A short list of marketing numbers, reviewed every week.

A single page of eight to twelve numbers, reviewed weekly, each with one owner, a definition, a source and a target. It is not a report and not a dashboard tour. The test is behavioural: if a row is off target, the meeting produces an owner and a date rather than an explanation. Everything that cannot be acted on inside a week, including most brand and cohort measures, belongs in the monthly pack instead.

The balanced scorecard is a strategy framework: four perspectives, a strategy map, objectives cascading into measures, and it lives on an annual or quarterly cycle. What we build is the weekly operating layer, closer to the EOS scorecard than to a strategy map, and it deliberately holds a handful of leading numbers instead of a balanced set. If your leadership team already maintains a strategy map, we tie the marketing rows to the objectives on it, so the two artefacts agree rather than compete.

It depends on your model, and the shortlist is always built backwards from revenue. A B2B firm typically ends up with qualified leads, sales-accepted opportunities, pipeline created, win rate, cost per qualified lead and two activity measures. An ecommerce brand tends to run orders, revenue, blended cost of acquisition, contribution margin, repeat rate and email or SMS revenue share. Website traffic makes the weekly list only when it genuinely leads the pipeline in your case; otherwise it sits in the analytics layer where it belongs.

A fixed fee, quoted after a scoping call, with the deliverables and dates written down before you commit. The number moves with how many business units or locations need their own rows and how much source plumbing has to be fixed first, so we do not publish a rate that would mislead most readers. Book a meeting and you will get a scope and a number, plus an honest answer about whether your data is ready.

A template gets you the shape and none of the value. The work is in choosing which numbers predict revenue in your business, writing definitions precise enough that two people compute them identically, setting targets from your own history, naming owners, and then changing how the weekly meeting behaves. Free templates skip all five, which is why most of them are abandoned by week four. If you want to try it yourself first, that is a reasonable choice and we would rather you did that than buy advisory you do not need.

No. If you do run EOS, this is the marketing-depth version of your scorecard and it slots into your existing Level 10 meeting, with off track rows going straight to the issues list. If you do not, the same discipline works inside a normal weekly leadership meeting: a short scan of the numbers, then issues with owners and dates. We use the EOS vocabulary internally because we run it ourselves, and we drop it entirely if it is noise for your team.

Sometimes, and we will tell you in week one. A scorecard can carry two or three manual rows, clearly labelled, while the plumbing gets fixed. It cannot survive if the CRM has no reliable lead source or if the ad platforms and the CRM disagree about basic volumes: 62% of organizations report losing revenue directly because of poor CRM data quality. When that is the case, marketing operations consulting comes first and this engagement follows it.

Each row has one named person, chosen for being able to influence the number rather than for seniority, and departments are never listed as owners. Disagreement at that stage is useful and we surface it deliberately: if a proposed owner says they cannot move the number, either the metric is wrong, the target is wrong, or the role lacks the authority, and each of those is worth knowing before the sheet goes live. Where the answer is structural, marketing team structure advisory is the right follow-up.

From your own trailing data, adjusted for capacity and seasonality, then sanity-checked against the revenue plan so that hitting every row would actually deliver the plan. Where there is no history, we set an explicit baseline period of four to six weeks, mark the row as baselining, and set the target afterwards. What we will not do is import an industry benchmark as a target, because a number nobody believes in trains the team to ignore red rows.

It gets you honest inputs and a defensible narrative, which is most of the battle: the weekly scorecard shows whether the leading numbers moved, and the monthly pack carries marketing ROI, payback and cohort measures where slower math belongs. Full causal claims need attribution work and often incrementality testing, and we say so rather than dressing correlation as proof. Context worth keeping: 71% of leaders believe AI-powered marketing tools prioritise short-term performance over long-term brand growth, so the monthly layer matters as much as the weekly one.

It should remove some. Two thirds of the way through most engagements we retire more reporting than we add, because a lot of what gets produced monthly has no audience. The weekly scorecard is automated wherever the source allows, manual rows are kept to two or three and labelled, and the monthly pack is cut to what leadership actually reads. If the honest answer is that your reporting burden is a plumbing problem, we say that instead of adding a sheet.

Two weeks to build and roughly six weeks of coaching, so about two months in total. We chair the first two or three reviews, then your marketing owner chairs and we observe, then we leave. Some clients book a quarterly check-in afterwards to re-cut targets and retire stale rows, which takes half a day and is optional. Nothing in the engagement obliges you to buy anything from us afterwards.

The same method extends to a full company scorecard, and in smaller companies that is often the better project, because the marketing rows only make sense next to sales and delivery. Where the constraint sits across the whole revenue system rather than inside marketing, growth advisory is the wider engagement, and a fractional head of growth is the option where you want someone to own the system week to week.

No. This is a defined advisory project that ends with a working scorecard and a meeting habit your own team runs. A fractional CMO is ongoing leadership that owns the marketing plan and the team. Clients often do this first, because once leadership can see a short set of trusted numbers, the question of what kind of leadership marketing needs answers itself.

Whatever you already own. Most scorecards live in a spreadsheet because it is editable by everyone and survives tool changes, with the dashboard built in the reporting platform you already pay for. Where you want something more durable, our data visualization team can build it properly, and where the CRM is the natural home, CRM analytics is the better route. We take no reseller margin on any platform we recommend.

That is the scorecard working, and it forces one of three honest conclusions: the plan needs more resource, the target was wrong, or the approach is not working and should change. The review turns the red row into an issue with an owner and a date rather than a recurring apology, and if it stays red past a quarter we expect the leadership team to change the plan. Where the diagnosis needs more depth than a weekly meeting allows, a marketing audit is the right next step.