The measurable share of sales pipeline that marketing activities generate or influence, typically tracked as the percentage of total pipeline value attributable to marketing-sourced or marketing-touched opportunities.
Pipeline contribution is the metric that determines whether marketing gets treated as a revenue function or a cost center. It answers a specific question: of the total pipeline sitting in front of the sales team, how much of it exists because of something marketing did?
The measurement splits into two versions that frequently get conflated. Marketing-sourced pipeline counts opportunities where marketing generated the initial engagement (a form fill, an event registration, an inbound lead). Marketing-influenced pipeline counts opportunities where a marketing touchpoint appeared somewhere in the buying journey, regardless of who created the first touch. Both are legitimate, but they tell different stories.
Sourced pipeline is the harder claim and the more credible one. It says marketing created demand that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Influenced pipeline is the broader claim and the easier one to inflate, because any touchpoint at any point in a long sales cycle counts. Organizations that report influenced pipeline without separating sourced pipeline risk measuring air cover and calling it demand generation.
The attribution dependency
Pipeline contribution is only as reliable as the attribution model underneath it. If the CRM can’t track which marketing touches preceded an opportunity, the number is a guess. If the attribution model gives full credit to the last touch, it over-credits bottom-funnel tactics and under-credits the awareness and education work that brought the account into the pipeline.
Getting this right requires clean CRM data, consistent campaign tracking, and an attribution model the organization actually believes. That’s a martech problem as much as a measurement problem.