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Answer Core CMO Questions with Marketing Planning Software

Answer Core CMO Questions with Marketing Planning Software

Introduction: CMO Questions That Generate Work

As a CMO (and in every senior marketing role I’ve held), a small set of questions always get asked. They came from CEOs, CFOs, board members, and often the sales leader or their teams. They were the right questions to ask, but they created work.

These questions didn't create work because we didn’t know the answer. The information existed, but it wasn’t instantly available in a usable format. We had to build it by checking multiple sources, reconciling numbers, formatting data, and reworking slides. What should have been a five-minute review became a multi-hour task.

People expect marketing to take time to analyze the data and tell a story during a quarterly business review. However, in ad-hoc meetings where participants make quick decisions, it's frustrating not to have the answers at hand. Worse still, needing to repeat this every time a stakeholder asked a slightly nuanced variation of the same question.

Imagine a marketing leader with the answers always ready and up to date. Able to present without reformatting. That is what a planning system should provide. Not a static document, but a source that experienced marketers can use to track, share, and explain the plan clearly.

Below are the core questions that, in my experience, are easy to ask but time consuming to answer.

1. What Is the Marketing Plan?

This question appears simple. But in many organisations, even experienced marketing teams struggle to answer it with clarity.

A marketing plan is not just a calendar, media schedule, or list of activities. A marketing plan is more than a budget spreadsheet or a slide deck outlining marketing campaigns. These might all be components of the plan, but they are not the plan itself.

A proper plan connects objectives to strategies, strategies to programs, and programs to specific activities. It reflects both the choices made and the alternatives considered. It should answer the following:

Without structure, the plan is likely to drift. Teams continue to work hard, but not necessarily in alignment. Gaps emerge between goals and execution and performance is difficult to judge objectively.

The best plans I’ve worked with are living systems. The structure shows how the organization allocates resources and how the marketing function operates. They are visible to stakeholders, regularly updated and reviewed, and helps people make decisions. A poor one requires constant re-working and explanation.

2. What Is the Return on Marketing Investment (Current and Forecasted)?

Return on marketing investment (MROI), is the most common question raised at senior leadership level. CEOs and boards want to know how marketing can scale a business with the right level of investment. This question is also difficult to answer well.

Marketing does not operate in a vacuum. Isolating direct impact is difficult, especially in long and complex B2B sales cycles. Marketers focus on complex (often unreliable) attribution models. None of these simply and fully explain the interplay of brand, demand generation, channel activation, and sales engagement.

Experienced marketing leaders typically use a combination of actual data and historic patterns. For example:

Ultimately, senior marketing leaders need to distil this into two simple metrics. What are we spending on marketing and what revenue has resulted. At this level the numbers don't need to attribute every last interaction. They need to credibly show the cause and effect of marketing investment.

Marketing planning platforms that track budgets and outcomes in the same place make this process much easier.

3. Which Marketing Channels Are Working?

This question is deceptively straightforward. It implies that marketing leaders can isolate channel performance with confidence. In reality, that is rarely the case. Even a small B2B business will have marketing efforts across many channels.

Marketing channels work in combination. Paid search may convert leads, but those leads may have first become aware of the brand through organic content or industry sponsorship. LinkedIn impressions may not generate form fills directly, but they may improve recall and response in account-based outreach. Previous brand exposure or thought leadership content can influence word of mouth.

Attribution systems can get complicated quickly. Testing and analysing prospect journeys and touch points provides lots of insight on marketing activity but not necessarily clarity. For CMOs, a more practical approach to answer this question is to aggregate channel performance.

These indicators allow marketers to judge whether a channel is performing its intended role. CMOs (while interested in the detail), need the quick indicator to show where investment should go next.

A marketing plan that easily segments and filters by channel (both spend and outcomes) answers this question. Leave the attribution modelling for deep dives, and focus instead on the overarching impact.

4. What Are We Learning and Adjusting as We Go?

Often unspoken in formal reviews, this question influences how people evaluate marketing. Boards and executive teams judge whether progress corresponds to decision making.

At its core, this question is about whether the marketing plan is a living system or a static one. Nearly all plans are reasonable at the outset. The real test comes if results diverge from expectations. Does the adjust or continue with the original course and wait for the next formal planning cycle?

An effective planning environment should support a continuous learning loop. This includes:

Adaptive planning does not imply constant change. It is not about abandoning strategies at the first sign of underperformance. Rather, it is about structured responsiveness. It means having checkpoints in the plan to test assumptions, gather feedback, and change course if necessary.

Marketing teams that operate this way tend to build more trust across the business. People see them as proactive rather than reactive, and commercially grounded rather than campaign-driven. They can explain not just what they are doing, but why they are doing it (and why something may need changing).

The most credible marketing plans are those that evolve in response to evidence, not pressure. A planning platform that supports this kind of structured learning is more than an administrative tool. It becomes a key management tool that allows the function to mature and deliver long-term value.

Conclusion

The questions outlined above are not hypothetical. They are the real questions that senior marketing leaders face regularly. CMOs that can answers them easily free-up time to work on the detailed understanding.

These questions are not hard but answering them often requires assembling disconnected information and producing custom outputs. It limits responsiveness. It increases the risk of inconsistency.

The solution is not more reporting but better tracking of the marketing plan. Consider using marketing software that links objectives, strategies, programs, and outcomes. A tool that allows marketing leaders to answer these questions without extra work.

That is the approach I advocate. Not a once-a-year planning document stored in SharePoint or Box. Instead, a living framework that helps senior marketers stay ready for the questions they face.