Attribution that survives lead conversion
3 mo to rebuild the revenue lifecycle
The problem they were facing
A Funnel the Reporting Could Not Describe
Cents sells hardware, software and payments to laundromat owners across two platforms. Most of the signal that drives growth sits outside a traditional CRM setup, which is a polite way of saying the standard playbook does not fit. When The Sales Nerd was brought in by Sumeru Equity Partners, the ask was never a cleaner top-of-funnel. It was a full view of the revenue engine.
The audit ran four weeks and produced around a hundred findings across six themes. The one that mattered most was the foundation everything else sat on: lifecycle and attribution. Four things were true about the system, and Kevin Bowman, who runs revenue operations at Cents, confirmed all four.
- Attribution was stuck on first touch. Once a record had a source it never changed, so channel performance was hard to answer with any confidence.
- Lifecycle jumped straight from lead to account. Nothing tracked a contact through the middle, and the model stopped dead at "customer," so everything after the sale fell off the map.
- The system could not be changed as fast as the business moved. Useful logic ended up in spreadsheets and side tools instead of in Salesforce, because that was genuinely the faster route.
- Everything after the sale was invisible. Expansion depended on someone noticing, because nothing in the system surfaced it.
Three projects were on the table after the audit: the lifecycle build, a customer health score with white space mapping, and retention reporting. Kevin took the lifecycle build first and deferred the other two.
That was the right call, and it is worth saying plainly, because the instinct in most companies is the opposite. A health score built on lifecycle definitions nobody agrees on is a number you cannot defend. Retention reporting on attribution that resets at conversion tells you what happened to a population you cannot describe. The foundation had to be settled before anything could be built on top of it.
What we did
Fixing the Layer Everything Else Reports On
Rather than build the dashboards first, the engagement went after the plumbing underneath them.
- Built one lifecycle model, agreed across Salesforce and HubSpot, so both systems mean the same thing by the same stage
- Made source and attribution survive lead conversion, the unglamorous fix everything else depended on
- Mapped 86 fields through the lead-to-contact-account-opportunity conversion, so custom data stops being dropped at the exact moment the record starts to matter
- Installed before-save logic and validation that hold the lifecycle ladder in place, so a record cannot be written into a stage that makes no sense for it
- Rebuilt attribution and pipeline reporting on the cleaned model
- Cleaned up historical data, so the reports cover the past as well as the present
The field mapping deserves a note, because it is the least interesting item on that list and the one that mattered most. Custom fields were being silently dropped at conversion. Every report built downstream of that moment was describing a record that had already lost its history. Eighty-six mappings now carry the data through instead of losing it.
What changed
Reports in Minutes, and a Source You Can Name
- A trusted pipeline report went from a few hours to minutes. That is a workflow fact, not a projection.
- Reliable lead source went from roughly a quarter of leads to most of them.
- First, most recent and last touch are all visible. Before the build, none of that existed. Attribution was a single frozen value.
- The guardrails run on their own. Asked what would break if the build disappeared tomorrow, Kevin named the automations: the things that now happen off the back of how people already work, rather than being remembered and typed in by hand.
In Kevin's assessment the biggest win was the lifecycle attribution infrastructure and framework itself, not any single report it produced.
Kevin Bowman
Senior Director of Revenue Operations, Cents
Cents
“Before the infrastructure build, it was nearly impossible to report or even understand where things were coming from. We relied on manual fields and everyone spoke a different language. Now, we can accurately identify and report with clean data.”What made this work
- A narrow Phase 1 that fixed the foundation instead of the symptoms
- Agreement on lifecycle definitions before anything was built on them
- Automated guards, so data quality does not depend on anyone remembering
- A client who treated it as a partnership and learned the system as it was built
What Kevin Would Tell the Next Company
Asked what surprised him, Kevin did not give the answer most reference customers give:
"The Sales Nerd team are not mind readers, so sometimes it can feel like you are in the dark as they are working. However, if you ask questions, learn it as they build, and treat it like a partnership, you can learn not only what they are doing, but why they are doing it and how it impacts the business. The team is great to work with. Do not just agree. If you do not understand, just ask."
That is the most useful thing in this write-up. The companies that get the most out of this work are the ones that treat it as something they are learning, not something they are buying.
On whether it was worth doing:
"Yes it would be worth it. Regardless of your stage of company, the earlier the better. If you are relatively new in your journey, you can lay the groundwork and build your processes on top. If you are further along, your eyes will be opened to how powerful it is and what you have been missing out on."
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