Nine sections. Roughly ninety minutes. It produces a written baseline your finance and sales leadership can check, and it is deliberately hard to complete. What you cannot answer is the first finding.
Most marketing strategy is written before anyone has established what is true. I built this to reverse that order. It covers the economics the CFO cares about, the pipeline reality sales lives in, and the allocation decisions marketing owns, in one pass, so that whatever gets recommended afterwards rests on something rather than on instinct.
It is built to hold at any scale. The questions are the same whether the number at the top is $10M or $700M, because the underlying economics do not change: what a customer costs fully loaded, whether the reported figures reconcile to the ledger, and what the business would do if the evidence contradicted the plan.
Work through it below. Nothing is sent anywhere. Your answers stay in this browser and you export the result yourself.
No marketing questions yet. The moment a diagnostic opens with channels, the conversation has been framed as a marketing problem rather than a capital allocation one, and every recommendation afterwards inherits that frame.
Sourced from sales conversations and the accounting system, never from platform dashboards. Every advertising platform counts a conversion it touched as one it caused, so no platform is positioned to report what the portfolio returned.
What each source claims it produced last quarter, against what finance booked from new customers in the same period.
| Source | Revenue it claims |
|---|---|
| Paid search | |
| Paid social | |
| Other paid media | |
| Email and lifecycle | |
| Organic and other attributed | |
| Booked revenue from new customers |
Media-only acquisition cost is the figure most teams report, and it is not what a customer costs. Agency fees, tooling and the salaries of the people running it are part of the cost whether or not the dashboard counts them.
Annualised. The output that matters is not the acquisition cost, it is the distance between the figure your team reports and the one finance would recognise.
| Media spend | |
| Agency and contractor fees | |
| Martech and tooling | |
| Internal salaries, marketing share | |
| New customers acquired | |
| Average annual value per customer | |
| Gross margin, % | |
| Average customer lifetime, years |
Not what you hope it does. What you could show. A meaningful share of most marketing budgets cannot be defended with evidence by anyone in the building, and it is rarely the line people expect.
Every line above a material threshold. The verdict is your honest read, not the vendor's.
| Line item | Annual | Evidence you'd offer | Verdict |
|---|
Reporting does not become honest because better software was purchased. It becomes honest when a named person is accountable for producing it, including when it is unflattering.
Most channel decisions are actually settled here rather than in the ad account. A source producing expensive leads that close at triple the rate is the better investment, and cost per lead will never say so.
Whether the pipeline that exists can produce the number the business has committed to.
| Revenue target for the period | |
| Qualified pipeline value now | |
| Historic win rate, % | |
| Average cycle length, days |
The cheapest growth available to most companies is already inside the building. This section is usually the one that produces the fastest result.
Asked here rather than at the start, deliberately. It only gets an honest answer once the numbers have made the room uncomfortable enough that pretending is harder than admitting.
The argument about whether something worked is almost always an argument about a standard nobody set. So the standard gets set first, in three tiers, while nobody knows the outcome.
The bottom row is the one that matters. It is the only one that requires anything of you.
| Initiative | Budget | Favorable | Acceptable | Unfavorable, stop | Review |
|---|
Findings first, then the evidence behind them, then an explicit list of what could not be answered. Nothing is transmitted. The export is generated in your browser.
A diagnostic I built, used at the start of every engagement and the input to any strategy that follows. Nine sections covering business economics, revenue origin, unit economics, allocation, measurement integrity, pipeline, owned assets, constraints, and targets. It produces a written baseline that finance and sales leadership can check rather than a marketing opinion.
Companies where marketing spend has become material enough that misallocation is expensive. It is written to hold at any scale: the questions work the same way at $10M in revenue and at $700M, because the underlying economics do.
About ninety minutes when completed properly, and it is designed to be worked through in a room rather than sent as homework. Several sections need someone from finance and someone from sales present.
A written baseline: the findings first, then the evidence behind them, then an explicit list of what could not be answered and why. That last section is usually the most useful.
Because an answer is only worth what its source is worth. Marking each one verified, estimated or unknown means the output states how much of the picture is actually evidenced. It is common for a third of it to be unverified, and that is the first finding rather than a failure.
The baseline becomes the input to allocation decisions, not a report that gets filed. Where it surfaces spend that cannot be defended, that is the first place to look. Where it surfaces reporting that does not reconcile, that gets fixed before anything is reallocated, because reallocating on unreliable numbers reproduces the problem at a different address.
If you would rather work through it with someone, that is usually faster and the answers are more honest with a second person in the room.