There is a list of things you can ask your CMO that no one has given you: market intelligence, signals about your ideal customer, an honest assessment of your positioning, and the real connection between your marketing message and the sales cycle. That list is your strategic map as a CEO. It tells you what to demand, why you are not getting it now, and how to stop operating blind.
- The CEO with the right strategic map knows what to demand. The one with the wrong map evaluates their CMO by what is visible, not by what drives the business.
- Market signals, segments gaining traction and competitive intelligence are rarely asked of a CMO, and more useful than any campaign report.
- Connecting marketing to business decisions usually falls on the CMO. But many organisations do not give them real access to do it.
- 3 structural errors CEOs make when managing marketing: none are intentional, all have a cost that takes time to become visible.
Why CEOs evaluate marketing by what they see rather than what matters
Most CEOs engage with branding, events and creative work. Almost none realise they can, and should, demand business intelligence from their CMO.
Most CEOs evaluate marketing based on visible outputs: campaigns, events, visibility, branding. The problem is that strategic decisions rarely fail for lack of activity. They fail for lack of useful context before those decisions are made. And that is where marketing should function as business intelligence, not just as execution.
Because, in the end, the decisions that cost the most are rarely the ones made badly. They are the ones made without the right information.
Intelligence about what is changing in the market before it impacts the sales pipeline. Which segments are growing. How the competition is shifting. Or when the current positioning is about to stop holding. None of that appears in the monthly campaign metrics report.
Yet 90% of CEOs believe they already understand the value of marketing, while only 50% of CMOs see that same connection [1]. The gap is not one of intention. It is about what each side considers marketing should contribute.
And that difference matters more than it seems. It shapes which questions get asked in meetings, what information reaches leadership, and what work ends up being rewarded inside the organisation.
This is not a new problem. Nor does it appear only in companies that ‘do not understand marketing.’
The CEO who best manages marketing is the one who understands marketing.
Technical knowledge in a CEO does not protect against the wrong evaluation framework.
Nike’s leadership did not ignore marketing. They made an informed decision: prioritise performance marketing, measurable metrics and direct attribution. The framework favoured what could be measured easily. In December 2024, the company itself acknowledged it had gone too far: ‘we are shifting investment from performance marketing to brand marketing’ [2].
What is interesting about the case is that it is not about incompetence. It is about a very human temptation. When a metric sits in front of us every day, we end up managing to improve it. Even when it does not represent the whole system.
The case does not illustrate ignorance. It illustrates that even a sophisticated organisation can end up optimising only the visible part of the system.
How an approved marketing plan can fail without anyone noticing
A company decides to invest in demand generation before securing distribution. The logic seems reasonable. The cost surfaces later.
A company wanted to launch a new product. The distribution channel and the commercial team were asking for a media campaign to generate demand and bring customers to retail outlets. The plan looked logical. The problem was that the product was barely available: distribution still covered a limited share of the market and was only present at a handful of key locations.
On paper, everything fit. In practice, there was a piece still missing.
Nobody in the room said so.
The pattern is more common than it appears. If the product is not available where the customer goes to find it, demand does not convert. Campaign metrics look good. Sales do not.
What was missing was someone who would put the right business question on the table before approving the plan: is the distribution chain in the state we need for this campaign to convert?
That question requires no knowledge of media, reach or frequency. It requires connecting what marketing is going to promise the market with what the business can actually deliver at that moment. It is the kind of question a CEO should demand be answered before approving the budget.
Only 34% of CEOs and CFOs are aligned with their CMO on the role of marketing in growth [3]. When that alignment does not exist, campaign approval meetings pass without anyone asking that question.
Perhaps that is why this kind of situation is rarely caught when the plan is approved. It is caught months later, when the results do not arrive.
If that type of question never appears in the room, the problem is usually not tactical. It is usually that the CEO never defined what they actually expected from marketing.
What you have the right to ask (and are not asking)
Not marketing metrics. Business inputs that marketing should be producing for leadership.
There is a list of things a CEO can and should ask their marketing director. Not as an audit, but as input for better decision-making.
Because the difference between a good report and a good CMO is not in the quality of the data. It is in the usefulness of the questions that data helps answer.
Market intelligence, not campaign reports.
What is changing in the sector before it reaches consensus. Which segments are growing and where adoption is accelerating within a specific sector. In a real meeting, this translates to something very concrete: the CMO arrives with a slide that says ‘the mid-market segment is closing 40% faster than six months ago, and here is the profile of the last three accounts closed.’ That is market intelligence. It changes the conversation. And when the conversation changes, the decisions usually change too. The question you should be asking your CMO before that meeting: what is changing in the market that has not yet shown up in our results?
An honest assessment of the current positioning.
If the message the company puts out in the market no longer resonates with buying decision-makers, that is information the CEO needs before it shows up in the sales pipeline. The clearest signal is operational: objections that appear repeatedly in early commercial calls, clients arriving with expectations the product cannot meet.
Those signals appear in conversations long before they appear in the pipeline. By the time they reach the pipeline, it is too late to react.
Many organisations say they want marketing to be strategic until marketing starts questioning the positioning leadership has been defending for years. It is at that moment that the word ‘strategic’ stops being an adjective and becomes a test. That is where it is decided whether the CMO is a genuine decision-making partner or an executor with a title. The question that changes that meeting: what are we promising the market that sales then has to row back on?
Signals about when your ideal customer is changing.
70% of CEOs measure marketing’s impact by year-on-year revenue growth [1]. That makes sense: growth matters. The problem is that it is a lagging indicator: it tells you what happened, not what is about to change. A concrete example: marketing detects that the profile of companies closing in under 45 days has shifted in the last 90 days, and that profile no longer matches the ICP the commercial team is still working against. That divergence exists in the data before it appears in the revenue. The question to ask yourself: is the customer you are acquiring today the one you want three years from now?
The connection between positioning and the sales cycle.
If clients who come through marketing consistently take longer to close than those who come via referrals, there is a signal: what marketing promises in the market is not what the commercial process can deliver. The client arrives with expectations shaped by the marketing message; the sales rep has to correct them before moving forward; the cycle lengthens. What looks like a commercial problem may in fact be a clue about positioning. That information exists in the CRM. The uncomfortable question that needs to be crossed with campaign data: do marketing leads convert better or worse than other sources, and what does that say about what we are promising?
- Market intelligence
- Positioning assessment
- ICP signals
- Pipeline-sales connection
- Branding
- Trade fairs
- Creative work
- Campaign reports
- Competitive monitoring
- ICP research
- (when not surfaced to leadership)
- Reporting, admin
Marketing should not be the department that communicates business decisions. It should be the department that helps make them. Reyes Brusola, CMO
Why the CMO rarely gets a seat at the business table
The CMO needs to connect marketing to business decisions. The problem is that, in many organisations, they do not have real access to the conversations where those decisions happen.
In many organisations, marketing is not in the room where decisions are made about which segments matter or what growth rate leadership considers acceptable. Then it is asked to generate pipeline for a strategy it had no hand in defining. If the CMO is not in that room, they cannot do that job even if they want to.
And that is where a familiar paradox appears: the CMO is asked to contribute to decisions they never had a chance to influence.
The CMO has clear incentives to take part in those conversations: that is where marketing stops being execution and starts influencing decisions that actually move the business. It is the same line that decides which version of the CMO role survives.
The problem is that organisational dynamics tend to work against them: many CEOs have given marketing a more strategic role and received analysis that did not connect to actual decisions, reports that arrived late, or recommendations without grounding in business data. The scepticism of 39% of CEOs about the value of marketing [4] is not irrational: it reflects accumulated experience. And that distrust closes off access to precisely the kind of work that could change it.
The clearest operational signal: a CMO who is failing talks about their campaigns. A CMO without access to the right information cannot answer questions about the business even if they want to.
- Asking for visibility instead of intelligence. When a CEO activates marketing to generate presence (branding, trade fairs, creative work) without asking for market analysis or competitive intelligence, the result is a very busy and not very strategic department. Visibility has value. But if it is the only thing asked for, it will be the only thing received.
- Approving plans without asking what business assumptions they make. Every marketing plan rests on assumptions: that the distribution channel is ready, that the sales team has the capacity to handle the volume, that the positioning is coherent with what the business can actually deliver today. If those assumptions are not on the table before the budget is approved, they will surface when the plan fails.
- Evaluating the CMO with marketing metrics. Leads, impressions, engagement. These are metrics the marketing team needs to manage its work. A CEO who uses them to evaluate marketing’s contribution to the business is measuring the process, not the outcome. The same trap appears when attributed pipeline stands in for revenue contribution. 70% of CEOs measure marketing’s impact by revenue growth, but only 35% of CMOs track it as a primary metric [1]. That gap reveals that both sides are measuring different things without anyone having put it on the table.
No conclusion. One question.
Before the next marketing presentation starts, one question changes what happens in the room.
What business assumptions does this plan make, and have they been validated?
It sounds like a simple question. It is not.
If marketing can answer it, there is a genuine commercial peer in the room. If it cannot, the problem is not in the campaign. It is that the plan was approved on business assumptions nobody validated. A plan can be perfectly executed and strategically broken at the same time.
Frequently asked
The mistake is thinking a CEO needs to learn marketing
A CEO does not need to know how to execute marketing. They need to know what they can demand from it: market readings that arrive before the monthly report, signals about when the ideal customer is shifting, and the connection between what marketing promises the market and what the business can deliver. None of that requires marketing training. It requires asking the right questions.
The information that should reach leadership before the monthly report
Campaign reports arrive when the cycle has already closed. What can arrive earlier: which segments are accelerating and why, what the competition is doing in areas that have not yet appeared in the dashboards, when the current positioning is about to stop holding. That reading exists in marketing data before it shows up in results. The question is whether anyone is producing it, and whether it is reaching the room where decisions are made.
The metric that separates useful marketing from visible marketing
Leads and impressions are useful for managing marketing teams. Not for understanding whether marketing is building a commercial advantage. The useful question is different: are the clients generated by marketing closing with less friction than those who come via referrals? Does the pipeline coming in today match the type of client the business wants three years from now? When that information does not exist, the problem is usually not one of performance. It is usually one of strategic reading.
The problem is not communication: they are measuring different things
The CEO measures business outcomes. The CMO reports marketing activity. This is not a communication problem: it is that each side brings a different evaluation framework into the room and no one has put that on the table. Until that agreement exists, marketing meetings will keep being presentations that do not connect to the decisions that matter.
Sources: [1] McKinsey & Company + ANA, Analysing the CEO-CMO relationship and its effect on growth, 2024-2025, n=100+ C-suite executives, Fortune 1000. [2] Peter Adams, ‘Nike shifts more performance dollars to brand building as part of reset’, Marketing Dive, 20 December 2024. [3] Gartner, Survey of 125 CEOs and CFOs on CMO alignment, August-September 2024. [4] Gartner, CMO Spend and Strategy Survey, September 2024, n=378 senior marketing leaders.
