When to audit

• Acquisition costs are rising and nobody can explain why.
• A new marketing lead is arriving, or the previous one has left.
• A fundraise, a pivot or a merger changes the goals.
• Sales and marketing disagree on the quality of leads.

Block 1: strategy

• Is there one business goal for marketing, with a number?
• Is the priority customer defined, and does everyone give the same answer?
• Can the positioning be said in one sentence?
• Does the budget split match the stated priorities?

Block 2: data and attribution

• Can you follow a prospect from the first click to the signed deal?
• Do marketing, sales and finance use the same figures?
• Who owns the ad accounts, the analytics and the CRM: you or an agency?
• Is there a dashboard leadership actually reads?

Start here. At Veesion, building reliable dashboards was what gave the executive committee a clear view of marketing for the first time.

Block 3: acquisition

• What is the acquisition cost by channel, and its trend over twelve months?
• Which channels bring customers who stay?
• How much of the spend goes to promotion-driven volume?
• What does the agency do, and how is it challenged?

Block 4: brand and website

• Does the website say what you sell within five seconds?
• Are proof points visible: clients, figures, cases?
• Is the identity consistent with the current positioning?
• Where do visitors drop on the way to contact?

Block 5: team and partners

• Who decides, and who executes?
• Are there gaps or duplicates in skills?
• Is the team stable, or is turnover a signal?
• Do agencies and freelances have clear goals?

Block 6: tools

• Which tools are paid for and not used?
• Is the CRM set up for the way sales actually work?
• Which manual tasks could be automated?

At Lifen, cleaning up the stack cut tool budgets by 20% and halved the time spent processing inbound leads.

From audit to decisions

An audit is useful only if it ends with choices. Close with:

1. Three priorities, ranked.
2. What stops, not only what starts.
3. An owner and a date for each priority.
4. The two or three numbers that will show progress.

How long it takes

With access to data and people, a first audit is a matter of days. In our Japhy mission, the strategic audit and onboarding were completed in five to seven days. At Lixo, the audit of HubSpot, content and messaging set the baseline for a three-month mission.

If you want an outside view, an audit can be run as a short on-demand mission. To turn the findings into a strategy, follow our 7-step method.