How to run a quarterly marketing review that changes the next quarter

A quarterly marketing review has done its job only if it ends with one activity stopped, one started, one left alone, and a named person and a date against each. Everything else, the charts and the discussion, is preparation for that. Hold the meeting after enquiries and sales have been matched by source, bring one page of figures, and refuse to close until the three decisions are written down.

What does the review need on one page?

Prepare the page before the meeting, not during it. For each marketing activity you ran, record four things.

Two warnings about the page. First, count hours as spend; a free channel that eats ten hours a week is not free. Second, if you cannot fill the order column because nobody asked "how did you hear of us?", that is the first thing to start, and it counts as your started activity for this quarter.

The figures come from where enquiries are recorded. If they live across three phones and a notebook, the page cannot be filled, and one shared register has to come first.

A 90-minute agenda

1. Ten minutes: read the page in silence. No presenting. Each person marks one row they doubt.
2. Twenty minutes: the doubted rows. Whoever marked a row says why. Argue about the number, not the person.
3. Twenty minutes: read five won and five lost enquiries aloud. Use the actual words of the buyer. Averages hide what a single message reveals.
4. Twenty minutes: decide. One stop, one start, one keep.
5. Twenty minutes: assign. Owner, first step, date, and what you will look at next quarter to know it worked.

Close the meeting by reading the three decisions aloud. If one has no owner, the meeting is not finished.

How do you choose what to stop?

Stop the activity with the largest gap between effort and orders, unless it plays a part you cannot see in the figures. Two tests help:

• The replacement test. If this vanished tomorrow, would the same buyers reach you another way? A directory listing that only repeats your Google profile may fail it.
• The long-cycle test. For products bought once a year, such as machinery or a school admission, a quarter may be too short to judge. Judge those on whether enquiries are of the right kind, and say so in the minutes.

Skip stopping something merely because it had a bad quarter. A seasonal activity that earns in two quarters of four should be judged over the year.

How do you choose what to start?

Start whatever a lost enquiry showed you was missing. If three lost buyers said they could not find a price, the thing to start is a price page or a rate PDF sent on WhatsApp. It comes from the lost enquiries, not from a list of what competitors are doing. Choose one thing small enough to finish before the next review: one owner, no new tool, and a cost the stopped activity can cover. A start that needs fresh budget or a new hire is a project, and it belongs in the planning conversation rather than here.

An invented example: a pump dealer who nearly stopped the wrong thing

Imagine an invented pump dealer in Coimbatore reviewing a quarter. The trade-directory listing has the highest annual fee and the most enquiries, but nearly all ask for a price the dealer cannot match. Dealer visits cost the most hours and produced the fewest enquiries, though two of them became the largest orders. The room's first instinct was to stop the visits.

Reading the won orders aloud changed that. Both big buyers came from visits, and both reordered. The review cut the directory's premium placement instead and kept the visits. That had a price: the directory had also sent a steady trickle of small orders, and a few of those stopped. It started one thing: asking every caller how they found the shop and writing the answer in a register, with the counter manager as owner and the register as the first item at the next review. The dealer left with a stop, a start and a keep, each with a name against it.

When not to hold this review

Skip the full meeting if nobody has recorded where enquiries came from. Spend the quarter setting up the register instead, and review it at the end. Skip it too when one person does all the marketing and also decides everything; then the "meeting" is a conversation with yourself. Ask the person who answers calls to sit in and read five lost enquiries aloud. An outsider notices what you have stopped seeing.

What goes in the minutes?

Keep them to a single page:

• The three decisions, each with an owner and a date.
• One line on what each decision is expected to change, in words rather than a target you cannot defend.
• Anything the figures could not tell you, listed as a question for next time.

Read the previous quarter's minutes first at every review. The first item on the agenda is whether last quarter's three decisions happened. If two of three did not, do not add three more; find out why they stalled.

The marketing hub shows where reviews fit among the rest of the planning. If you would like someone to run the first one with you, see quarterly business reviews, or tell us what you need and we can build the page for your own channels.