If your marketing is failing,
look up the chain
of command.

If you read Part 1, you might have finished it thinking something like: okay, but I’m not running a charity. My job is to protect and grow revenue. I’m not just going to open the floodgates because a marketer told me to. So what are you actually telling me to do?

That’s a fair reaction. And I want to address it directly.

I’m not a CFO. I’m not a consultant with a model to sell you. I’m a marketer with 13 years of experience who has spent a career on the floor, watching programs succeed and fail, talking to colleagues across industries, and trying to understand why the same dysfunction shows up everywhere. A friend of mine works in construction marketing, helping his company win bids on large projects. Completely different industry, completely different buyer, completely different product. Same conversation with leadership. Same pressure. Same loop.

This isn’t unique to your industry. It isn’t unique to your company size. It’s a pattern. And patterns can be interrupted.

What I’m offering here isn’t a playbook. I’m not qualified to tell you how to restructure your capital allocation. What I can tell you is what I’ve seen work when executives stop treating marketing like a cost to be managed and start treating it like a bet to be made intelligently.

The Bet Starts Before the Budget

In most organizations, the budget gets set first. Finance closes the books on last year, leadership looks at the numbers, and marketing gets handed a figure. Then marketing is told to build a strategy around it.

That’s backwards.

Strategy should determine budget. Not the other way around. When budget comes first, you’re not building a plan to win. You’re building a plan to fit. And there’s a meaningful difference between those two things.

I once built a plan that required $78,000 to run a single campaign properly for a year. The budget allocated for that campaign was $11,000. So I built the best plan I could inside that constraint. But I want to be clear about what that means: I wasn’t building a strategy. I was doing damage control with whatever was left over.

That’s not a marketing failure. That’s a resource failure that gets misread as a marketing failure.

When you set the budget before the strategy, you’re not making a calculated bet. You’re making a blind one. You’re spending money without knowing if the amount is sufficient to generate the data you need to make the next decision. And when the data comes back inconclusive, the response is usually to cut further.

The executives I’ve seen get this right do one thing differently. They ask marketing to build the strategy first. What are we trying to accomplish? What does that realistically cost? Then they look at that number and decide how much of the bet they want to place. Sometimes it’s the full amount. Sometimes it’s a defined pilot. But the decision is informed. You know what you’re buying. You know what you’re giving up if you cut it. And you know what success looks like before the first dollar gets spent.

You’re Not Spending Blind. You’re Buying Data.

This is the part that makes a lot of executives uncomfortable. Because what I’m about to say sounds like “just trust us.” It isn’t.

When you’re launching a new program or rebuilding a broken one, you’re not going to have clean data telling you exactly where to spend. That data doesn’t exist yet. And the only way to get it is to spend.

That’s not recklessness. That’s how marketing actually works.

Think of it less like spending money and more like buying information. Your first campaign isn’t just a campaign. It’s a research project. You’re finding out which channels your buyers actually respond to. Which messages resonate. Which titles and pain points stop the scroll. That information is worth more than the campaign itself because it tells you how to allocate every dollar after it.

But here’s where executives make a costly mistake. They approve a test at half the recommended threshold because the full number feels risky. And I understand that instinct. The problem is that underfunding a test doesn’t reduce your risk. It just makes the signal weaker.

If your marketing team tells you a channel needs $5,000 to generate meaningful data, testing it at $3,000 doesn’t give you a discount version of the answer. It gives you an incomplete one. You’ll still get results. You’ll still optimize. But you’ll be optimizing on $3,000 worth of signal instead of $5,000 worth. The richer the data you start with, the smarter every decision after it becomes. Underfunding the test doesn’t save you money. It just makes every dollar you spend after it work harder to compensate for what you didn’t learn the first time.

The executives I’ve seen navigate this well treat that first year of a new program the way a smart investor treats a new position. You’re not betting the company. But you’re betting enough to get a real signal. Because a real signal, even a bad one, is infinitely more valuable than the comfortable ambiguity of an underfunded test.

And if the budget genuinely isn’t there to fund the test properly, that’s a conversation worth having directly. Not every organization is in a position to make the full bet. But the answer to that isn’t to underfund it and expect full results anyway. It’s to be honest about what’s actually achievable with what you have. Aspirations are great. But if the investment doesn’t match the ambition, you’re not setting marketing up to succeed. You’re setting yourself up to be disappointed. Play in the space you can actually afford to play in, do it properly, and build from there.

The Jump Scare Problem

Here’s something I’ve watched happen more times than I can count.

A campaign launches. The team is doing monthly check-ins, tracking cost per click, customer acquisition cost, lead quality, MQL to SQL conversion rates. The numbers in the first quarter look scary. CAC is high. Lead volume is lower than projected. And somewhere in a conference room, an executive sees those numbers and the reaction is immediate. Shut it down. Pull the budget. This isn’t working.

That’s the jump scare. And it kills more marketing programs than bad strategy ever will.

Here’s what that executive didn’t have: context. Nobody agreed upfront on what the numbers were supposed to look like in month two of a brand new program. Nobody defined what “not working” actually means at each stage of a campaign. So when the numbers looked unfamiliar, the only available response was a gut reaction.

This is where kill criteria changes everything. And I don’t mean that as a framework or a formal process. I mean it as a simple conversation that happens before the campaign launches.

What does underperformance actually look like at 90 days? What does it look like at 180? If CAC is high in Q1 while we’re still testing channels, is that a failure or is that exactly what we said would happen? If lead volume is low but the leads converting to SQLs are higher quality than last year, what does that tell us?

When you answer those questions before the money gets spent, you’ve done something important. You’ve taken the panic out of the decision. The jump scare only works when there’s no pre-agreed context for what the numbers mean. When there is, a high CAC in month two isn’t a crisis. It’s the plan working exactly as designed.

Think of it like negative keywords in SEO. Your KPIs tell you what success looks like - the metrics you’re chasing, the signals that tell you to keep spending. Kill criteria tell you what failure looks like - the defined thresholds that tell you when something genuinely isn’t working and it’s time to stop. You need both. Without the negative side of the equation, you’re optimizing for success with no mechanism for recognizing failure.

I saw this play out firsthand at a previous company. We were running events as a primary acquisition channel. Certain events were performing. Others weren’t justifying their cost. The data was clear. The recommendation was to cut the underperforming events, reallocate that budget to what was working, and test a new channel with the savings.

The answer was no. Because that’s how it had always been done.

The data wasn’t the problem. The absence of pre-agreed criteria for what “not working” actually looked like was the problem. Nobody had defined it upfront. So when the recommendation came to cut, it felt like opinion rather than evidence.

That’s the gap kill criteria closes. Before the campaign launches, define what underperformance looks like at 90 days and at 180. Not as a threat to the team. As a shared agreement between leadership and marketing about what the data needs to say before anyone makes a move. That way, when the numbers look unfamiliar in month two, nobody panics. The decision was already made. You just check it against what you agreed on.

That’s how you turn the jump scare into a checkpoint.

Stop Asking for Proof. Start Speaking the Language.

A colleague of mine once used a phrase during a conversation about this that stopped me cold. He called it capital efficient language. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right.

Here’s what that means in practice. When a marketing team reports back to leadership with impressions, click-through rates, and social engagement, they’re speaking marketing. When a CFO or CEO looks at that same report, they’re translating. And something gets lost in translation almost every time.

Capital efficient language flips that. Instead of reporting what marketing did, you’re reporting what the investment returned. Not clicks. Cost per qualified opportunity. Not impressions. Pipeline contribution. Not engagement rate. Payback period. You’re showing the ratio - how much output the organization got for every dollar it put in.

This matters for two reasons. First, it gives executives something they can actually evaluate. A click-through rate tells a CMO something. It tells a CFO almost nothing. But a cost per qualified opportunity that’s trending down 20% quarter over quarter? That’s a number a CFO can work with. That’s a number that builds confidence.

Second, and this is the part marketers don’t always want to hear, it holds marketing accountable for what it promises to deliver. If you’re asking for investment, you need to be able to show what that investment is producing in terms that connect directly to revenue. Not eventually. Consistently. Every quarter.

I’m not a financial person. I’m a marketer. I can’t tell you exactly how to structure your reporting or what metrics your CFO specifically needs to see. What I can tell you is that the marketing teams I’ve seen earn and keep executive trust all have one thing in common. They don’t wait to be asked for proof. They show up with it. In language that doesn’t require translation.

That’s not just good reporting. That’s how marketing stops being a cost center and starts being treated like the growth engine it actually is.

The Bet Is Yours to Make

Here’s what I’m not saying.

I’m not saying give marketing a blank check. I’m not saying ignore the numbers or extend infinite patience to a team that isn’t delivering. I’m not saying any of this is easy or that the investment always pays off the way you hope.

What I am saying is that the way most organizations fund marketing right now doesn’t give it a real chance to succeed. Strategy gets built around whatever budget is left over. Tests get underfunded to the point where the data is meaningless. Campaigns get killed in month two because nobody agreed upfront on what month two was supposed to look like. And marketing reports back in language that requires translation instead of building confidence.

That’s not a marketing failure. That’s a setup for one.

The bet is yours to make.

And for the marketers reading this, this goes both ways. If you’re asking for budget, you have an obligation to treat that money like it’s your own. Show up with the strategy. Bring the data. Report in language that builds confidence, not just language that makes sense to you. You can’t ask for trust and then not do the work that earns it.

That’s not a blank check. That’s a partnership. And partnerships are how programs actually win.