Every operations professional has one grievance they can recite from memory. For Mira Wise, a revenue operations leader in B2B SaaS, it is a missing object in HubSpot. On the Let’s Talk Marketing podcast she explained to Sophie Steffen exactly what HubSpot does not give her, why it matters, and the considerably involved workaround her team built to get it back.
The Object HubSpot Does Not Have
Wise came to HubSpot from Salesforce, and that history is the source of the complaint. Salesforce has a campaign member, an individual object that records every touchpoint in a contact’s journey. Someone registers for a webinar, and that registration is logged along with where it came from, perhaps social media. Three months later they request a demo, and that is logged too. The result is a complete, ordered account of every meaningful interaction a person had with you.
HubSpot does not offer that. It offers first-touch and last-touch attribution, full stop.
“HubSpot gives you first and last and I mean, that’s great, right? That’s still better than what we had before in our case, but of course, from a marketing team’s perspective, you’re missing a huge chunk of visibility on what’s actually happening with everyone that’s in your funnel.”
First and last are the bookends. Everything between them (the webinar, the second webinar, the content download, the event) vanishes. For a marketing team trying to understand what actually moves people through a funnel, losing the middle is losing the plot. The beginning and the end of a story rarely explain why it happened.
The Tableau Workaround, and Its Limit
The first move was clever. The team’s data analyst built a custom attribution model that lives entirely outside HubSpot, in Tableau. The insight behind it is that the digital touchpoint data is not actually absent from HubSpot. It simply is not surfaced in the interface. Pull it from the backend, drop it into Tableau, and you can reconstruct the multi-touch model HubSpot declines to show you. This is also why Wise reports multi-touch attribution in Tableau by default rather than fighting HubSpot’s reporting to do it.
That solved the online problem. It did not solve the offline one. Backend digital data, however cleverly extracted, still only knows about things that happened in a browser. An event your company runs, where you upload a list of session attendees afterward, never generated a tracked online interaction. As far as HubSpot’s machinery is concerned, those attendees did not have that touchpoint at all.
So the team went one step further and rebuilt the missing Salesforce concept by hand. They constructed something that replicates the campaign member inside HubSpot, capturing the offline interactions too, in a form that could be exported and plugged into the Tableau model. It is, by Wise’s own description, an advanced solution. It is also one most teams would never attempt.
Why the Missing Touchpoints Change Everything
The reason this work was worth doing comes down to how weighted attribution models behave when you feed them new inputs. A multi-touch model assigns weight to each interaction in a journey. If whole categories of interaction are invisible (leads referred through PartnerStack by the partnerships team, attendees from offline events), then the model is distributing its weights across an incomplete picture.
“Now you actually have five more interactions that get weights, and so all of that shifts.”
That is the crux of it. Adding the missing touchpoints does not just append a few rows to a report. It redistributes every weight in the model, because attribution is a zero-sum accounting of credit. A model that ignores partnerships and events is not slightly incomplete. It is actively wrong about marketing, too, because it has handed marketing credit that belonged elsewhere.
The payoff is a model that finally serves the whole revenue organization rather than one corner of it. Marketing, sales, and partnerships can all see their real contribution, which matters enormously when attribution feeds decisions about budget and, in the case of sales, commission. Wise is candid that the solution is more elaborate than it should have to be, and that a native campaign member in HubSpot would make the entire exercise unnecessary. But until that arrives, a homemade one plugged into Tableau is what an honest attribution model costs.
For the full interview breakdown, see our complete Expert Insight with Mira Wise.
Tools Mentioned in the Interview
The following tools and platforms were referenced during this conversation.
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