Stop Nodding at Numbers Nobody Has Done the Math On
by Chad de Lisle
The meeting ended and you nodded.
The CEO had just announced the number. Everyone was fired up. You had a pit in your stomach, because you’re the one who has to go make it happen and you already knew roughly what budget was coming with it. But you didn’t say anything, because it wasn’t the moment and you didn’t want to be the person who deflates the room.
Nine months later you’re in a conference room explaining a miss. Every explanation you have is true. None of them matter.
Guess what? You didn’t miss the number. You agreed to it.
THE PROBLEM: MARKETERS NOD. SALES LEADERS PUSH BACK.
Watch what happens when a VP of Sales gets handed a quota with no math behind it. He pushes back in the room, in front of everyone, and nobody thinks less of him. It’s expected. It’s practically the job.
Now watch a marketing leader get handed a growth target. Smiles. Nods. Takes it back to the team and starts figuring out how to make it work.
I did this for years, and I want to be precise about why, because it isn’t cowardice.
Part of it is optimism, which is genuinely a gift. Marketers are the people in the building who believe the thing can be done. We can see the version of the company that wins. That belief is why anyone hires us, and it’s also the reason we say yes to numbers we haven’t checked.
The rest is a bad assumption about who owns what. The number belongs to the CEO. Hitting it belongs to me. That’s only half right.
The vision is his job. The how is mine. I can’t do my half by staying quiet.
And here’s the thing I didn’t understand until Jake said it out loud: he doesn’t enjoy being told no either. No CEO does. But he’d much rather hear it in the planning meeting than find out at the end of Q3, when the only options left are bad ones.
THE FRAMEWORK: REVERSE ENGINEER, DON’T ACCEPT
Most planning starts in the wrong place. Somebody opens a doc and starts writing 90-day priorities, and the year gets built out of whatever the team can think of doing next quarter. That’s backwards, and it’s why so many annual plans are just last year with a bigger number on top.
Start at the other end:
The North Star, ten years out
You shouldn’t know how to hit this one yet. If the path is obvious, the goal’s too small. This is the CEO’s dream and yours to write down.
Three years
What would have to be true for the ten-year number to still be live? What does the business look like, what does it sell, who’s buying it.
One year
This is where reality sets in, and where the arguing should happen. Not in Q3.
Ninety days
Near-term priorities. They fall out of the plan instead of becoming it.
Then comes the part most marketers avoid
You reflect the math back. Out loud, in the room, in front of the person who set the goal.
It’s simple arithmetic and it gets almost comical when you do it honestly. The goal requires this many new customers. Our fully loaded CAC is this. That’s the spend required. Our current budget is this. Here’s the gap.
You’re not arguing. You’re just reading the numbers back until the ask becomes visible to everyone, including the person who made it.
And once it’s visible, there are exactly three things that can move. Change the goal. Change the budget. Change the timeline.
That’s it. Those are the levers. One of those three is happening whether anyone names it or not. The only question is whether you decide in January or discover it in September.
THE PROOF
A few months ago I walked into Jake’s office. We were pacing ahead of the goal, and I was holding a budget I didn’t need.
I told him he could have it back.
He almost cried. He’ll tell you why on camera this week, and it comes down to something he said that stuck with me: as a CEO, you feel like an ATM to everybody. Every conversation is somebody wanting more.
But I want to be clear that this wasn’t generosity, and it wasn’t a gesture. It was the reverse engineer working exactly the way it’s supposed to.
I could hand the budget back because I knew what that money was for. We’d built the plan together, so I could see we were going to clear the number without it. Nobody who’s just been handed a target can do that. You can’t return money when you were never told what it was buying.
That day wasn’t a moment of character. It was the output of a planning process that gave me something to measure against.
TAKE THIS AND USE IT MONDAY
🎯 For Marketing Leaders: Before your next planning cycle, ask your CEO two questions: What’s the most we could do? What’s the least we’d be okay with? Two walls to bounce off beats one number to defend. Then reverse engineer from the ten-year down, not the 90-day up, and bring the math to the meeting where the goal gets set rather than the one where it gets reviewed. When the gap shows up, say which of the three levers you’re recommending. Don’t make your CEO guess.
📊 For CEOs: When your marketing leader pushes back on a number, that’s GOOD. The quiet yes is the expensive one, because you’ll pay for it three quarters from now with less room to fix it. If your last planning meeting had no friction in it, you didn’t get alignment. You got compliance.
THE TRUTH
How indispensable you are comes down to one thing: how far out on the timeline you can align with your CEO.
Align on this quarter and your staff. Align on the year and you’re a manager. Align on where this company is going in ten years, and you’re in the room where it gets decided.
That’s the difference, and it starts with refusing to nod at a number nobody has done the math on.
We put both sides of this on the Indispensable Marketer show this week. Jake’s solo episode is the script for the meeting itself. The conversation episode is the day I gave the budget back and what he said about it.
Both are on YouTube now. Link in the comments.
— Chad de Lisle
Head of Marketing, Disruptive Advertising
P.S. On September 30th at 1PM ET, Jake and I are going live for an hour on this exact problem. Free. We’re walking through the Trust Gap and the system we built to close it, and there’s no recording, which is on purpose. Everyone who stays to the end gets a physical copy of the book shipped before it’s on sale anywhere.
