The Executive's Marketing Playbook

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

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

What's the Difference Between Marketing Activity and Marketing Performance 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

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? When a Team Problem Is Really a Leadership Problem The teams below them are scattered. Some are burned out, working hard but cri

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.

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. Why Most Marketing Dashboards Don’t Measure Business Outcomes Most marketing dashboards are designed to make marketers look busy,

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