From Fire Drills to Focus: Building a Marketing Function That Actually Scale
The Challenge
Like a lot of startups, this company was stuck in constant reaction mode. Every time a salesperson or customer asked for something, the marketing team dropped everything to make it happen. They were producing sales decks, one-pagers, visuals, and videos nonstop.
The problem was that none of it connected back to a bigger strategy. The team was exhausted, stretched too thin, and had no real sense of what was working. Leadership couldn’t see how marketing contributed to the bottom line, and the marketers didn’t have the data or structure to prove their impact.
The Strategy
The first step was to bring focus and leadership to the team. I met with the CEO to review the company’s quarterly business goals, also known as “rocks,” and then built out five marketing rocks that clearly tied to revenue growth, customer development, and product expansion.
Once I had those goals in place, I created a quarterly marketing plan that broke everything down into priorities, projects, and ownership. The plan included goals, strategies, channels, and timelines, but I made sure the team had input so they felt ownership and clarity.
I finalized the plan within a week and aligned it with the leadership team. Then I started improving how marketing worked day to day. I helped them integrate AI tools into their workflow, which saved time and reduced manual tasks. I also built a marketing dashboard that showed how campaigns were performing and made ROI visible to the entire company.
I also:
Integrated AI tools to streamline content and reporting workflows
Created standard operation processes to drive efficiency and ensure nothing slipped through the cracks
Built a marketing performance dashboard to visualize ROI in real time
Defined guardrails so the team could confidently push back on low-value requests
The Results
Within 60 days:
Marketing priorities were directly tied to revenue and customer metrics
The team reduced off-strategy requests by 40%, freeing time for high-impact work
Leadership finally had visibility into marketing ROI and contribution to growth
The company transitioned from reactive execution to a repeatable, data-backed revenue marketing system — setting the foundation for scalable growth.
Elishaa Batdorf is a fractional CMO and marketing strategist who helps growth-stage startups scale by providing leadership, strategy and focus. With 20 years of experience helping Fortune 500 companies and startups, she builds scalable, AI-enabled marketing functions that connect content and campaigns directly to pipeline.
