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Marketers aren’t lying to executives — they’re just explaining the end result without the how. That’s the distinction this conversation is built around, and it’s why multi-touch attribution keeps losing credibility with CFOs. The theory is elegant: distribute opportunity value across every touchpoint that contributed to a deal. But once you ask how the model actually assigns that credit, the story falls apart — it’s glorified last-touch dressed up as science, and the moment a touchpoint doesn’t get “the credit it deserves,” someone manually adjusts the model. Add in the fact that no one can closed-loop report an LLM citation, and you’ve got a measurement framework that’s been running on borrowed trust for years.

The conversation traces where that trust erodes and what’s replacing it. Instead of assigning dollar values to individual milestones — a blog visit, a badge scan, a demo — the shift is toward understanding causation: what actually moved someone to engage, and can you replicate it. This is where journey analytics and Markov modeling earn their keep — not by pricing out each interaction, but by modeling the path itself as the unit of value. That reframe matters more than it sounds: it’s the difference between measuring activity and measuring intent.

The second half applies the same lens to lead scoring. The 100-point threshold gets called out for what it is — a playbook that expired a decade ago, when scoring was never meant to declare someone “ready to buy.” It was designed to indicate engagement and content affinity, full stop. The episode walks through how that got corrupted — MQL, then AQL (automation qualified lead) as a stopgap after sales stopped trusting MQLs, then back to a form of MQL — and lands on where scoring is genuinely useful today: as a decay-based signal of fading intent, not a qualification gate.

The takeaway for anyone running attribution or lead scoring today: stop defending the model and start defending the story it’s supposed to tell. If you can’t explain how a number got generated, the number won’t survive contact with a skeptical buying committee — whether that committee is your CFO or your sales team.