Where does your revenue come from?

I run the same exercise with nearly every company I sit down with. And nearly every time, the same thing happens.

I ask the founder or head of sales to list their last 15-20 closed deals. Not pipeline. Not projections. Deals that already happened - real money, real clients, already in the door.

Then I ask six questions about each one.

Most people fill out the first three columns in ten minutes. Client name, point of contact, what they bought. That's memory. That's easy.

Then they hit "why they purchased" and things slow down. Not because they don't remember - but because they've never thought about it at that level. They'll write "they needed marketing help." Surface-level. The kind of answer that sounds like an answer but tells you nothing.

Then they get to "where they found you" and it falls apart completely.

"Referral."

One word. For a $30K, $50K, sometimes $100K deal - the entire attribution story is a single word that could mean a hundred different things. Who referred them? Why did that person think of you? Was it a warm intro or did the client cold-call after hearing your name at an event six months ago? Was there a LinkedIn post involved? A Google search?

Nobody knows. Because nobody tracks it. And because nobody tracks it, every marketing decision going forward is a guess dressed up as strategy.

I ran this recently with a company spending $6K/month on paid ads. When we mapped their last 20 deals, exactly one came from paid. One. The other 19 came through referrals, direct outreach, and networking. They'd been burning $72K/year on a channel that wasn't working - because the assumption was "we need to be running ads." Nobody stopped to check.

That's an extreme case. But the pattern is everywhere.

Businesses spending money based on what they think is working - not what is. The only way to know the difference is to look backward before you plan forward.

Working Theories: The Attribution Diagnosis

The Attribution Diagnosis is a structured review of your most recent deals across six dimensions. It's not a marketing audit. It's a reality check - designed to replace assumption with evidence.

Here's how to run it.

1. Pull your last 15-20 closed deals. Not your pipeline. Closed deals. Use your CRM, invoice history, or deal log. This takes 10 minutes.

2. Fill in six columns for each one.

• WHO purchased - their title and role, not just the company name. If you sell B2B, this tells you who your actual buyer persona is. If 12 of 15 deals closed with a VP instead of a CEO, your messaging is aimed at the wrong person.

• WHY they purchased - the real reason, not "they needed our service." A reason sounds like: "Their vendor missed a compliance deadline and they needed someone who could guarantee 48-hour turnaround." Push past the surface. What was the pain, fear, or trigger?

• WHAT they bought - specific product, package, price point. "Consulting" is not specific enough. "12-week operational audit, $30K" is.

• WHEN they bought it - the timing trigger, not just the date. Was it fiscal year-end? A budget approval? A business event like new funding or a leadership change? If deals cluster in Q4, your heaviest marketing push should be Q3.

• WHERE they found you - the full path, not just "referral." Who referred them? Why did that person think of you? Was it a warm intro or a cold call? If it was LinkedIn, was it organic content, an ad, a DM? List every touchpoint in order. Write at least 2-3 sentences. This is the column that tells you where to spend money.

• Point of contact vs. decision maker - who did you talk to versus who said yes. If you're spending cycles with gatekeepers who can't close a deal, that's a process problem.

3. Look for patterns - not anecdotes.

Common ones to watch for:

• Buyer persona mismatch: you think you're selling to CEOs, but the data says VPs. Fix the targeting before you fix the funnel.

• Attribution concentration: 60-80% of revenue coming from one or two channels. That's either a strength to double down on or a vulnerability to address.

• Shallow attribution: if most of your WHERE answers are one word, you don't know how people find you. That's worth solving before spending another dollar on marketing.

• Timing clusters: if deals close in the same quarter every year, your campaign calendar should reflect that. If they don't cluster, stop guessing about seasonality.

• WHY repetition: if the same pain point shows up in 8 of 15 deals, that pain point is your message. Not your features. Not your process. The pain.

4. Translate patterns into decisions.

The diagnosis doesn't tell you what to do - it tells you what's true. Strategy comes after truth. Adjust your messaging to reflect the real WHY. Target the actual WHO. Allocate budget toward the channels that appear most in WHERE.

The exercise takes 60-90 minutes the first time. Faster every quarter after that. The ROI on that time is hard to overstate - because every marketing dollar you spend afterward is informed by evidence instead of assumption.

Stop guessing. Look backward first.

Reference Document

Full List Of Working Theories Resources