In most growing businesses, marketing underperforms not because the agency is weak but because of a marketing ownership gap: nobody inside the business owns the number. This issue gives you one figure, a 30-minute ownership check and one thing to look for in your agency reports.
Who Owns Growth? Issue 2. By Sagar Pratap, Principal Consultant and Fractional CMO, Dizital Connect.
This is Who Owns Growth?, a short note every Monday from Dizital Connect for founders and leaders of growing businesses. Each issue has three parts: one number worth knowing, one fix you can make in under an hour, and one thing we look for in our own client work.
This week's point is simple. In most growing businesses, marketing underperforms not because the agency is weak but because nobody inside the business owns the marketing number.
The Number: 7.7%
Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey of 402 marketing leaders found budgets flat at 7.7% of company revenue, with 59% of CMOs saying they lack the budget to deliver their strategy and 39% planning to cut agency spend. For a growing business, the lesson is that growth now comes from moving money between channels rather than adding more of it. Moving money well needs someone who knows which half of the spend is working, and in most businesses we speak to, that job belongs to nobody.
The Fix: the marketing ownership check (30 minutes)
Open a blank page and answer four lines:
- Who owns the marketing number in this business? A name, not a team.
- What was that number last quarter: qualified leads, cost per customer or pipeline created?
- Every channel you paid for last quarter, and what each one cost.
- How many customers each channel produced.
If you can't fill in line one or two, a bigger budget or a new agency won't fix what follows. The gap is ownership, and it comes before everything else.
From the Desk: read your last three agency reports
One of the first things we ask a new client for is their agency's last three monthly reports. They almost always measure impressions, clicks and posts published, because those are the numbers an agency controls. That isn't bad faith. It's what happens when nobody on the client side defines success in commercial terms. Try it with your own reports this week: if none of them mentions qualified leads or customers, the agency is doing the job it was given, and nobody is doing the job above it.
Owning the plan, the budget and the result is what a Fractional CMO does, for a fraction of a full-time salary. We wrote up how to choose between an agency, a freelancer and a Fractional CMO, including what each costs and what the first 90 days should produce.
Frequently asked questions
Who should own the marketing number in a growing business?
One named person with authority over the plan, the budget and the agency briefs. In founder-led businesses that is often the founder by default. A Fractional CMO is one way to hand it to someone with the time and experience to run it properly.
How do I know if my business has a marketing ownership gap?
If nobody can name last quarter's marketing number (qualified leads, cost per customer or pipeline created), or your agency reports only cover impressions, clicks and posts, the gap is ownership rather than execution.
Get the 90-day plan
If you'd like the 90-day plan we run with clients, reply PLAN or comment PLAN on our LinkedIn post and we'll send it.
Sagar Pratap and the Dizital Connect team
Who Owns Growth? is the Dizital Connect newsletter for founders and leadership teams who want growth they can measure. Previous issue: Issue 1: The Leads You Already Paid For.
