It is a tale as old as technology investment itself. Startup gets funded, funds get allocated, and marketing, inevitably, is one of the most monolithic buckets of those funds.

Marketing feels, at times, little better than gambling; There are few guarantees and many risks. We make bets and hope they return more than our ante.

One of the biggest challenges for executive leaders is the fact that marketing is so wide and deep - nobody can be expected to be an expert on every channel, nuance, media type, setting, audience, technology.

There are ways to organize these inquiries that help assess if the team is handling the largest buckets effectively; Some of these questions are a test of intellectual honesty.

What does your perfect MarTech stack look like and how long will it take to establish?

AdTech and MarTech are constantly evolving to adapt to the mercurial nature of the marketing landscape. Audience targets in a cookieless world, A.I. improvements to best leverage the algorithm changes, the emergent channels such as TikTok, the changing relationship users have with email, text and push notifications, and the need to fold analytics and personalization into all of these touch points across the user journey.

This question has some nuance in how people answer.

“We prefer to go channel direct” is less tech expensive but has scale issues and the cost of labor becomes a larger investment over time. If you continue down this path too long it makes the necessary shift to campaign management harder the more complex the structure is before you begin to adopt the tech. If you bring on tech too early the cost of tech can outweigh the media investment itself. Striking this balance is key to successfully continuing to grow without interruption.

“We prefer only best in class for each tool” is a great philosophy on paper. This mindset misses one key element of the marketing ecosystem - nothing in marketing happens in isolation. Going best in class but ignoring lateral integrations, data sharing, and customer journey management can lead to a situation where the larger marketing effort is stunted as a whole in the pursuit of individual channel refinement.

“We want to build into this vendor’s stack” can be a great choice. The challenge comes in why that vendor was selected. More often than not the decision is biased based on personal experience as opposed to an impartial assessment of the needs of the company at hand. Another challenge is that no single vendor truly provides every tool for every channel, meaning that even a “full stack” will need to be augmented by other tools. And finally; once a stack is implemented reverting that choice can be a deeply painful process to overcome.

“We prefer this vendor’s stack for paid media, this vendor for CRM and CDP, and this 3rd vendor for CMS, DAM and personalization” is the answer I would hope to see. Building in tech clusters where you have a few tools per vendor built around where and how that tech is interacting with the customer journey is a good rule of thumb. I also hope to hear what is being anchored in the stack - Media Delivery, Identity Management, Analytics or Data, or Personalization. The anchor tech will drive the entire ecosystem’s single source of truth.

Mistakes with tech choices, tech timing, and tech integrations can be massively expensive; Between dollars spent, time lost, and opportunity squandered there are few things that can sink a startup quicker.

How much media waste would you estimate exists in your paid media campaigns in a given month?

There is really only one truly wrong answer to this question: “None.”

Media waste is a byproduct of any paid media delivery. There are gaps in audience targets, suboptimal automated keywords being triggered on, more and less effective copy, along with the testing and perpetual optimization functions that exist in paid media.

I would expect an honest marketing leader to estimate no less than 3% waste.

If they state it’s in the double digits without explicit explanations of testing and growth we also have a reason for concern.

Of all the Paid Media Audits I have done I’d argue the healthiest companies sit between 3% and 8% incidental media waste across their campaigns. Since these teams are likely building creative, setting messaging strategies, building audience targets, designating keyword strategies, balancing budgets and bid automation there is a reasonable expectation of some amount of waste that can be identified, cut and reinvested.

What roles will be created and eliminated over the next two years to continue to scale our efforts?

Too many leaders will only think about what team members will be added over time and miss out on the fact that as your marketing organization grows there are roles that should be eliminated as you scale. A healthy marketing organization is evolving its needs over time and some roles that made sense to start in marketing should either be removed or transferred to or from another organization.

Throwing more bodies at marketing isn’t the solution. As you adopt technology you should unlock automation and shift the work from directly creating and managing campaigns to implementing tools and systems. These are fundamentally different skill sets.

As you scale, your marketer who has been reporting on performance should be upgraded to an analyst who owns the marketing data. The ability to build data operations around the channel and platform APIs into more robust data, the knowledge to build models and validate the channels, the capacity to assess and project marginal incremental ROI, attribution, and true impact is not a marketing role.

While we can hope that everyone we hire has the professional growth to continue to meet our evolving needs, the reality is that we need to apply a dispassionate honesty acknowledging that seamless improvement for all team members is an unlikely, idealist outcome.

What can I do as an executive leader to validate that my investment has the highest chance of success?

This is where a neutral 3rd party has a unique capacity to help. The worst case outcome of a Lean Marketing Audit is that you pay for an audit to only come away reassured that everything is being done as best as possible and provide a clean bill of health. The worst case outcome of not getting a Lean Marketing Audit is bleeding out Media Waste, creating insurmountable tech debt that will take years to fix, and continuing to retain people who are misaligned to the company needs or their professional talents.

Taking the time to ask these hard questions and establish the answers is a foundational step towards a healthy and honest relationship with understanding where, and how effective, your company is managing the marketing investment.