For CMOs and VPs Marketing, weeks 2–26
You inherited a stack. Nobody can tell you what it does.
Before the board asks for a pipeline plan, you need a map: which of the workflows still fire, which leads never land on an owner, where attribution stops reconciling to closed revenue, and what the last admin left undocumented. We produce that map in three weeks, read-only, with evidence attached to every finding, so your first quarter goes to fixing rather than to discovering. From USD $1,500, credited in full against the fix.
The moment
The tell we see most often
A marketing-operations or MarTech requisition posted within weeks of a new leader's start date. That hire will take a quarter to land and a quarter to become useful, and the stack keeps running on whatever the previous owner configured in the meantime. The audit is what you hand the hire on day one, so they start at the fix instead of spending their first ninety days drawing the map.
Three questions we get asked
Answered the way we would answer them on the call.
Four things, in this order: the sync error queue and what it has been silently dropping; the lifecycle stage definitions and whether sales agrees with them; the routing rules and how many leads have no owner; and the scoring model, which sales usually stopped trusting long before anyone said so. Each has an export that answers it.
Almost never in the first quarter, and not on the strength of a vendor demo. A migration quoted before anyone has read the current instance moves the mess to a new address. Read first; the migration decision is much cheaper once you know what is worth carrying over.
Audit first, because it is three weeks and the hire is two quarters. The audit does not replace the hire — it makes them productive in a week instead of a quarter, and it gives you something to show the CEO while the seat is open.
A finding, in the format you would get it
Finding, evidence, exposure, fix. Always in that order.
Anonymised from a real engagement; numbers rounded. Every figure in a real readout carries the export that produced it.
Setup
B2B SaaS, ~650 people, Marketo → Salesforce. New CMO in month two, MOps director seat open.
Evidence
412 active Marketo programs; 61 had fired in the last 90 days. MQL definition in Marketo: score ≥ 80. MQL definition sales accepted: a demo request or a pricing-page visit. Overlap: 23%.
Exposure
The pipeline number the board saw was correct. The funnel above it was fiction — 77% of "MQLs" were never worked, and the conversion-rate slide was measuring the wrong population.
Fix
One MQL definition, written and signed off by sales, enforced as a field rather than a slide; 351 dormant programs archived with a rollback list.
The full sample is on the worked sample audit page. The audit is from USD $1,500 — up to 100k records, credited in full against the fix — and the pricing page has every band.
Questions
The four that usually come next.
Kickoff within five business days of signing, once a read-only user exists on each system. Most new leaders can arrange that in a day.
No. Read-only access, no changes, one sixty-minute session a week that your ops person sits in on. The readout is written to make them look prepared, not exposed.
Then you have evidence that it is, which is worth more in your first quarter than most fixes. That outcome happens; the audit is scored, not sold.
Yes — the rescue sprint, custom build and embedded ops rungs exist for that, and the audit fee is credited against any of them within thirty days.
Get the map before the board asks for the plan.
Three weeks, read-only, evidence attached. From USD $1,500, credited in full against the fix.