputs; the implementation behind them can evolve.- Stable. The two-category Sourced and Influenced rule, the dimension names, the signal ordering, the exclusion rules, and the lock-on-close behavior.
- May evolve. Signal weighting nuances, partner sub-hierarchy refinements, and the acceleration weight once it ships.
Related
- Event Attribution Funnel: how the dashboard surfaces these classifications.
- Enrichment: how attendees are resolved to companies so they can be matched.
- Context Graph Coordinates: the five dimensions every signal is located along.
- MCP Tools: how to query attribution programmatically.