Quick Links:
- What Happens in an L10 (and Why It Matters for Marketing)
- Why Vendors Can’t Show Up To Your Leadership Meetings
- What a Fractional CMO Does Differently
- The Cost of Keeping Marketing Outside the Leadership Conversation
- What Marketing Traction Looks Like Inside an EOS Company
- If Marketing Feels Like the Missing Piece… It Probably Is
At the beginning of our Fractional CMO engagement with HSP Diesel, their Director of Operations sent an email that said everything this blog is about to explain. Jon wrote: “I’d love to be more connected with the marketing/sales rhythm the same way I am with our manufacturing team. I lead daily huddles, Level 10s, all the stuff for our manufacturing team. I want you guys to own marketing, but I don’t want to be hands-off to the point where I’m disconnected.”
Jon wasn’t complaining about deliverables. The vendor was doing fine work. But marketing still felt like it belonged to a different company, operating on a different rhythm, answering to a different system. He could see every manufacturing metric at a glance, IDS problems in real time, and track rocks through completion. Marketing was a black box.
If you’re running on EOS and your marketing strategy feels like the weakest link in an otherwise tight operation, this is probably why. The issue isn’t that your vendor lacks skills or experience. The vendor model itself can’t solve a leadership problem. Vendors aren’t built to lead, they’re built to execute. And if marketing isn’t represented in the room where strategy lives, it will always lag behind the rest of your business.
What Happens in an L10 (and Why It Matters for Marketing)
For anyone not fluent in EOS, a Level 10 meeting (L10) is the weekly leadership meeting that keeps the business on track. It follows a consistent agenda: segue and good news, review the Scorecard (the handful of weekly numbers that matter), check in on Rocks (your quarterly priorities), share headlines, update the to-do list, and then use IDS (Identify, Discuss, Solve) to work through whatever’s red or stuck.
The L10 keeps accountability front and center. You see problems early, solve them at the root, and make sure the plan you agreed on in your quarterly meeting is really happening. When sales has a seat in that room, you know if the pipeline is on track. When operations has a seat, you know if delivery is on schedule. When finance has a seat, you know if cash flow is healthy.
But when marketing doesn’t have a seat? You get reports after the fact, vague reassurances that things are “on track,” and no real way to know if marketing is moving you closer to your goals or just checking boxes. That’s the structural gap Jon was naming. He had visibility into manufacturing because he owned that seat. Marketing had historically been outsourced, which meant it was also out of sight.
Why Vendors Can’t Show Up To Your Leadership Meetings
Marketing vendors operate on a deliverable model. You hire them to execute a scope of work, they send you reports and assets, and you pay the invoice. That works fine for production tasks, but it breaks down completely when you try to integrate it into a leadership cadence.
The problem isn’t that vendors are bad at what they do. Most are perfectly competent. But asking a vendor to join your L10 is like asking your landscaper to weigh in on your capital allocation strategy. They’re great at mowing the lawn, but they’re not equipped to tell you whether you should expand into a new market or double down on retention. Different job entirely.
Vendors don’t have context. They know what you told them in the kickoff meeting and what’s in the creative brief, but they don’t know what happened in your quarterly planning session, what your Integrator is worried about, or why sales suddenly pivoted to focus on a different segment. They’re working from instructions, not insight. And you can’t IDS a marketing problem if you don’t know what the rest of the business is trying to solve.
They also don’t own the outcome. Vendors are accountable for deliverables, not results. They’ll tell you the email sent, the ads are running, and the content is live. But whether those things moved the business forward? That’s not their job, because it requires knowing what the business is trying to do and how all the pieces connect. That’s leadership work.
And here’s the structural issue that doesn’t get talked about enough: vendors aren’t built to operate inside your system. EOS companies run on Rocks, Scorecards, and IDS. Vendors run on scopes, timelines, and change orders (and let’s be honest, a lot of “can we hop on a quick call?” emails). Those rhythms don’t sync. A vendor can’t own a marketing Rock because they weren’t in the room when Rocks got set. They can’t track a Scorecard metric because they’re not in the L10 where it gets reviewed weekly. And they definitely can’t IDS a problem in real time when they’re usually finding out about it three days later via a forwarded email thread with seventeen people cc’d.
This isn’t vendor-bashing, we love our vendors. Many of them do excellent work and we consider them valuable resources. But execution without leadership creates exactly that disconnect – marketing happening somewhere else, managed by someone else, tied to goals that may or may not line up with what the business needs right now.
What a Fractional CMO Does Differently
A fractional CMO isn’t a vendor with a fancier title. When companies compare fractional CMO vs agency options, they’re really choosing between leadership and execution. It’s a different model entirely. We take the marketing seat at your leadership table, which means we show up the same way your Integrator, your head of sales, and your operations lead show up: with ownership, context, and accountability for outcomes.
When we work with EOS companies, we’re in the room when priorities shift. We’re not getting a recap three days later or piecing together what happened from a forwarded email.
We join your L10s as participants. We update our Scorecard metrics, report on marketing Rocks, and IDS problems right there with the rest of the leadership team. When Jon told us he wanted marketing to run on the same rhythm as his manufacturing team, the answer was immediate: you’re in the Marketing L10 now and please invite us to the leadership L10 – we’re happy to join. Marketing started operating with the same visibility and accountability as every other function.
We own Rocks. When we work with clients who run on EOS like Veit Tool, Manson Reamers, or Michael Andrews Bespoke, we’re accountable for getting our quarterly commitments done the same way any other leadership team member is accountable for their area. If a Rock is off track, we’re explaining why in the L10 and IDS-ing a solution.
We also help figure out what should actually be on the Scorecard for marketing. Most companies are drowning in numbers that don’t tell them anything useful. We help strip it down to the three to five metrics that actually matter week to week. When something goes red, we IDS it in the moment instead of letting it sit.
And because we run on EOS ourselves (with a formal implementer, not the “we read the book once” version), we already speak the language. We’re talking about Rocks, Scorecards, and IDS because that’s how we run our own business. No translation required. BTW, Our EOS Implementer is Jason McCullough and he is the best. You should hire him.
This is what marketing team alignment looks like when someone owns the seat.
The Cost of Keeping Marketing Outside the Leadership Conversation
When marketing doesn’t have a seat at the L10, a few predictable things happen.
Priorities drift. Without someone in the room when leadership sets the quarterly plan, marketing keeps working on whatever was decided three months ago. The business pivots, but marketing doesn’t, because nobody told them the context changed.
Execution and strategy split. You’ve got a beautifully designed strategy deck gathering digital dust in Google Drive and a vendor churning out content that may or may not connect to it. Nobody owns the bridge between the two, so the gap just keeps getting wider until someone finally asks “wait, why are we doing this again?”
Problems surface late. If marketing only reports monthly, you’re finding out about issues 30 days after they started. By the time you IDS it, you’ve already lost a month of momentum and probably spent money on something that wasn’t working.
The rest of the team compensates. This is what happened at Veit Tool. They’re a precision tool manufacturer with a tight operation, but when we started working with them, non-sales employees were doing cold calling to fill the gap. Why? Because there was no coordinated handoff between marketing and sales. Marketing was generating activity, but it wasn’t aligned to the same target list, the same cadence, or the same goals that sales was working from. So people stepped in to cover what marketing should have been doing, which meant everyone’s job got harder.
Side note so that you know we’re not vendor-bashing over here. We helped Veit hire a great outsourced sales agency to solve their “who is going to do sales” problem. We manage that vendor closely and think they’re great. So great that we’ve recommended them to other clients in the same situation.
That’s the thing about keeping marketing outside the leadership conversation. It doesn’t just mean marketing underperforms. It means the whole system works less efficiently because one function is operating in a silo while everyone else is trying to stay coordinated.
What Marketing Traction Looks Like Inside an EOS Company
When marketing finally has a seat in the L10 room, a few things shift immediately.
You stop getting retrospective reports and start getting real-time accountability. Instead of a recap of what happened last month, you’re reviewing what’s on track this week and IDSing what isn’t. Marketing starts operating on the same rhythm as the rest of the business, which means problems get solved before they turn into bigger problems.
Marketing Rocks get completed. When someone owns the Rock and reports on it weekly in the L10, it doesn’t slip through the cracks. Progress is visible, blockers get solved in real time, and the team knows marketing is moving forward with the same discipline as every other function.
The Scorecard finally includes marketing in a way that makes sense. Instead of a separate dashboard living in some other tool that nobody looks at, marketing metrics sit right alongside sales, operations, and finance. Leadership can see at a glance whether marketing is contributing to traction or needs attention.
Sales and marketing stop operating like they work for different companies. When both functions are in the same L10, they’re solving handoff problems together, aligning on target accounts, and building a system instead of playing telephone. This is what we helped fix at Veit Tool: getting marketing and sales working from the same strategic target list, same touchpoint rhythm, same goals. That kind of coordination doesn’t happen through “better communication.” It happens because both teams are in the room where decisions get made.
One of our clients, Michael Andrews Bespoke, operates this way. As their Fractional CMO, we run the Marketing L10. Collectively, we assign tasks, comment on priorities, and track referral metrics directly inside the marketing L10. We co-own the work with them, which means they have full visibility into what’s happening and why, and we have full context on what the business needs. That’s what a fractional CMO partnership looks like when it’s working.
If Marketing Feels Like the Missing Piece… It Probably Is
If you’re running on EOS and marketing is the one area where traction still feels out of reach, you’re dealing with a leadership gap, not a vendor problem.
You don’t need another agency promising better results with the same deliverable model. You need someone who can sit in the L10 room, own the marketing seat, and make sure marketing is moving the business forward with the same accountability and clarity as every other function.
That’s what a fractional CMO does. We’re the marketing leader you’ve been missing.
Want to talk about what that could look like for your business? Let’s chat.
Read the Comments +