Is Your Marketing Team Any Good?
How to Know If Your Marketing Team is Any Good (Hint: It’s Not in the Jargon)
One thing I have encountered a lot over the last year, Founders having a hard time gauging how good or bad their marketing team is.
It’s a fair question.
Most of the founders I work with don’t come from a marketing background. They’re product-led. Tech-led. Vision-led. Which is awesome… until you’re sitting in a meeting trying to decode a string of marketing acronyms that might as well be an alien language.
CAC is up but CTR is solid and SQLs are trending okay but the MQL-to-SAL conversion is underperforming…
Cool. So should we panic or celebrate?
Because marketing is weird like that. It’s simultaneously super measurable and full of ambiguity. It’s easy to get lost in the sauce of dashboards, campaign timelines, and tools but none of that tells the full story.
And here’s where things usually break down: since founders aren’t always confident in how to evaluate marketing, they tend to either be too hands-off or push the wrong levers. They don’t know:
How much pressure to apply without being unreasonable
What good execution actually looks like
How to distinguish between a genuine constraint and a creative excuse
So let’s simplify it.
If I had to boil it all down to one rule of thumb to evaluate whether your marketing team is solid or… not so much?
Great marketing teams don’t make excuses.
Seriously. That’s it.
They don’t come back with a laundry list of reasons why something can’t be done.
They don’t hide behind a lack of tools, or data, or budget.
They don’t endlessly tweak the strategy deck while the world keeps spinning.
They don’t say, “We’ll need a 3-month runway to validate that idea with a 12-touch nurture flow before we can even consider launch.”
Do good marketers acknowledge constraints? Of course.
But then they move quickly, offer up scrappy solutions, and ship anyway.
Great marketers are resourceful.
They know how to duct-tape a campaign together if need be. They figure out the analytics later. They know 80% live > 100% in Figma.
They find ways to test fast, learn fast, and keep momentum.
So if you’re sitting there wondering whether your team is underperforming or if you’re just being too hard on them do this:
Look at the last 5 things you asked your team to do.
How many of those were met with:
“We’d love to, but…”
“We need better tools first.”
“It’s not in the budget right now.”
“Legal still hasn’t approved the copy.”
…versus how many were just quietly handled, executed, and improved after the fact?
That’s your answer.
You don’t need to be a marketing guru to know whether your team is getting it done.
Just track the ratio of excuses to execution.
Lower = better.
Thanks for reading,
Adam