In Marketing Execution, Effort Doesn’t Count
by Chad de Lisle
Your team is busier than they’ve ever been.
Three new channels this year. A content calendar nobody can keep up with. Two tests running that somebody will interpret eventually. Weekly reporting that takes a full day to assemble and gets skimmed in four minutes.
Everyone is working. Nobody is resting. And if your CEO asked what moved the number last quarter, you’d need a minute.
I’ve run that team. I’ve been that marketing leader. And the thing I didn’t understand at the time is that the activity wasn’t evidence of commitment, let alone good marketing execution. It was evidence that I couldn’t tell what mattered, so I was doing all of it and hoping the right thing was in there somewhere.
The Problem: Effort Is The Wrong Currency
Marketers believe their value comes from how much they do. It’s the most natural belief in the world, because effort is the one thing fully within your control.
Nobody cares how much you do.
That sounds harsh and it isn’t meant to. Your CEO isn’t ungrateful and he isn’t blind to the hours. He’s just evaluating a different thing entirely, which is whether the business is better because you’re here.
Output is easy to show and results are hard. So when trust is thin, the instinct is to produce more evidence of work. More slides. Longer updates. A list of everything shipped this month.
That makes it worse. Volume of activity reads as busy, not valuable, and the gap between the two is where marketing leaders quietly lose the room.
Here’s the reframe that matters: vision can live on a whiteboard and still be true. Strategy can pencil out in a spreadsheet and still be sound. Execution is where the market punches you in the face, and it’s the only one of the three where you find out whether any of it was real.
The Framework: Four Things That Actually Decide It
Four questions determine whether marketing execution lands.
- Is your data accurate, and can everyone see it? Not just accurate. Visible. Data nobody outside your team can look at is data your CEO has to take your word on, which means every number you report is an ask for trust rather than a demonstration of it. Making your work visible is what buys you autonomy, because nobody needs to check on someone they can already see.
- Are your leading activities happening every time, on time? Most marketing teams have five or six things that reliably produce outcomes and a hundred things that might. The reliable ones slip first, because they’re boring and nobody notices for a few weeks. Name them. Put owners on them. Then be the kind of leader who’s unreasonable about those specific things and relaxed about almost everything else.
- Is your testing aimed at a known break in the funnel? Most testing is gambling with extra steps. You test a headline because testing headlines is what people do, not because you know the drop-off is at consideration and you know why. A test aimed at a specific leak returns a specific answer. A test aimed at nothing returns a number you’ll interpret however you need to.
- Can you name what you said no to this month, and why? This is the one almost nobody can answer, and it’s the real tell. If everything got a yes, you don’t have priorities. You have a list. And a list is what a team produces when the leader won’t choose.
That fourth one isn’t a marketing skill. It’s a willingness to disappoint someone on purpose, which is why it stays undone in most departments.
The Proof: Choosing The Boring Work First
The hardest version of this I’ve done here was choosing the boring work.
When I took over marketing, my instinct was to spend on awareness. That’s the fun work. New campaigns, new creative, a number that moves fast enough to show in a meeting.
Jake asked me to walk the customer journey first. What I found was a broken handoff from marketing to sales, inconsistent onboarding, and no system at all for turning happy clients into referrals.
So I spent two months fixing the bottom of the funnel while the top sat exactly where it was.
Two months is a long time to have nothing exciting to report. Every week I walked into a meeting and said some version of still working on the plumbing. There was no dashboard moment in any of it.
What it did was make the awareness spend work when I finally turned it up, because the leads had somewhere to land. And it did more for Jake’s trust in me than any campaign I’ve run, because he saw someone choosing the necessary work over the fun work.
But first I had to admit out loud that I’d been about to spend money on the wrong thing.
That’s the tax on all four of these. Not effort. Humility. You can’t prioritize honestly without conceding that some of what you’ve been doing didn’t matter, and most marketing leaders would rather stay busy than say that in a room.
Take This And Use It Monday
🎯 For Marketing Leaders: Write down everything your team is currently working on. Then mark which items you could prove moved a business number, which ones you believe will move one, and which ones exist because somebody asked. That third list is your budget and your team’s capacity, and it’s usually bigger than you want it to be. Kill two things this week. Then go to the person who asked for each of them and tell them why, before they notice.
📊 For CEOs: If your marketing updates are getting longer and your results aren’t getting better, you’re probably watching someone try to prove their value with volume. That’s a clarity problem, not a work ethic problem, and the fix is on your side of the table as much as theirs. Ask what they said no to this month. If the answer is nothing, nobody has told them what matters most.
The Truth
Effort is the only thing fully in your control, which is exactly why it’s the thing you reach for when trust is getting thin.
It won’t work. The marketer who does ten things well and can explain why, beats the one doing forty things hoping it performs. Every single time, and it isn’t close.
Jake’s episode on this is up now. The four principles, and what it costs to start doing them.
It’s on YouTube. Link in the comments.
— Chad de Lisle
Head of Marketing, Disruptive Advertising
P.S. We’re running the first Indispensable Marketer cohort starting October 30th. Eight weeks, live, small group, and you build the VSET system on your own business rather than reading about mine. Ten founding seats at $3,500 instead of $5,000, in exchange for a case study. One cohort at that price. Take the free assessment if you want your score first.
