Goals & priorities
Your weakest area
Goals & priorities
You scored lowest here. That usually means your marketing is busy and your revenue does not reflect it.
What it looks like when it’s broken
You hear the same two sentences on repeat.
There is no marketing budget. There is approval, campaign by campaign, after leadership signs off on each one. The team is inundated. You have run plenty of experiments and plenty of campaigns, and none of them landed as a clear win. Activity is high. Contribution to revenue is hard to point at.
Why it happens
Marketing has no single north star, so every request looks equally valid and everything becomes urgent.
The usual explanation is that the team needs to execute better. The real problem sits upstream. Without a goal, there is nothing to measure a campaign against before you commit to it, so the decision defaults to whoever asked most recently or most loudly. That is also why the budget works the way it does. Leadership approves spend one campaign at a time because there is no agreed outcome to fund against.
This matters most when resources are tight. A small team with limited people, time, and tools cannot afford to spend them on campaigns chosen by default.
What good looks like
Without a goal
Five initiatives moving quickly, chosen by whoever asked loudest, none of them properly resourced and none of them a clear win.
With a goal
Two campaigns chosen by working backwards from the outcome, using data rather than instinct, each one properly resourced.
You can say out loud why this campaign and not another one. That sentence is the whole difference.
The first move
Decide the one big goal for the company this year, and what outcome you want marketing to produce against it.
That second part is where most people slip. The answer is an outcome, like qualified pipeline or retained revenue or a specific number of new accounts. It is not a list of marketing activities. “Publish more” and “improve SEO” are things marketing does. They are not what marketing is for.
One goal. Written down. Agreed with leadership.
How you’ll know it’s working
You can see the gap between where you are and where you’re going, month over month. That number exists and someone owns it.
Your marketing team can explain what they did this month to move it, and for anything that did not work, they can tell you why.
That second part is the real signal. Less activity, more focus, and a team that can diagnose rather than just report.
What this looked like for one client
I worked with a company where everything was urgent and there was no marketing budget, just approval campaign by campaign depending on what looked shiniest that month.
The part that hurt was subtler than that. Marketing had goals. The company did not. So several departments came to marketing with competing requests, all reasonable on their own, and marketing had no basis to rank them. Every conflict went up to leadership.
That cost twice. Marketing lost time to work that had nothing to do with its own goals, and leadership lost time being pulled into marketing prioritization decisions they should never have been in.
The cost of having no company goal was two extra years on a single project.
They got there eventually. They would have got there far sooner with a company goal everyone was working toward.
Where this sits
Goals sit upstream of everything else, and you can trace the damage in order.
Dashed areas are not directly affected by this one.
Nothing outranks anything else, so priority becomes first come, first served and every request arrives marked urgent.
There is nothing to measure against, only activity to count.
Nobody has defined what a qualified lead actually is, so sales and marketing argue about lead quality instead of working one definition.
You cannot tell which tools are worth investing in when you do not know what this year is for.
No brief to work from, so nobody can say how much to make, for whom, or when.
Fix the goal and those five get easier on their own. Leave it and every fix downstream is a patch.
Your weakest area is where to start. It is not the whole picture.
The Scorecard rates eight areas because they fail together. You scored lowest here, but there are often others already under strain. Worth reading the neighbors before you decide where to spend the next quarter.
Click any highlighted area to read it.
- Goals & priorities · You are here
- Audience & positioningRead →
- Content & conversionRead →
- CRM & handoffsRead →
- Reporting & attributionRead →
- People & ownershipRead →
- Tools & dataRead →
- AI useRead →
Want someone to look at the whole system?
The Scorecard tells you where it hurts. A Diagnostic tells you why, and what order to fix it in. I look at your setup properly and give you a sequenced plan rather than eight separate problems.