Growth Insights for CEOs
Advice for CEOs on Growth and Scaling
Recent Posts

Vistage Chairs: Is Your Member’s Marketing Really Working? Ask These 5 Questions.
Tue, Aug 11, 2026 | Posted by Karen Hayward
Executive Takeaways
- Most CEOs challenge every capital investment but can't say with confidence whether their marketing is working.
- More leads isn't better marketing. Better customers are.
- If sales and marketing are blaming each other, the CEO hasn't asked the right question.
- The real measure isn't what marketing produced. It's what it changed about the future economics of the business.
Recent Posts

Are You Committing Marketing Malpractice? 4 Ways That CEOs Miss the Marketing Mark
Wed, Aug 27, 2014 — A prospective client recently reached out to me, having found me by searching for fractional chief marketing officers on the Internet. This C-suite executive, who shall remain nameless, dispensed with formalities and said, “I am interviewing 15 marketing firms, and I’d like a list of things that we could do for $20,000.” After I took a beat to absorb his “unique” approach, I responded as any ethical Chief Marketing Officer should – calmly explaining that there are many, many steps required before we could even begin to develop a budget to spend those $20,000 hard-earned marketing dollars – things like identifying goals, objectives, priorities and the like.
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