Magazine · 5 September 2026 · revised 9 October 2026
Attribution in a client's CRM: who owns a lead that never replied?
Whoever can prove the contact. If you work in a client's CRM and are paid on results, keep your own attribution log from the very first contact, alongside the client's CRM, with five details per line. Your CRM access ends with the contract; your claim to payment often runs months longer.
The argument is rarely about the model
First touch, last touch, even split or time-weighted: you can debate these models for a long time. The real dispute usually starts elsewhere, over which contacts are in the calculation at all.
A contact nobody logged counts for zero in every model. In the end, whoever writes things down decides.
The CRM belongs to the client
We work in our clients' systems, and that is deliberate: the instance and licences belong to them. It has a consequence that is easy to miss when signing: access ends with the contract, the claim does not.
A success fee with a twelve-month tail means the contact that matters must still be provable a year after your last login, in a system you can no longer open. Relying on the other side's records means relying on their memory.
What belongs in an attribution log
The log starts with the first contact, long before the first deal. It runs alongside the client's CRM and doesn't replace it: the CRM holds what sales needs, the log holds what the invoice needs. One line contains:
- date and time
- company and person, with the identifier from the client CRM
- channel: phone, LinkedIn, meeting or handover
- what happened, in one sentence
- who did it
That is all it takes. A log that is a lot of work stops being kept after three weeks, and a patchy log won't help much in a dispute.
It gets expensive when something changes
A contact leaves, a CRM is migrated, a field gets renamed. Then the chain that attribution hangs on breaks at a point nobody was watching.
That is why our proposals state who keeps the attribution record and where it lives. The log is also a separate file, kept apart from the weekly report.
It costs a few minutes per contact and saves the later argument about whether a deal counts.
How we document outreach and handover in the CRM is described at Sales OS.
What is lead attribution?
The assignment of a deal to the contacts that led to it. It decides who may claim a success. With a success fee, it decides who gets paid.
Which attribution model is the right one?
That is rarely the deciding question. What matters more is that every contact is recorded at all. A missing contact counts zero under every model.
Is the client’s CRM not enough as proof?
As long as you have access, yes. But access ends with the contract, and a success fee with a tail does not. That is what your own log is for.