Marketing Stocktake
Is your marketing function built for the past, or for what comes next?
Most marketing functions were shaped around constraints that no longer exist. The Marketing Stocktake scores yours against our capability framework, on evidence, not opinion. It shows where marketing can contribute more, and which gaps to hire for, borrow, automate or stop doing.
Two to eight weeks, depending on the size of your company. The Stocktake ends with a start date.
Marketing Stocktake
What your people believe, against what the evidence shows
Stocktake Score
What gets scored
Seven domains, core and frontier.
Direction
Where marketing points the business, and how it chooses between building, borrowing and automating.
Organisation
How the function is organised to deliver, and whether change actually lands.
People and judgement
The skills and judgement of the team, and how well people direct the machines.
Machine and data
The stack, the agent layer and the data they run on.
Demand and audience
How the business earns and buys attention, including with AI assistants, and turns separate channels into a campaign.
Growth and customer
Turning interest into revenue, arming the people who close, and keeping the customers you win.
Signals and proof
Measurement your finance team can reconcile, and data you can trust.
Core and frontier capabilities, scored separately. Fourteen of the thirty-six capabilities are new, or newly scarce, since the AI shift.
What you give us
- A named sponsor, and a few people across levels for a short survey
- Read-only access to the admin screens of your core marketing systems
- The operating documents you already have
If a document doesn’t exist, that is a finding.
What you get back
- A Stocktake Score out of 100, with its reasoning
- An assessment of your marketing investment
- A profile across the seven domains, core and frontier shown apart
- Triangulated findings: where belief and evidence disagree, and why
- A Build / Borrow / Bot plan for every gap
- Role briefs written against evidenced gaps
- A twelve-month roadmap
A 45 to 60 minute boardroom readout.
What we look at, and what we don’t
We read configuration and counts, not customer records.
Access is read-only: configuration and usage counts, read off admin screens by a person. We take no contact lists, campaign data or customer records, and nothing is copied out of your systems.
A data processing agreement is signed before any access is granted. The Visibility Snapshot, by contrast, needs no access at all.
What makes it different from a maturity assessment
Four evidence streams. The survey comes last.
A Stocktake draws on four separate kinds of evidence. Each is scored on its own, then compared with the others.
What your work shows
The plans, reports and operating documents your team already produces.
What your systems show
Configuration and usage counts, read off the admin screens of your core marketing systems.
What the market can see from outside
Your public footprint, read from outside the way a buyer sees it, including what AI assistants say about you.
What your people believe
A short survey across levels, run last, so that belief is tested against the other three streams.
Disagreement is the finding
When belief and evidence diverge, or your own people disagree, that gap is the most useful thing in the report. A survey alone averages it away.
Evidence weighted over opinion
Evidence outweighs opinion in every score, and every score carries its reasoning, so you can challenge it.
We supply all four.
Permanent, fractional, automated, or stop. Because we supply all four, the evidence decides, not our revenue model. The Stocktake is a fixed fee with no hidden work programme, so telling you to stop costs us nothing.
Start here
Find out how far marketing can go in your business.
Scored against the Crew & Engine Capability Map: seven domains, core and frontier.