What I Look For When Auditing a Marketing Function

The 6 things that reveal the real problems fast

Whether you're stepping into a new CMO role, taking on fractional work, or doing a gut-check on your own team, auditing a marketing function is one of the most useful things you can do. But most audits go about it the wrong way.

They start with dashboards. Then channels. Then spend. They produce a report that looks comprehensive and lands on a shelf.

That approach is fine if you need a formal document. It is not fine if you need to actually understand what is going wrong, and why.

After enough time inside marketing functions at various stages of growth, you start to develop a different set of diagnostic instincts. You stop looking for the obvious things first. You start looking for the structural and behavioural signals that tell you where the real problems are buried.

Here are the six things I look for. They work whether you are auditing your own team or walking into someone else's.

1. How the team talks about their own work

Before I look at a single report, I sit with the team and ask simple, open questions. What are you working on right now? What is going well? What is frustrating you?

The language people use tells you everything. A healthy team talks about outcomes and decisions. A struggling team talks about tasks and volume. They say things like "we've been really busy" or "we've been producing a lot of content" without being able to tell you whether any of it moved the needle.

This is not a failure of the individuals. It is usually a failure of how the function has been set up. When a team has no clear priorities, no feedback loops on performance, and targets that keep shifting, they retreat to what they can control: activity. The work becomes about doing things, not achieving things.

When you hear a team describe their work primarily through output metrics like the number of posts, the number of campaigns, the number of events, it is worth asking the follow-up question: and what happened as a result? The hesitation that often follows is your first signal.

2. Whether there is a real brief culture

Ask to see the last three briefs that came into the marketing team. Or if briefs are not used, ask how work gets initiated.

What you find here usually falls into one of three categories. The first is that briefs exist, are clear, include objectives and success criteria, and are followed. This is uncommon, but it exists. The second is that briefs exist on paper but are really just task descriptions without any context about what the work is supposed to achieve. The third is that there are no briefs, and work arrives via Slack messages, verbal requests, or email threads that cascade into campaigns.

The absence of a brief culture does not mean the team is bad at their jobs. It usually means the marketing function was never set up with proper operating infrastructure. Sometimes it means the team grew too fast and processes never kept pace. Sometimes it means leadership never demanded the discipline.

The reason this matters is that without briefs, you cannot trace why decisions were made. You cannot learn from what worked. And you cannot hold anyone accountable to an objective they were never given in writing.

3. The relationship between marketing and sales

I do not spend a lot of time auditing this through formal processes. I ask one question to the marketing leader: when did you last sit in a sales call? And then I ask the same question to someone in sales: when did marketing last sit with you?

The gap between marketing and sales is one of the oldest problems in B2B companies, and it never fully goes away. But the size of that gap, and whether people are actively working to close it or just talking about alignment in strategy documents, tells you a lot about how functional the marketing operation really is.

In companies where this relationship is broken, marketing tends to generate leads that sales ignores, or create assets that sales never use. Both teams develop their own narratives about why the other is the problem. And the root cause is almost always structural: they do not have a shared definition of what a good lead looks like, they do not review pipeline together, and they do not have a regular rhythm of conversation.

You can fix a lot of this with process. But the first step is being honest about how wide the gap actually is.

4. What gets measured and what gets ignored

Every marketing function measures something. The question is whether what they measure is connected to what actually matters to the business.

Ask to see the marketing dashboard or the most recent performance report. Look at what is tracked. Then ask: of these metrics, which ones does the executive team or board care about? Which ones are reported upward, and which ones stay inside the marketing function?

What you often find is a two-tier measurement system. The internal metrics are granular and channel-specific, things like impressions, click-through rates, email open rates, and follower counts. The business metrics are things like pipeline generated, revenue influenced, and customer acquisition cost. The problem is that the internal metrics get the most attention, and the business metrics get mentioned briefly in a quarterly slide before everyone moves on.

This is not purely a measurement problem. It is a prioritisation problem. Teams tend to optimise for what they can control and report confidently. Business metrics require cross-functional data, attribution clarity, and a willingness to have difficult conversations when the numbers are not great. Channel metrics are easier to present, and they are rarely challenged.

If the marketing function cannot tell you what it contributed to revenue in the last quarter with any clarity, that is worth exploring. Not to punish anyone, but to understand where the measurement infrastructure needs to be rebuilt.

5. How decisions get made when priorities conflict

Every marketing team faces competing priorities. There is always more work than there is capacity to do it. The real test of a marketing function is not what it does when everything is going smoothly. It is what it does when two things are both urgent and it has to choose.

Ask the marketing leader how they currently decide what to work on. Ask them what happens when a senior stakeholder drops something new into the queue. Ask how often the team's plan for the week matches what actually gets done.

In healthy teams, there is a decision framework, even an informal one. The leader can articulate how they weigh things up. They have a way of pushing back on low-priority requests without burning relationships.

In struggling teams, the decision-making is whoever shouts loudest. Or it defaults to the most senior person who sent the most recent email. The team spends a significant portion of their week reacting to things that interrupt the actual plan, and the plan quietly becomes irrelevant because it never gets executed.

Again, this is usually not a people problem. It is a systems problem. When there is no agreed-upon framework for prioritisation, people default to whatever keeps them out of trouble in the short term. That is a very human response to an impossible situation.

6. Whether the marketing leader has genuine authority

This is the one that most audits do not address directly, because it is uncomfortable. But it is often the most important signal.

A marketing function can have the right strategy, the right team, the right tools, and still underperform if the marketing leader does not have genuine decision-making authority within the executive team.

The signals here are subtle. Does the marketing leader sit in on commercial strategy discussions, or do they receive decisions after the fact? Do they have budget autonomy, or does every spend decision require approval from someone who does not understand marketing? When the company wants to change positioning or messaging, is marketing involved early, or brought in to execute a decision that has already been made?

When a marketing leader is operating without real authority, the whole function eventually adjusts to that reality. The team starts doing safe, executional work rather than taking strategic risks. They learn that strategy-level input is not welcomed. They stop asking questions about why and focus on how. And slowly, the function stops being a driver of commercial outcomes and becomes a production department.

If you are auditing your own function, this is the signal that requires the most honest conversation, usually with yourself first.

What to do with what you find

An audit that produces a list of problems without prioritisation is not very useful. When I work through these six signals, I come out with a rough map of where the dysfunction lives. Is it structural? Is it relational? Is it about systems and process? Is it about authority and leadership positioning?

The structural problems, like missing brief processes, broken measurement, and unclear prioritisation frameworks, are the easiest to fix. They take time and discipline, but the solutions are well-understood.

The relational problems, like a damaged marketing-sales relationship, require more patience. You cannot fix trust through a process document. You fix it through consistent behaviour over time.

The authority problem is the hardest. If the marketing leader does not have a genuine seat at the commercial table, fixing everything else will only get you so far. At some point, that conversation needs to happen, and it needs to happen at the right level.

The reason I find these six signals useful is that they cut through the noise quickly. You do not need weeks of data collection to start understanding what is really going on inside a marketing function. You need the right questions, and enough experience to know what the answers mean.

If you are stepping into a new marketing leadership role, or if you have a sense that something is off in your current function and you cannot quite name it, start here. The data will still be there when you need it. But the signals above will tell you where to look first.