The Executive's Marketing Playbook

A few years back, CPK sent a delivery order to a customer's house. Mac and cheese. Except they forgot the mac. Just cheese. Melted. In a container. The customer was an influencer. She posted it. It went viral, way beyond what a melted cheese mistake should ever warrant. Because people love a good disaster. They lean in. They wait to see what happens next. What CPK did next is why I'm writing this. Within 24 hours, they showed up at her door with a care package: a year of free

There's a version of marketing support that feels really good. Every recommendation gets a nod. Every campaign gets approved. Every concern gets smoothed over with "we'll figure it out." No friction. No hard conversations. Just forward motion. And then six months later, you're wondering why nothing changed. I've been in rooms where everyone around the table is agreeing with the CEO. Not because they agree, but because disagreeing feels risky. So the uncomfortable truth sits t

There's a pattern I see in a lot of growing companies. The sales team is putting in the hours. They're making calls, sending follow-ups, working their contacts. And yet the pipeline feels thin. Deals are slow. New opportunities aren't coming in fast enough. Leadership looks at sales. Sales looks at marketing. Marketing isn't sure what they're supposed to be doing. And nobody wants to say the quiet part out loud: the pipeline problem isn't a sales problem. It's a marketing pro

You're generating leads. Your marketing is running. Campaigns are going out. And somehow, growth is still stalling. I see this constantly in healthcare organizations, and the diagnosis is almost always the same: the marketing worked. The handoff didn't. Here's what it looks like in practice. Marketing sends a campaign. Interested prospects respond — they call, fill out a form, or request more information. And then the experience they get doesn't match the one they were promis

A CEO I work with recently told me his marketing wasn't working. He'd tried two agencies. Hired a marketing manager. Run paid ads. Built out a content calendar. Nothing was moving. When I asked him to walk me through his customer acquisition process from first touch to closed deal, he paused, "I'm not sure we actually track that." That's not a marketing problem. That's a foundation problem. And it's more common than most CEOs want to admit. Here's what I've learned after work

She didn't see it coming. The CEO I was working with had just wrapped up her strongest revenue quarter in three years. The team was celebrating. Pipeline looked healthy. Retention numbers were holding steady. Then Q2 hit. Three of her top five accounts didn't renew. Two had already signed with a competitor. One sent a two-sentence email: "We've decided to go in a different direction. Thank you for the partnership." No warning. No complaint. No chance to fix it. That's the thi

I've walked into companies spending $60,000 or more on a single initiative with zero way to tell you if it drove a single qualified lead. The team is exhausted. The calendar is packed. The budget is moving. And when you ask what's working, everyone goes quiet. That's not a marketing problem. That's an accountability problem. Here's what I see in almost every company I walk into: the marketing budget is funding activity, not results. There's spending on tactics - outreach, spo

I walked into a company sitting on a product that should have been pulled from the shelves a year earlier. It had been repackaged as a white label to try to move it. That didn't work either. And yet, resources kept being thrown at it - promotions, tactics, energy - all trying to solve a problem that had only one real solution. Delete it. But that decision took months longer than it should have. Why? Because sales and marketing were operating in silos. Each team was doing its

I talked to a CEO last month who was furious about their marketing spend. They ran a health and wellness nutrition company, selling both direct to consumers and through practitioner partners across the US and Canada. They'd invested heavily in digital advertising. Almost half their marketing budget went to ads aimed at generating consumer purchases and practitioner partnerships. The CEO could tell me their cost-per-click. They knew their cost-per-lead. But when I asked which

"Clarity in priorities saved more time and money than any optimization effort." I see this play out every time I walk into a company. It's almost always the same pattern, just different symptoms. The executive team wants to do too much. They lack focus and clear prioritization on what it will actually take to hit their growth goals. So what happens? The teams below them are scattered. Some are burned out, working hard but criticized for not delivering. Others are busy executi

In chatting with CEOs, I can spot it quickly. The marketing team is running hard. Campaigns across multiple channels. Content going out daily. New tactics every quarter. But when I ask, 'What's actually driving revenue?' the answers fall into two camps: Some have no data at all. Worse, they don't have the foundation to even track it. Others are drowning in data, dashboards full of metrics, but they're tracking the wrong things. Follower counts, impressions, engagement rates.

For over a decade, performance had been sliding. Leadership was divided. And the company I was working with hadn't evolved its brand in over 20 years. They'd tried tactics. New campaigns. Different agencies. Nothing worked. Because the problem wasn't marketing execution. It was that no one was connecting the dots between strategy, execution, and outcomes. This organization had all the right pieces: Strong legacy and founding story Talented people Market opportunity But there

I see the same pattern in every discovery call: CEOs proudly show me dashboards filled with impressions, clicks, and engagement rates. Then I ask: "Which of these metrics directly predict revenue?" Silence. They're measuring activity, not outcomes. And it's costing them. Their dashboards look successful. Their bank accounts tell a different story. Most marketing dashboards are designed to make marketers look busy, not to show CEOs what's actually working. Impressions don't pa

You're Great at What You Do, But Is It Easy to Pay You? The call ended, and I sat there, stunned. "We require all our customers to pay by check," my client had just told me. Checks. In 2025. I had to ask twice to make sure I heard correctly. Who even carries checks anymore? And if you do, you're probably still using the same checkbook from 2015 because you write maybe two checks a year. The problem wasn’t that their customers wanted to pay that way. It was that the business h

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