Perspective / Private Equity
How to Evaluate a Portfolio Company's Marketing Function
CMO + TEAM · Published
A marketing team can look busy and still be strategically underbuilt.
It can also look small and be surprisingly effective.
Headcount alone tells you very little.
A better evaluation asks whether the function has the capabilities required to support the company's commercial goals.
Start with leadership.
Who owns marketing?
Do they have authority?
Can they connect strategy to revenue?
Can they make resource tradeoffs?
Can they challenge the business when the diagnosis is wrong?
A team of specialists without leadership often becomes a collection of requests.
Evaluate capabilities.
Look at:
- strategy
- market intelligence
- positioning
- product marketing
- demand generation
- creative
- content
- lifecycle
- operations
- analytics
- sales enablement
Not every capability needs a full-time employee.
But every strategically important capability needs an owner and a delivery model.
Examine the operating model.
Ask:
- What is internal?
- What is outsourced?
- Who manages agencies?
- Who owns performance?
- How are priorities set?
- How does sales participate?
- How are investments evaluated?
- How quickly can the organization change direction?
The problem may not be talent.
It may be orchestration.
Look beyond marketing metrics.
The function should eventually affect:
- revenue
- pipeline
- acquisition cost
- conversion
- retention
- expansion
- sales velocity
- market penetration
Activity metrics matter diagnostically.
They are not the final score.
A defined next step
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