Ask a floor which vendor produced their best deals last quarter and most give an answer based on the vendor they remember being annoyed by. The data usually exists in principle and has never been connected end to end.
Tag at ingestion, not later
- Vendor, on every record, set by the endpoint that received it.
- Batch or order identifier, so you can compare one order against the next.
- Campaign and ad identifiers where the vendor passes them.
- The date the record was generated, separately from the date you loaded it.
- A flag for replacements, so a replaced lead does not inflate a batch’s apparent performance.
Carry the tags to the end
The tags have to survive the whole pipeline — through the qualified stage, the submission, the offer and the funded deal. Most CRMs lose them at exactly one point: when a lead is converted into an opportunity or deal object and the source fields are not mapped across. Check that specific transition, because it silently breaks every report downstream of it.
| Report | Answers |
|---|---|
| Funded deals by vendor | Who to buy from |
| Cost per funded deal by vendor | What to pay them |
| Contact rate by vendor | Whose numbers are real |
| Time to first dial by batch | Whether the comparison is fair |
| Funded rate by batch over time | Whether a vendor is degrading |
That last row is the one worth watching. Lead quality degrades quietly as a vendor scales or changes their traffic, and a per-batch trend catches it a quarter before the aggregate number does.
Questions brokers ask
How do you track which lead vendor produced a funded deal?
Tag every record with vendor, batch and campaign at ingestion, and make sure those tags survive the conversion from lead to deal in your CRM. That single transition is where most attribution breaks.
Why tag the batch and not just the vendor?
Because lead quality changes. Per-batch reporting shows a vendor degrading a quarter before the aggregate figure does, and it makes each order comparable to the last.
Why does a replacement flag matter?
Because a batch of fifty that became fifty-eight through replacements did not produce its deals from fifty. Without the flag, cost per funded deal is understated on every batch that ever had a claim.
What reports should attribution enable?
Funded deals and cost per funded deal by vendor, contact rate by vendor, time to first dial by batch, and funded rate by batch over time.
Where does attribution usually break?
At lead-to-deal conversion, when the source fields are not mapped onto the new object. Everything downstream then reports blank and nobody notices until a quarter-end review.
Alex Makowski
Founder, Infinite Bookings
Runs the lead generation operation behind Infinite Bookings — paid traffic, the funding application, and the delivery pipeline that puts records into brokers’ CRMs.
Reachable directly at alex@infinitebookings.com or 732-609-7182.