Ask anyone who's tried a revenue-share deal what killed it, and you'll rarely hear "the work was bad." You'll hear something quieter and more corrosive: we couldn't agree on what counted.
It's the problem hiding under every pay-for-performance arrangement. When you're paid a flat fee, attribution is somebody else's headache. The moment your pay depends on results, attribution becomes the entire relationship — and most agreements paper over it with a hopeful sentence and a handshake. That sentence is where the trust goes to die.
Why it's so hard
A growth engine fills the top of the funnel. A sales team closes the bottom. In between sits a long, messy middle full of things neither side fully controls: timing, pricing, a competitor's stumble, a champion who changes jobs, a deal that was already half-cooked before anyone showed up.
So when a big contract lands, two true stories compete. Ours: the engine sourced the account, warmed it, and booked the meeting. Theirs: the relationship was already there, the product sold itself, the close was all them. Both can be partly right. And if the contract doesn't decide in advance whose story wins, you've built a fight into the foundation.
How we draw the line
We answer the question before we start, in writing, and we draw it conservatively. Three rules do most of the work:
- Trace it or skip it. If a deal can't be followed end-to-end in your CRM back to something the engine did, it doesn't count. No tracing, no claim.
- Baseline everything. Customers you had and deals already in your pipeline on day one are carved out up front. We're paid on what's genuinely new, not on momentum you already had.
- Ambiguity breaks your way. When a deal could be argued either direction, it isn't ours. Full stop.
When it's ambiguous, it doesn't count. The relationship is worth more than a contested invoice.
That last rule costs us money on paper. We give up the gray-area deals we could plausibly argue for. We take it anyway, because the alternative — quarterly arguments about whose win it was — costs far more. A partner you trust on attribution is a partner you'll scale with for years. A partner you audit is one you'll fire.
The cleaner the loop, the bigger the bet
This is also why we're picky about who we back. The companies where attribution is cleanest — a real CRM, disciplined pipeline hygiene, a sales team that logs its work — are the ones where we can take the most confident bet. Messy data isn't a dealbreaker, but it usually means we start with a proof sprint to get the tracking honest before any upside is on the line.
Performance deals don't fail because the work doesn't land. They fail because nobody decided, in advance and in good faith, how to read the scoreboard. We'd rather lose a few gray-area dollars than the one thing the whole model runs on.