What should I show the board about marketing?

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2. Measurement & Budget

By Saroj Jha · November 2, 2026 · 13 min read

Show the board one page that answers two questions: is marketing money turning into revenue at a cost the company can afford, and what will you do differently next quarter? In my view that page needs four blocks: pipeline created against plan, with how pipeline from earlier quarters has converted; CAC and payback, with the definition written underneath; marketing spend against plan; and the two or three changes you are making, with any decision you need from the board. Put leading numbers (pipeline, meetings, activation) beside lagging ones (new revenue, CAC, payback) so nobody judges this quarter’s spend by revenue it has not had time to produce, and show every attribution figure with the method that produced it, as a range when methods disagree.

Here is what goes on the page, and why.

Running case: Example Co. Fictional

Example Co. is a fictional Series A B2B SaaS company selling a compliance-tracking product to operations leaders at mid-sized logistics firms. It sells through a sales team, at an average first-year contract of $24,000 and an 80% gross margin, and in Q3 2026 it won 45 new customers on $900,000 of total sales and marketing cost, $330,000 of it marketing program spend. Its marketing section in the board deck runs to 14 slides of channel charts. Example Co. and every number attached to it are illustrative.

What does a board actually want to know about marketing?

Whether the money is working, and whether you know what to do next. Board members are not there to review click-through rates; they are there to judge whether the company can grow efficiently and whether its leaders are making good calls.

The pressure to show that has grown. In The CMO Survey’s 2025 edition, which surveyed 281 marketing leaders at US for-profit companies from January 21 to February 12, 2025, 50% reported increasing pressure from the board to prove the value of marketing, against 33% in fall 2023^[1]. The same survey found that “Demonstrating the impact of marketing actions on financial outcomes” was the activity most marketing leaders found challenging, at 64.0%^[1].

Most do not feel they manage it. In Gartner’s survey of 378 senior marketing leaders in April and May 2024, only 52% said they were successful in proving the value of marketing and receiving credit for helping meet enterprise objectives, and CMOs ranked CFOs (40%) and CEOs (39%) as the executives most sceptical of that value^[2]. Gartner’s release does not give company size, and these are not startup figures, but I see the same gap at Seed to Series B: a long marketing section that reports activity and leaves the board to work out whether it mattered.

The time you get is short. Speedinvest’s open-sourced seed board template gives the whole KPI update “ca. 10 min” of an agenda that runs two to three hours, and asks founders to “allocate at least 50% of the board meeting to important strategic topics”^[3]. That is one venture firm’s view, not a benchmark, but it matches what I see: the numbers are a short opening, and the discussion is what the board is there for.

Example Co., step 1 Fictional

Example Co.’s 14 slides cover sessions, followers, email opens, webinar registrants, cost per lead by channel and a multi-touch attribution chart. None of them says what Q3’s $330,000 of program spend produced in pipeline or customers, what a customer cost, or what changes in Q4. The board spends its time asking for those numbers.

Do this

Write the two questions at the top of a blank page (is the money working, and what changes next) and check whether each slide in your current marketing section answers either one.

Which numbers belong on the one page?

Four blocks, each with its definition underneath, so the board reads the same number you do.

1. Pipeline created, and how earlier pipeline converted. Pipeline created this quarter against plan, and for the pipeline created two or three quarters ago, how much has closed, how much is still open and how much was lost. Pipeline alone rewards creating opportunities that never close.
2. CAC and payback. Customer acquisition cost is all sales and marketing cost for the period divided by new customers won. Payback is CAC divided by monthly gross profit per new customer. Andreessen Horowitz’s partners write that CAC “should be the full cost of acquiring users”, warn against leaving out referral fees, credits or discounts, and say many investors want “the blended number as well as the CAC, broken out by paid/unpaid”^[4]. That is one firm’s guidance, and it is the definition I would use.
3. Spend against plan. Marketing spend this quarter against the budget the board approved, with any variance of a tenth or more explained in one line. My rule of thumb, not a benchmark.
4. What changes next quarter. Two or three changes, each tied to a number above, and any decision you need from the board.

The Board Marketing Slide Pack has this page laid out, and the Marketing KPI Board Report holds the definitions. For why stage conversion, not top-of-funnel volume, shows whether marketing works, see How Do I Know If Marketing Is Working?; I do not repeat it here.

Example Co., step 2 Fictional

Example Co.’s CAC is $900,000 ÷ 45 = $20,000, up from $810,000 ÷ 45 = $18,000 in Q2. Monthly revenue per new customer is $24,000 ÷ 12 = $2,000, so payback is $20,000 ÷ ($2,000 × 80%) = 12.5 months, against 11.25 in Q2. Marketing program spend was $330,000 against a $300,000 plan (110%), and pipeline created was $2,640,000 against a $3,000,000 plan (88%). Of the $2,500,000 of pipeline created in Q1, $500,000 has closed (20%), $300,000 is still open (12%) and $1,700,000 was lost (68%).

Do this

Write the definition of CAC and payback your finance lead uses under each number, and use the same one every quarter.

Why one page and not forty?

Because a board reads the numbers before the meeting and spends the meeting on decisions. True Ventures’ Jon Callaghan, drawing on more than 1,500 hours of board meetings, advises a whole board deck of “10-25 slides max”, sent “3 to 5 days in advance of the meeting”, and says “Never read slides or bullets in a startup board meeting”^[5]. If the entire company gets 10 to 25 slides, marketing gets one, perhaps two. That is his view, not a rule, and I agree with it.

The page needs history, not only this quarter. Speedinvest’s template asks for actuals against forecast, ideally with “six to twelve months of historic data”^[3]. Two or three prior quarters beside the current one let the board see a trend without a separate chart for each metric. Everything else, the channel detail your team runs on, goes in an appendix the board can open if a question comes up.

Example Co., step 3 Fictional

Example Co. moves its 14 channel slides to an appendix and keeps one page: the four blocks, each with Q1, Q2 and Q3 side by side. The deck goes out four days before the meeting with one line on top: “Pipeline is 12% under plan and CAC rose 11%; the page shows why and what changes in Q4.” CAC rose from $18,000 to $20,000, which is $2,000 ÷ $18,000 = 11%.

Do this

Move every chart that a board member would not act on to the appendix, and put the quarter’s one-sentence summary at the top of the page.

How do you separate leading from lagging numbers?

Put them in different columns and say how long the lag is. A lagging number, such as new revenue, CAC or payback, tells you what spending from earlier quarters produced. A leading number, such as pipeline created, first meetings with accounts that match your ideal customer profile or trial activation, tells you what next quarter’s revenue is likely to look like. Mixing them makes this quarter’s spend look bad when revenue has simply not arrived yet, or good when it is living off earlier work.

The cleanest way to join them is by cohort: follow the pipeline created in one quarter until most of it has closed or died. That shows the board a conversion rate it can trust and lets you estimate what this quarter’s pipeline will become. The Marketing KPI Report calculates stage conversion and change from last period from your counts.

Example Co., step 4 Fictional

Example Co.’s sales cycle runs about two quarters, so most of the pipeline created in Q3 will close or be lost by the end of Q1 2027. If Q3’s $2,640,000 of pipeline converts like Q1’s has so far, at 20%, it becomes about $528,000 of new contracts, against $600,000 had pipeline hit its $3,000,000 plan: a gap of about $72,000, visible now, two quarters before it shows up in revenue. That is only what Q3’s own pipeline adds; deals from other quarters’ pipeline close in the same period. The 20% holding is an assumption, not a forecast, and 12% of Q1’s pipeline is still open, so the final rate could be higher.

Do this

Add a cohort row to your page: pipeline created in each of the last four quarters, and how much of each has been won, lost and is still open.

How do you show attribution honestly?

Label each number with the method that produced it, and show a range when methods disagree. Software attribution assigns credit to the touchpoints it can track, which is not the same as cause.

Self-reported attribution, the answer to “how did you hear about us?” on a demo form, sees word of mouth and podcasts that software misses, but depends on memory. A holdout or geo test measures cause, but only for the channel you tested. A board can work with all three if you say which is which.

What I would not show is “marketing-influenced revenue” as if it were caused by marketing. It counts any deal a marketing touch appeared in, so it rises whenever marketing does more of anything; How Do I Know If Marketing Is Working? explains why. For the decisions that matter most, scaling or cutting a large channel, the honest answer is a test, and Incrementality Testing for Startups shows how to run one at startup scale.

Example Co., step 5 Fictional

Example Co.’s CRM credits 12 of the 45 new customers to paid search, 18 to organic and direct, 10 to outbound and 5 to events. Asked at the demo, the same 45 named paid search 5 times, organic and direct 6, outbound 10, events 4 and a peer or podcast 20. So the page says “Paid search: 5 to 12 of 45 new customers, depending on method; holdout test in Q4” rather than a single number. Paid media cost $180,000, which is $15,000 per customer on the CRM’s count of 12 and $36,000 on the buyers’ count of 5.

Do this

Next to every attribution number on the page, write the method in three words or fewer (CRM last touch, buyer said, holdout test), and show a range wherever two methods disagree.

How should you present a quarter that missed?

State the miss in the first line, explain it with the numbers on the page and say what you will change. Boards forgive a miss far more readily than a surprise, and a page that hides one teaches the board to distrust every page after it. Name the cause you believe, the evidence for it and what would prove you wrong.

The last block is where the page earns its time. Each change should point to a number above it, and any decision you need, more budget, a hire, permission to stop a channel, should be stated as a question the board can answer in the meeting. Callaghan suggests opening the meeting with “Here’s one area where I could really use your help”^[5]; the marketing page is a good place for that ask.

Example Co., step 6 Fictional

Under the top line from step 3, Example Co.’s page explains the miss: “Field events cost $95,000 and produced $210,000 of pipeline; partner webinars cost $40,000 and produced $480,000.” Its changes: move $30,000 from events to partner webinars, add two qualifying questions to the demo form, and run a paid-search holdout in Q4 to settle the 5-to-12 range. Its ask: “Should Q4 hold spend at plan while the test runs?” Events produced $210,000 ÷ $95,000 = 2.2 times their cost in pipeline; webinars $480,000 ÷ $40,000 = 12 times.

Do this

Rewrite the first line of your marketing page as the quarter’s result against plan, in one sentence, before you add anything else.

What changes by stage?

• Pre-seed — No separate marketing page. One line in the founder update on how the first customers found you and what you spent, in absolute numbers.
• Seed — Deals by name rather than rates, which are noise at a handful of wins: every new customer, where they came from in the CRM and in their own words, and cash spent against plan. Show CAC only as total spend over customers won, with the count beside it.
• Series A–B — The full page: pipeline created with cohort conversion, blended and paid CAC with payback, spend against plan and changes. By Series B, split CAC and payback by segment, report retention beside acquisition, and include results from at least one holdout test on your largest channel.

Free template

Put the four blocks on one page

The Board Marketing Slide Pack gives you the one-page layout described here, with the four blocks, a cohort row and space for the quarter’s decisions.

The page is the summary; the measurement behind it is covered elsewhere. Marketing Analytics for Startups: Measure What Changes a Decision sets out the few measures worth tracking and the review rhythm that feeds this page, and My LTV:CAC Is Below 3:1. Which Number Should I Fix First? helps when the CAC block is the problem.

If you want me to look at your own funnel, positioning and channels, my Growth Audit ends with three prioritized fixes and a 30-day action plan.