Choosing a Credit Model When Your CFO Wants Last-Click and Your CMO Wants Linear

Every flagship commission includes a half-day credit model workshop. The failure mode we see most often is not technical — it is two executives arriving with incompatible expectations and no framework to resolve them.

Last-click is defensible for budget allocation because it ties spend to a measurable action. Linear distribution reflects the reality that most purchases involve multiple touches. The mistake is presenting both models as interchangeable answers to the same question.

Our workshop produces a decision matrix: which model governs which report tier. Executive summary uses the model leadership agrees drives budget decisions. Analyst drill-down includes all three (last-click, linear, time-decay) side by side with a toggle note explaining when to reference each.

We document the chosen primary model in the methodology PDF with signatures from both finance and marketing stakeholders. That single page prevents more revision rounds than any technical fix.

For B2B commissions with long sales cycles, we often recommend position-based (U-shaped) as the primary model with last-click reserved for performance marketing sub-reports. The specific choice matters less than the documented agreement — an dashboard nobody trusts is worse than a simple model everyone accepts.

If your commission is stalled because of internal disagreement, pause the build and run the workshop before week three. Rebuilding credit logic after the dashboard skeleton exists costs roughly triple the workshop time.