As a former CMO at multiple tech unicorns, earlier this year I found myself in an exec meeting feeling much like Leo’s character in The Departed when Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) asks him — “Do you know who I am?” (Yes, in case you didn’t know, I watch a lot of movies and have a flare for drama!)

I had a feeling my hand was about to be smashed by my own boot as I contemplated anwering the question from our CFO — “How much pipeline did we build last quarter for the budget allocated?”

The room was quiet.

My first reaction was to respond with a simple — “It’s in my deck.”

The CFO nodded politely, then asked again: “But what’s the ROI?”

I felt the boot come crashing down on my knuckles.

This was not the first time. I had repeatedly heard different versions of this, the most common being — “Look you (marketing) has unlimited budget. If you can tell us how much pipe we can build with $X we can pour millions to drive growth.”

Nursing my hand and ego, I started to think (again!) — Why is marketing the only function in business where we’re expected to prove our value while playing a game with constantly moving goalposts, invisible rules, and a referee who keeps changing the scoring system. Not to mention that often the referee change multiple times in the same game.

But what if there was a better way? My engineering brain wanted to solve this as a problem so I started going down a rabbit hole of defining the problem, coming up with a solutions and organizing them in an organized framework that can be implemented.

This article is my attempt at that based on my years of experience playing the defensive in board rooms.
The Seven Circles of Marketing Measurement Hell

First, let me paint you a picture of what CMOs deal with every single day.
The Attribution Nightmare

Imagine you’re trying to figure out why someone bought your product. They first found you through a Google search six months ago. Then they saw your LinkedIn ad. Downloaded a white paper. Attended a webinar. Ignored twelve emails. Saw a retargeting ad while shopping for shoes. Finally, they talked to a sales rep and converted. This happes repeatedly and the sales rep gets a Rolex and goes to the President’s club!

Sounds familiar?

Now things get controversial because everyone starts asking — “Who gets the credit for a closed deal? What was the attribution (a fool’s errand, if you ask me).

Which touch point gets credit?

If you said “all of them,” congratulations, you’ve just discovered multi-touch attribution. If you said “the last one,” you’re using last-touch attribution and probably giving all your budget to retargeting ads. If you said “I have no idea,” welcome to the club. The club has millions of members and we meet in conference rooms around the world, staring at dashboards that promise clarity but deliver confusion.

The Time Warp Problem

Here’s where it gets really fun. That blog post you published today? It might influence a purchase decision eighteen months from now. That brand campaign you ran last quarter? The impact might not show up until next year. Meanwhile, your board wants to know this quarter’s results.

It’s like planting an oak tree and being asked weekly, “Where are the acorns?”
The Causation Circus

Revenue went up 30% this quarter. Was it because of your brilliant demand generation campaign? Or was it the new product features? The competitor who went out of business? The economy? Mercury being in retrograde?

Correlation is easy to find. Causation is like finding a specific snowflake in an avalanche.

The Data Disaster
Your marketing data lives in approximately seventeen different systems. Web analytics here, marketing automation there, CRM over there, advertising platforms scattered across the digital landscape like breadcrumbs in a forest. Each system speaks a different language, uses different identifiers, and tracks things differently.

Oh, and thanks to GDPR, CCPA, and cookie deprecation, half your data is now blind spots anyway.
The Intangible Dilemma

How do you put a number on brand trust? What’s the dollar value of being top-of-mind? How do you quantify the feeling someone gets when they see your logo?

You can’t. Not really. But try explaining to a spreadsheet-loving CFO that some of your most important work can’t be reduced to a number in a cell.
The Organizational Maze

Marketing defines a qualified lead one way. Sales defines it differently. Finance allocates revenue using logic that nobody in marketing understands. Product launches features without telling marketing, which impacts conversion rates that marketing gets blamed for.

It’s like trying to measure your running speed while three people are pulling you in different directions.

The Moving Target
Just when you’ve figured out how to measure TikTok effectiveness, everyone’s moved to the next platform. Your measurement framework that worked last year is obsolete this year. New channels emerge. Customer behavior shifts. The game changes while you’re still learning the rules.

This is the reality CMOs live in. And yet, somehow, we’re supposed to definitively answer: “What’s marketing’s ROI?”

The complexity isn’t a bug. It’s a feature of a function that operates across multiple time horizons, influences behavior through dozens of touchpoints, and creates both tangible and intangible value.

So what do we do about it?

The Three-Pillar Framework: A Survival Guide for Modern CMOs

After years of wrestling with these challenges, I’ve come to believe that the answer isn’t more complexity. It’s structured simplicity. A framework that acknowledges reality while providing practical tools for decision-making.

Think of it as marketing’s version of thermodynamics. (Stay with me here, I promise this won’t get too physics-y.)

The framework rests on one core insight: All marketing activities can be organized into three pillars, and each pillar needs to be measured differently because they operate on different time horizons and create different types of value.

The three pillars are:

Demand Generation aka Sales-Led Growth (SLG)— Generating qualified pipeline that converts to revenue
Product-Led Growth (PLG) — Driving user acquisition and expansion through product experience. And no, having a demo button to book a meeting is not PLG.
Brand Marketing — Building long-term equity that reduces acquisition costs and creates competitive moat

But here’s the key: Instead of trying to measure every single tactic individually, we organize work into Containers (think Docker if you come from a world of engineering).

The Container: Your New Best Friend

Think of a Container as a standardized box. Every marketing initiative, no matter how big or small, goes into one of these boxes. And every box has the same structure:

Inputs (what you put in):

Dollars spent
Hours invested by your team
Resources consumed
Audience — It’s important to keep them isolated as much as possible to avoid multi-touch issues across containers
Timeline — Each container should have a start date. The end date depends on whether the container is for an episode (for example, a conference) or evergreen (for example, a brand keyword paid campaign)

Activities (what you do):

Specific tactics with clear ownership
Defined timeline
Measurable milestones

Outputs (what you get out):

Primary metrics (MQLs, signups, brand lift)
Secondary metrics (engagement, velocity)
Attribution window (how long you track results)

Efficiency (how well it worked):

Cost per output
ROI (when applicable)
Efficiency score compared to benchmarks

Why does this matter? Because now you can compare apples to apples. You can see which campaigns are working and which aren’t. You can learn from successes and kill failures quickly.

More importantly, you can aggregate results at the pillar level and make strategic decisions about where to allocate budget.
How Each Pillar Actually Works

Let me break this down with real examples.

Demand Generation Pillar or SLG
This is your pipeline engine. You’re running LinkedIn ABM campaigns targeting enterprise CFOs. You invest $50K in ad spend plus 200 hours of team time. You generate 150 MQLs, which create $2M in pipeline. Your cost per MQL is $333, and your ROI is 4.2x.

You evaluate this quarterly. If your Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC) is less than 33% of customer lifetime value and you’re generating at least 40% of total pipeline through marketing, you’re winning. If not, you reallocate budget.

Product-Led Growth (PLG) Pillar
This is your growth engine. You invest $30K in development costs to optimize onboarding and reduce time-to-value. You get 500 trial signups, 200 become product-qualified leads, and 30% convert to paid. Your Net Revenue Retention is 115%.

You evaluate this monthly because PLG moves fast. If NRR is above 100% and your CAC payback is under 12 months, you double down. If not, you fix the product experience.

Brand Marketing Pillar
This is your moat. You invest $80K in a thought leadership series, conference sponsorships, and a content hub. Over the year, brand awareness increases 15%, organic traffic grows 40%, and share of voice increases 8%.

You evaluate this annually because brand building takes time. If brand equity scores improve and you see correlation with reduced CAC and increased win rates over 12+ months, it’s working.
The Budget Allocation Dance

Here’s where it gets strategic. How much should you allocate to each pillar?

It depends on your company stage:

Early Stage (still finding product-market fit):

Demand Generation: 20–30%
Product-Led Growth: 50–60%
Brand: 10–20%

Focus on validating that your product solves a real problem through PLG motions.

Growth Stage (found product-market fit, now scaling):

Demand Generation: 40–50%
Product-Led Growth: 30–40%
Brand: 15–25%

Accelerate pipeline generation while maintaining PLG efficiency and starting systematic brand building.

Scale Stage (established market position):

Demand Generation: 35–45%
Product-Led Growth: 20–30%
Brand: 30–40%

Balance demand generation with increased brand investment to build competitive moat.

Market Leader:

Demand Generation: 30–40%
Product-Led Growth: 15–25%
Brand: 40–50%

Leverage brand strength to drive efficient growth, with brand becoming the primary driver of demand generation efficiency.

But here’s the critical part: You review and reallocate quarterly.

Every quarter, you evaluate pillar performance against thresholds. You assess market dynamics. Then you shift 5–10% of budget from under performing pillars to over performing ones. You maintain minimum thresholds (no pillar below 15%) to prevent strategic neglect. And you keep 10–15% as experimental budget for testing new approaches.

This isn’t set-it-and-forget-it. It’s dynamic portfolio management.
The Visual Framework (Or: How to Explain This to Your Board in 60 Seconds)

Picture this flow:

Your total marketing budget sits at the top. It splits into three pillars based on your stage and strategy. Within each pillar, budget deploys through campaign containers — each with standardized inputs and outputs. Campaign results aggregate at the pillar level. Every quarter, you evaluate performance and reallocate based on what’s working.

It’s a continuous cycle:
invest → measure → learn → optimize → reallocate.

The beauty is in the simplicity. Your board doesn’t need to understand the nuances of multi-touch attribution or the difference between MQLs and PQLs. They need to understand: “We allocated X to Demand Generation, it generated Y in pipeline at Z efficiency, and here’s how that compares to our targets.”

Clear. Defensible. Actionable.
What Makes This Different from Every Other Framework You’ve Seen

I know what you’re thinking. “Great, another framework. My shelf is full of frameworks from consultants who’ve never actually run marketing.”

Fair point. So let me tell you what makes this one different:

It acknowledges time horizons. Unlike frameworks that try to measure everything on the same cycle, this one recognizes that demand generation, PLG, and brand operate on fundamentally different timescales. You don’t judge a brand campaign by next month’s pipeline. You don’t wait a year to optimize a PLG onboarding flow.

It creates accountability without rigidity. Campaign containers give you clear ownership and measurable outcomes, but they don’t prescribe tactics. You can experiment within the structure.

It speaks CFO language. By standardizing inputs and outputs, you create a common language for marketing, sales, finance, and executive teams. No more talking past each other.

It’s actually implementable. You don’t need a data science team or million-dollar MarTech stack. You need discipline, clear definitions, and consistent measurement. Start with a spreadsheet if you have to.

It makes budget conversations rational. Instead of political battles over who gets what, you have data-driven discussions about pillar-level performance and strategic priorities.
How to Actually Implement This (Without Losing Your Mind)

Here’s the roadmap:

Foundation
Define your campaign container template (in the Robynn platform, we call this Playbooks). What fields does every campaign need? Establish baseline metrics for each pillar. Where are you today? Implement tracking infrastructure. This doesn’t have to be fancy — start with what you have. Create pillar-level dashboards that roll up campaign results.

Pilot
Launch 2–3 containers per pillar using the framework. Test your measurement processes. Do the definitions work? Can you actually track what you said you’d track? Train your team. Get feedback. Iterate ruthlessly.

Scale
Migrate all marketing activities into campaign containers. Everything. No exceptions. Establish your quarterly budget allocation review process. Put it on the calendar. Integrate with financial planning so finance knows when to expect updates.

Optimize
Build your historical performance database for benchmarking. Now you can see trends. Develop predictive models. What patterns predict success? Refine attribution models based on learnings. Establish centers of excellence for each pillar so knowledge compounds.

The Payoff
Here’s what happens when you implement this framework:

Clarity - You know what’s working and what isn’t. No more guessing. No more defending tactics that don’t drive results because “everyone else is doing it.”

Confidence - When the CFO asks about ROI, you have an answer. When the board questions your budget request, you have data. When the CEO wants to cut marketing spend, you can show exactly what you’ll lose.

Agility - You can reallocate budget quarterly based on performance, not annually based on politics. When market conditions change, you adapt fast.

Credibility - Marketing transforms from a cost center with ambiguous returns into a growth engine with measurable, defensible impact on company performance.

Career survival - Let’s be honest — CMO tenure averages about 26 months (and rapidly getting shorter!). Anything that helps you prove value and survive longer is worth implementing.
The Uncomfortable Truth

Here’s something nobody wants to say out loud: Some of your marketing isn’t working. Maybe a lot of it isn’t working. And that’s okay.

The point of measurement isn’t to prove that everything you do is brilliant. It’s to figure out what actually drives growth so you can do more of it and less of everything else.

This framework will expose your failures. That’s the point. Fail fast, learn faster, and reallocate to what works.

The alternative is continuing to operate in a fog, defending budgets based on faith rather than data, and wondering why your board and often the CFO doesn’t take marketing seriously.
A Final Thought

As I walked out of my umpteenth exec meeting after hearing the same questions repeatedly, I realized something. The question “What’s marketing’s ROI?” isn’t really about the number.

It’s about trust.

Does the board trust that marketing is making good decisions with company resources? Does the CEO trust that marketing understands the business, not just the tactics? Does finance trust that marketing can speak their language?

This framework builds that trust. Not because it’s perfect — no framework is — but because it’s honest, structured, and grounded in reality.

It acknowledges that marketing is complex while providing tools to manage that complexity. It respects that some things take time while creating accountability for things that don’t. It balances art and science, creativity and measurement, intuition and data.

And most importantly, it gives you a way to answer that dreaded question with confidence: “Here’s what we invested, here’s what we got, here’s how it compares to benchmarks, and here’s what we’re going to do differently next quarter.”

That’s not just measurement. That’s leadership.

Now go build your campaign containers. Your future self (and your CFO) will thank you.

What’s your biggest challenge in measuring marketing impact? Drop a comment below — I’d love to hear what’s keeping you up at night.

AI Agents for Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide

The CMO’s Mission Impossible : Why Measuring Marketing Impact is Like Catching Smoke (And How to Do It Anyway)