Many Marketing KPIs appear to belong to Marketing. Qualified leads, website conversions, email performance, SEO rankings, engagement, pipeline and revenue contribution all regularly appear in job descriptions and onboarding plans. A few months later, those same numbers are often used to judge whether the marketer is doing a good job.
The problem is that most of those numbers do not belong to Marketing alone. They depend on decisions, systems and behaviours elsewhere in the business too. If that’s not made clear before the hire starts, one person can end up carrying responsibility for an outcome they were never fully in control of.
That’s where the trouble begins.
Take “qualified leads”
Increasing qualified leads is one of the most common expectations placed on a marketer. On the surface, it seems reasonable. Marketing creates visibility, drives demand and generates interest, so naturally lead generation sits with Marketing.
But when you look beneath the KPI, it gets more complicated.
Who decided what “qualified” actually means?
Has Sales agreed with that definition?
Does everybody use it consistently?
Is the offer clear enough for the right people to recognise themselves in it?
Does pricing align with the audience you are trying to attract?
What happens after a lead comes in, and how quickly does somebody follow up?
Marketing can improve targeting, sharpen the message, and create demand, but if qualification criteria are unclear, Sales and Marketing aren’t aligned, or follow-up is inconsistent, the marketer is being judged against a moving target.
That doesn’t mean lead generation isn’t a Marketing responsibility. It means the KPI depends on more than Marketing alone.
Website conversions are not just a Marketing problem
The same applies to website performance. Marketing can absolutely be responsible for increasing relevant traffic and improving the route through the website. They can work on messaging, landing pages, calls to action, content and conversion points.
But what happens after somebody clicks matters just as much.
Is the offer easy to understand?
Is pricing clear?
Can somebody buy, enquire or book without friction?
Does somebody respond quickly?
Does the sales process make sense?
Does the customer experience after first contact match the promise made on the website?
If those things are weak, there’s a ceiling on how far Marketing can move conversion. The marketer may be told to “improve the website”, when the real problem sits somewhere else in the customer journey.
At that point, conversion isn’t purely a Marketing KPI. It’s a business KPI that Marketing influences.
Social engagement depends on whether the business has something worth saying
Founders often want Marketing to improve visibility, grow LinkedIn and increase engagement. Again, these are perfectly reasonable expectations, but they depend on more than content output.
What does the business actually believe?
What perspective does it have that a competitor couldn’t say just as easily?
Is the founder willing to be visible?
Are people inside the business willing to contribute?
Is there enough clarity around the brand for the marketer to build something distinctive?
A marketer can turn ideas into content, create consistency and improve how those ideas are communicated. What they can’t do is manufacture genuine authority from nothing.
If nobody wants to contribute, nobody wants to take a position, and leadership does not want to be visible, the problem isn’t necessarily that Marketing “isn’t creative enough”. There may simply be too little substance to work with.
Email performance starts long before the subject line
Open rates, click-through rates, responses and conversions are often treated as straightforward Marketing metrics. Sometimes they are. But email performance is also shaped by the quality of the database, how well the audience is segmented, the relevance of the offer, the timing of the campaign and what Marketing is learning from Sales.
If the database is old, messy or full of people collected for different reasons over several years, there’s a limit to what even a very good marketer can achieve with copy and subject lines.
Sometimes the problem is the email. Sometimes the problem existed long before the email was written.
SEO is another good example
SEO frequently lands with the marketer, but improving rankings can depend on technical fixes, development resources, website structure, content investment, authority, budget and time.
If the website is technically poor and nobody is available to fix it, that matters. If the business expects strong rankings without investing consistently in content, that matters. If SEO has been ignored for years but the marketer is expected to turn it around in a quarter, that matters too.
The KPI itself may still be reasonable. The conditions around it may not be.
This is an important distinction because founders can otherwise end up judging execution without examining whether the business has created the conditions for that execution to work.
Some KPIs barely belong to Marketing at all
There are also outcomes that Marketing can influence but does not control in any meaningful sense.
Customer satisfaction,
Retention,
Positive reviews,
Repeat purchases,
Referrals.
To name a few.
Marketing can attract a better-fit customer. It can set expectations clearly and communicate value well. It can influence who comes into the business and what they believe before they buy.
But once somebody becomes a customer, Marketing doesn’t control the entire experience. If delivery is poor, customer service is slow, or the product doesn’t live up to the promise, Marketing cannot solve that with better messaging.
In fact, strong Marketing can make the problem more visible because it sends more people into an experience that isn’t working.
This is where founders can end up blaming the wrong thing
When the numbers aren’t moving, it’s very easy for the conversation to become about the marketer.
Are they good enough?
Why are they not delivering?
Why aren’t we seeing results yet?
Sometimes the marketer genuinely is the problem. They may be underperforming, focused on the wrong things or simply the wrong hire. That possibility shouldn’t be ignored.
But it shouldn’t be the automatic conclusion either.
Before performance is reduced to the capability of one person, founders need to look at the conditions around the work.
If a marketer has been given a target they cannot move without support from Sales, Product, Operations, Finance or leadership, then that needs to be acknowledged.
Otherwise, the business is measuring a shared outcome and putting one person’s name next to it.
Marketing amplifies what is already there
One of the most useful ways to think about Marketing is as an amplifier.
If the offer is strong, positioning is clear, Sales follows up properly, and the customer experience delivers, Marketing can help accelerate that.
If the offer is confusing, nobody agrees on what a good lead looks like, Sales and Marketing barely speak, and the customer journey is messy, Marketing amplifies that too.
It doesn’t create the problem. It makes it harder to ignore.
That’s one reason Marketing can feel unpredictable inside a growing business. A founder can hire someone talented and still be disappointed by the output because the hire exposes weaknesses elsewhere in the business.
The marketer might simply be the person closest to the symptom without being the person who created the cause.
This is why I spend so much time on expectations before the hire
When I work with founders preparing for a marketing hire, I don’t just want to know what they want that person to do. I want to understand what they expect to happen as a result.
Then I want to pull that expectation apart.
If the goal is more qualified leads, what needs to be true in Sales for that to happen?
If the goal is better conversion, what needs to be true in the customer journey?
If the goal is more visibility, what is the founder willing to contribute?
If retention is being discussed, does Marketing genuinely own that outcome?
If Marketing is expected to generate growth, what decisions will the marketer actually be allowed to influence?
Those questions aren’t there to make things unnecessarily complicated. They’re there to surface dependencies before they become frustrations.
Because hidden dependencies behave in much the same way as hidden expectations. They stay invisible until something goes wrong.
Before you put a KPI into the job description, ask one more question
Instead of simply asking, “Can this marketer deliver this?”, ask:
“What else has to be true in the business for this number to move?”
Then work out who owns those things.
Maybe Marketing owns most of it.
Maybe Sales owns part of it.
Maybe leadership does.
Maybe there is an operational issue that needs fixing first.
Maybe several people need to contribute.
That doesn’t remove accountability from Marketing. It makes the accountability more accurate.
A marketer should absolutely be measured. They should have clear goals, clear expectations and a shared understanding of what good looks like. But there’s a difference between holding someone accountable for their contribution and making them responsible for an outcome they don’t control.
If that distinction is not made early, structural problems quickly start to look personal.
That’s often when a founder starts wondering whether they hired the wrong person.
Sometimes they did.
Sometimes the KPI was never fair in the first place.