Concept: Seeing Which of Ten Touchpoints Actually Closes the Deal

Starting Point

Cascade Ridge Energy Partners is a nine-year-old engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contractor based in Spokane, Washington, building commercial and industrial solar arrays and battery storage systems for manufacturers, cold-storage operators, port authorities, and municipal utilities across the Pacific Northwest and Mountain West. The company has grown from a three-person crew doing rooftop installs to a 130-person operation landing $500,000 to $8 million projects, with a marketing function that has grown almost by accident: a mix of Google Ads, LinkedIn campaigns, trade show sponsorships, gated whitepapers, and a referral network built on word of mouth from past utility clients. Leadership knows the pipeline is healthy. What they cannot say with any confidence is why.

The Problem

Every Cascade Ridge deal moves through a buying committee, not a single buyer — a plant engineer who cares about system uptime, a sustainability or facilities director tracking emissions targets, a CFO or controller modeling payback period and tax incentives, and often a utility interconnection liaison who has to sign off before anything gets built. That is consistent with what Gartner found in its 2024 survey of 632 B2B buyers: buying groups now range from five to sixteen people across as many as four functions, and 74% of those buyer teams show unhealthy conflict during the decision process (Gartner, 2025). Each of those stakeholders enters the funnel differently and at different times, which is part of why McKinsey's 2024 B2B Pulse survey of nearly 4,000 B2B decision-makers found that customers now use an average of ten interaction channels over the course of a purchase, up from five in 2016 — and 42% of buyers touch more than eleven separate channels before deciding (McKinsey & Company, 2024). Cascade Ridge's CRM and ad platforms were never built to talk to each other, so almost none of that journey was visible. Marketing could report cost-per-click and form fills; sales could report closed-won revenue; nobody could connect the two. That gap is not unique to Cascade Ridge — 6sense's research on B2B buying behavior estimates that a typical purchase journey now involves somewhere between 100 and 200 individual buyer interactions, of which 70% to 80% happen anonymously and never get captured by traditional marketing attribution at all (6sense, 2025). Without a way to reconcile ad spend, content engagement, and trade-show contacts against which deals actually closed, Cascade Ridge's marketing team was effectively guessing which of its channels were paying for themselves and which were just generating activity.

Our Approach

Cyean's concept starts by treating the CRM, not the ad platforms, as the source of truth. That means matching every marketing touchpoint — paid search, LinkedIn ads, organic content, webinar registrations, trade show badge scans, referral intros — to a specific contact and opportunity record using consistent UTM tagging and contact-level matching, so a six-month deal can be traced from its very first touch to its close date instead of being credited entirely to whichever channel happened to submit the final contact form. Because a Cascade Ridge deal typically involves several stakeholders joining at different points, the dashboard would also tag each touchpoint by the role of the person engaging with it — plant engineer, sustainability director, finance — so marketing and sales could finally see not just which channels worked, but which channels reached which piece of the buying committee. On top of that matched data, Cyean would build a live reporting dashboard replacing the quarterly spreadsheet exports Cascade Ridge's marketing manager was assembling by hand. The dashboard would show pipeline value and win rate by channel and by first-touch source, alongside a multi-touch view crediting every channel that appeared in a deal's history — giving leadership both the simple story ("what started this deal") and the fuller one ("what kept it alive for eight months").

What Changed

• Connected CRM opportunity records to every marketing touchpoint — paid ads, organic search, trade shows, webinars, referrals — through consistent UTM tagging and contact-level matching.
• Built a stakeholder-mapped view showing which channels and content reached each buying-committee role (engineering, sustainability, finance) across a single deal.
• Replaced hand-built quarterly spreadsheet reports with a live dashboard updated daily, covering pipeline, win rate, and cost per opportunity by channel.
• Added first-touch, multi-touch, and time-to-close views side by side, so the team could separate what generates initial interest from what nurtures a deal through a long cycle.
• Set up automated alerts flagging when a high-value account's new stakeholder engaged with a channel, so sales could follow up while it was still relevant.

The Outcome

This is an unsolicited concept built to show what Cyean's analytics and reporting work could look like for a business like Cascade Ridge Energy Partners — it describes no actual client, and no results below were measured for this specific company. The figures cited throughout are independent, publicly available industry research, offered only to size the scale of the opportunity a project like this could plausibly unlock, not a claim of what was achieved. With that framing, the opportunity is real. If Cascade Ridge's marketing team currently cannot see which of its ten average interaction channels (McKinsey, 2024) is actually driving the deals that close — and if, per 6sense's estimate, 70% to 80% of the interactions inside a typical buying journey are going entirely unmeasured (6sense, 2025) — then even a partial fix to that visibility gap changes the conversation from "we think trade shows work" to "here is the dollar value trade shows produced last quarter, and here is what it cost to get it." For a company spending real budget across paid search, LinkedIn, sponsorships, and content while running an EPC pipeline where deals routinely involve four or more decision-makers (Gartner, 2025), knowing which channels reliably reach which stakeholders is the difference between spending against a hunch and spending against evidence.

Industry Context

Energy and infrastructure companies are entering this measurement problem later than most B2B sectors, in part because their sales cycles are longer and their buying committees are larger than the marketing tools built for faster-moving industries were ever designed to track. Gartner's research shows that buying groups experiencing genuine relevance and consensus within the committee are up to three times more likely to result in a high-quality deal (Gartner, 2025) — meaning the businesses that can see how their marketing actually reaches and satisfies every stakeholder in that group, not just the one who filled out a form, are the ones positioned to convert that complexity into an advantage rather than a blind spot. Sources: - Gartner, "Gartner Sales Survey Finds 74% of B2B Buyer Teams Demonstrate 'Unhealthy Conflict' During the Decision Process," May 2025 (survey of 632 B2B buyers) - McKinsey & Company, "The Surprising Economics of B2B Growth" / B2B Pulse Survey 2024 - 6sense, "The 2025 B2B Marketing Attribution & Contribution Benchmark," 2025