Quick Links
- The One Seat That Keeps Missing Its Rock
- Reason 1: Your Visionary’s Energy Gets Channeled Into Strategic Action
- Reason 2: Your L10 Has a Marketing Update People Care About
- Reason 3: Someone Else Carries the Mental Load
- Reason 4: You Can Hold Someone Accountable to a Result — Not Just a Deliverable
- Reason 5: Marketing Becomes a Fully Functional, Accountable, Productive Department (thank goodness)
- What a Well-Written Marketing Rock Looks Like
- Frequently Asked Questions
The One Seat That Keeps Missing Its Rock
The marketing rock has been in the Issues list for three consecutive quarters. Again.
The marketing rock, unlike every other rock at the table, doesn’t have someone sitting in the seat who owns it at the leadership level. Your team cares. Execution is happening. But nobody shows up to the L10 and says: this is mine, here’s the progress, here’s what’s next.
Every other function in your accountability chart has that person. Operations has it. Finance has it. Sales has it. Marketing has a gap dressed up as a plan. And someone — usually the Integrator — has been quietly managing around it.
Setting a marketing rock isn’t the fix by itself. Putting the right person in the seat to own it is. Here’s what changes when that happens.
A quick note on EOS: the Entrepreneurial Operating System is a business framework used by tens of thousands of companies that structures every function around quarterly priorities (Rocks), weekly measurable metrics (the Scorecard), and a recurring leadership meeting cadence (the L10). If you don’t run on EOS, everything in here still applies — you just call it something different. But if you do run on EOS, this is written specifically for you, in your language, about the one seat in your accountability chart that’s probably still broken.
Reason 1: Your Visionary’s Energy Gets Channeled Into Strategic Action
Every Visionary has marketing ideas. Great ones, half-formed ones, and the ones that get mentioned in the L10 and circled back to in the parking lot and somehow still surface three weeks later in a Slack message to the marketing coordinator. (Sorry Visionaries, but you know it’s true.)
Without a formal Rock-setting process owned by someone with strategic authority, all that energy has nowhere to go except around the system. It creates direction without accountability, and it puts the Integrator in the position of managing the gap between what the Visionary pictured and what actually got executed.
When marketing has a Rock set at the quarterly — by someone who owns the seat and understands the V/TO — the Visionary’s ideas enter through the IDS process like everything else. The ones that connect to the 1-year plan become Rocks with owners and milestones. The rest get parked. Not ignored, not acted on impulsively. Just properly triaged. The Visionary’s energy flows into execution that’s aligned to the 3-year picture instead of generating activity that nobody can trace back to a strategic goal.
The Integrators we work with describe this as one of the first things that shifts when we come into an engagement. Not because anything dramatic changed — but because the marketing conversation finally has a seat at the quarterly table instead of being retrofitted into it afterward.
Side note: if your Visionary’s marketing ideas are consistently bypassing the L10 and landing directly with your marketing team as direction, that’s not a Visionary problem. It’s a structure problem. The Rock is the structure.
Reason 2: Your L10 Has a Marketing Update People Care About
There is a version of the marketing update that happens in a lot of L10s. The marketing person — or whoever inherited the marketing agenda item — reports that the team posted four times this week, open rates are up, and the new landing page is almost ready. The Scorecard metric is blank or says something like “campaigns active.” Everyone nods. (Someone updates their task list. Someone else checks their phone.) Nobody knows if any of that is good or bad or connected to anything the company is trying to accomplish this quarter. The conversation moves on.
That’s not an update. That’s a status report on activity. And every Integrator who has sat through it knows the specific low-grade frustration of a function that won’t yield a number.
When marketing is running on a Rock and a Scorecard metric, the L10 update takes three minutes and leads somewhere. The rock is on track or it isn’t. The metric is green or it goes in the Issues list and gets IDSed right there. No performance theater. No vague “we’re making progress.” Just: here’s the commitment, here’s where we are, here’s what’s blocking it if anything.
We run the Marketing L10 update for several of our fractional CMO clients. We own it. We present it. We IDS it when it’s red. The Integrator doesn’t manage it. That’s the point.
Side note: if your L10 marketing update is currently the one agenda item where the energy in the room goes slightly flat, that’s diagnostic. The problem isn’t the update. It’s that there’s no Rock underneath it.
Reason 3: Someone Else Carries the Mental Load
This one doesn’t show up in any scorecard. But it shows up in every conversation we have with Integrators before they bring us in.
When marketing doesn’t have a seat owner, the mental load of figuring out what marketing should be doing lands on whoever is closest to it. Usually the Integrator. Sometimes the Visionary. Often both. The question of what marketing is working on, whether it’s the right thing, and whether it connects to the goals the company has actually set — that’s a question someone is answering every week, even if the answer is “I don’t know and I should find out.”
Setting a Rock with a real owner transfers that load. When the Rock is set, the owner shows up to the L10 with a status update, not a question. The direction is decided at the quarterly, not improvised at every Tuesday standup. The Integrator’s job becomes reviewing accountability, not providing it.
One of the things we hear most often in the first 30 days of a new engagement is a version of: “I didn’t realize how much time I was spending managing around the marketing gap until it stopped.” That’s not a small thing, honestly. For an Integrator who has built a company that runs on a system, having one function that breaks the system is a specific, persistent frustration. The Rock is what closes it.
Reason 4: You Can Hold Someone Accountable to a Result — Not Just a Deliverable
EOS companies are exceptionally good at holding people accountable to results in every function except marketing. The standard is exactly the same. The Rock just was never written in a way that made accountability possible.
“Improve our digital presence” is not a Rock. It’s a direction. You cannot IDS a direction. You cannot put a direction on a Scorecard. You cannot ask, on day 85, whether a direction was completed. Believe me, people try.
A well-written marketing Rock sounds like: “Launch the updated service page for [product line], run an A/B test on the headline, establish a baseline conversion rate by end of quarter.” Or: “Complete SEO audit of top 10 priority pages and implement title tag updates by [date].” Or: “Run first referral campaign to existing client list, send by [date], report open and response rates at the next quarterly.”
Those aren’t perfect examples — adjust them for your business. But the structure is right. Specific. Owned. Time-bound. Yes or no on day 85.
When the Rock is written that way, the accountability conversation changes completely. You’re not asking whether effort was applied. You’re asking whether the result was achieved. That’s a different conversation — and it’s the one your finance leader has been having with their team for years. Marketing should be no different.
Side note: if your marketing rocks have been consistently written as directions — “improve X,” “grow Y,” “build awareness of Z” — that’s fixable. Rewrite them as deliverables with definitions of done. It changes what accountability means for the function.
Reason 5: Marketing Becomes a Fully Functional, Accountable, Productive Department (thank goodness)
Here’s the company you’re building. Or trying to build: every seat owned, every function accountable, every rock completed, every scorecard metric reviewed and meaningful. The operating system working the way it was designed.
Most EOS companies get there everywhere except marketing. Marketing floats. It’s active — posts are going out, emails are being sent, the vendor is sending reports — but it’s not running on the same operating system as everything else. It doesn’t have a seat owner. Its Scorecard metric is vague or missing. Its Rock keeps landing in the Issues list. The Visionary’s energy around it is uncaptured. And the Integrator is quietly managing around the gap, quarter after quarter.
When marketing has a Rock, a Scorecard metric, an owner who shows up in the L10 to report on it, and a quarterly connection to the V/TO — it stops floating. It becomes legible the same way every other function in your accountability chart is legible. You can see it working. You can hold it accountable to an outcome. You can walk into a quarterly and know whether marketing moved the business forward in the last 90 days.
That’s the difference between marketing being the one function that operates by different rules than everything else — and marketing finally running on EOS.
We wrote about what it looks like when marketing can’t join your L10 and why the vendor model almost always creates that gap. This is the fix.
What a Well-Written Marketing Rock Looks Like
For reference, here’s the difference between a direction and a Rock:
Not a Rock: “Improve our website.” “Grow our social media presence.” “Build brand awareness.”
A Rock: “Audit top 10 website pages, implement title and meta updates, establish organic traffic baseline by [date].” “Publish 8 blog posts to Advice Hub series, submit all to Google Search Console, report keyword movement at next quarterly.” “Run first referral outreach to existing client list — send by [date], report open rate and booked calls at next L10.”
The test: can you answer yes or no on day 85? If the answer requires a conversation to evaluate, it was written as a direction. Directions are useful. They’re not accountable. Rocks are accountable. Big difference.
If your marketing Rocks have been missing, incomplete, or written too broadly for two or more consecutive quarters, that’s usually one of three things: the Rock wasn’t written specifically enough, too many Rocks were set, or the person accountable isn’t operating at the leadership level the seat requires. All three are fixable. Start here and we’ll walk through what the marketing seat actually needs to run.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the difference between a marketing Rock and a marketing task? A task gets done in a day or a week. A Rock is a 90-day commitment significant enough that completing it moves the business forward in a meaningful way. Writing a blog post is a task. Building and launching a content system that produces consistent inbound leads is a Rock. If you’re setting tasks as Rocks, the quarterly will always feel like marketing is behind — because you’re measuring the wrong unit of work.
Who should own the marketing Rock? Whoever owns the marketing seat at the leadership level. Not the marketing coordinator. Not the social media vendor. Not the Integrator by default. The person who sits in the marketing seat on your Accountability Chart and shows up in the L10 to report on it. If that person doesn’t exist yet in your org, that’s the issue to IDS — not the Rock itself.
What Scorecard metric should marketing track? It depends on your stage and your goals, but marketing KPIs should operate like headlights — illuminating the road ahead rather than decorating the dashboard. For most EOS companies we work with, we start with one or two metrics that connect directly to revenue: qualified leads generated, website conversion rate, or email-attributed pipeline. Impressions and follower counts are not Scorecard metrics. They’re activity reports.
Our marketing Rock keeps landing in the Issues list every quarter. What’s wrong? That’s a signal worth IDSing properly. Is the Rock written too broadly? Are too many Rocks being set for the seat? Or — most commonly — is the person accountable not operating at the leadership level the seat requires? A fractional CMO owns the Rock at the leadership level and shows up in the L10 with progress to report, not reasons it didn’t happen.
We’re an EOS company but our marketing vendor isn’t in our L10. Is that a problem? It’s the most common structural gap we see. A vendor can’t own a Rock — they can support one, but ownership requires someone who sits inside your operating calendar, attends your L10, and is accountable to your leadership team the same way your Director of Ops is. If your marketing update is being delivered by someone who’s not in the room, the update will always feel thin. We wrote about this specifically here.
Where does marketing strategy connect to the V/TO? Your 3-year picture should include your market position and growth goals. Your 1-year plan should include the marketing milestones that support those targets. Your quarterly Rocks should be the specific work that moves you toward the 1-year. If those three layers aren’t explicitly connected, marketing is operating in a vacuum even if it’s technically inside an EOS structure. That vertical connection — from V/TO to Scorecard to weekly deliverable — is one of the core things we build in the first 90 days of a new engagement. You can also read more about how to build an EOS marketing plan that actually connects to the system.
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