HubSpot offers six attribution models out of the box. Most teams pick the default (linear) and never change it. That’s fine for a 14-day cycle and disastrous for a nine-month enterprise cycle. The model has to match the motion.
Linear: short cycles, low touch counts
Distributes credit equally across all touchpoints. Use when your cycle is under 30 days and average touch count is under 5. Above that, the long tail of touches gets equal weight to the high-leverage first and last touches, which dilutes signal.
First touch: brand-led demand
Gives 100% credit to the first interaction. Use this when your team’s job is to create awareness and you’re optimizing top-of-funnel campaigns. It systematically undervalues your nurture and conversion teams. Pair it with a second model for balance.
Last touch: response-led teams
Gives 100% credit to the closing touchpoint. Useful for paid-search teams optimizing for conversion, dangerous as a primary CMO metric. Buyers don’t decide on the last ad; they decide and then click an ad.
Time decay: long enterprise cycles
Weights recent touches more heavily. Use for cycles over 90 days where early-stage touches actually do matter less than the recent demo or sales conversation. Default decay (7-day half-life) is too aggressive for enterprise; tune to 30 days.
Position-based (40-20-40): full-funnel teams
40% to first touch, 40% to last, 20% spread across the middle. The most defensible default for B2B SaaS with 60-180 day cycles. Marketing gets credit for awareness AND conversion, with middle-funnel teams getting their share.
W-shaped: lifecycle-aware
40% first, 40% lead conversion, 40% opportunity created, balance to closing touch (yes, it sums to 100% via normalization). Use when you have clean MQL and SQL stage timestamps. Most teams don’t, so this looks great in theory and fails in practice.
The cardinal rule
Run two models in parallel and look for divergence. If first-touch and last-touch tell different stories about which channel matters, that’s where your real insight lives. Same answer = noise.
Channel: Webinar
First-touch revenue: $1.2M
Last-touch revenue: $180K
Insight: Webinar creates pipeline, doesn't close it. Don't measure with last-touch.What to do this week
Identify your average sales cycle in days and average touchpoint count per won deal. Pick the model that matches. Set a calendar reminder to revisit when your cycle shifts by more than 30%.
