How to Track What’s Working (and Who’s Working It)

In our last issue, we talked about how marketing can actually support sales by producing clean, useful materials that help your team do their job. But just handing things over isn’t enough. Once the folders, flyers, and campaigns go out into the world, someone needs to ask the next question: Did it work?

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That’s where lead attribution comes in. Not as some fancy corporate term, but as a basic tool for understanding what’s bringing in business. If you’re not tracking where your leads are coming from, you’re making guesses about what’s working — and guesses don’t scale.

Attribution Isn’t Just About Credit

When most people hear “lead attribution,” they assume it’s just about tracking which rep brought in the deal. In that, they’re partially correct…but there’s more to it.

Attribution means knowing which channel, piece of content, event, or campaign played a role in bringing a lead to your door. Did they scan a QR code on a box truck? Did they fill out a form on your website after clicking an email? Did they call the number on a trade show flyer?

Without that information, it’s hard to know where to focus your efforts (and even harder to justify your marketing budget).

Done right, attribution helps your whole team:

Sales sees which tools and tactics convert.
Marketing learns what’s worth producing more of.
Leadership gets a clearer picture of how business is being won.

The Tools We Actually Use

You don’t need five platforms and a dedicated analyst to get started with attribution. You just need a few well-integrated tools and the discipline to use them consistently.

Here are some of the systems we use to track where our leads are coming from here at QBC:

UTMs
A UTM (short for Urchin Tracking Module) is a small snippet of text added to the end of a URL that tells you where someone clicked a link. For example, if you email a flyer to a client with a QR code that links to your website, the UTM can tell you that the traffic came from that specific flyer. It’s nothing groundbreaking — it’s just structured information that feeds into tools like Google Analytics or HubSpot — but it is extremely valuable.

CallRail

When leads prefer to pick up the phone, you can use tools like CallRail to assign unique phone numbers to different campaigns, print pieces, or landing pages. That way, you know whether a lead came in from a job site sign, a website contact page, or a direct mail piece. It’s an easy way to bring visibility to channels that don’t leave a digital footprint.

HubSpot

As our CRM (Customer Relationship Management), HubSpot is where all contacts are tracked. It lets us tag each contact by source, campaign, or sales rep. Over time, we can see patterns: Which channels are bringing in the highest-value leads? Which campaigns generate the most engagement?

Custom Tags & Properties

Inside HubSpot, we’ve created simple checkboxes and dropdowns that let us assign details like lead type, deal owner, and pretty much anything you can think of. This structure gives us real answers when we review monthly performance.

Attribution Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated

One reason companies might not track leads is because they think it’s going to be messy or time-consuming. But the truth is, a simple system that gets used is better than a perfect one that doesn’t.

The key is making attribution part of the process, rather than an extra step. That might mean adding a required dropdown to your lead capture form (“How did you hear about us?”), or it could mean pre-tagging every print piece with a QR code that includes a campaign ID.

You can even assign specific CallRail numbers to different teams, so incoming calls are automatically logged by source. Small moves like these take the pressure off your team and let your systems do the work.

Once you’ve got a system in place, make sure someone is actually looking at the results. Set a monthly time to review performance and share insights between marketing, sales, and leadership.

Sales and Marketing Need a Feedback Loop

Attribution only works when the information flows both ways. Sales should be telling Marketing which materials actually get used (and which ones get tossed in the trash). Marketing should be showing Sales which campaigns are working and how they’re being measured.

This kind of collaboration doesn’t require long meetings or fancy project management software. It just takes a shared interest in making things work better. Start with a quick monthly check-in. Share a one-page report. Ask what’s working and what’s not. That feedback helps everyone move faster and smarter.

Progress Over Perfection

We won’t pretend we’ve got attribution down to a science at QBC. Like most companies, we’ve had to untangle years of assumptions and old habits, and we’re not afraid to ask for help.

But over time, we’re learning. And that means better decisions with less guessing.

Attribution doesn’t need to be complicated. It just needs to be clear — and consistent.

Your Challenge

Think about your last five closed leads. Can you say for sure where each one came from?

If not, it might be time to stop relying on memory and start building a system that gives you real answers.

Let us know what you think of this issue by emailing media@questbuildingcorp.com.

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How to Track What’s Working (and Who’s Working It)