What Board Decks Should Show About Marketing and Growth

What should the marketing section of a board deck show?

It should show five things and one request: cost per customer won, qualified pipeline against target, where new business comes from, payback period, one number that looks ahead, and the decision you need from the board. That is the set McCracken Marketing recommends for a board pack, and its reasoning is that these are the figures a board can act on.

• Lead with three numbers, one line on each, then the decision. Put detail in an appendix.
• Show pipeline, cost per customer won and payback. Skip impressions, followers and engagement rate.
• Apply the 30% test: if a number moved 30% either way and no board decision would change, it is not a board metric.
• State a miss in the first line, with two options and a recommendation.
• Keep the format identical from one meeting to the next.

The two guides this page draws on are a UK fractional marketing firm's advice and a SaaS practitioner's post on Kellblog. Neither shows the data behind its thresholds, so read the numbers in this article as starting points to test against your own board, not as benchmarks.

What does a board want to know about marketing?

A board wants answers to three questions: is the money working, will the pipeline hold up, and what needs deciding. McCracken Marketing frames the marketing section around exactly those three and calls anything that does not help with one of them filler, however interesting it is internally.

Each question maps to a slide in the outline below. The mapping is Kanso's, built from the metrics each guide names.

What does a five-slide marketing outline look like?

It looks like four evidence slides and one decision slide, with an appendix behind them that nobody has to read. The outline below is the part of this page that the two source guides do not give you: they list metrics, and neither lays them out as slides.

How it was put together: the metrics come from McCracken Marketing's five and Kellblog's seven, filtered by the 30% test, and ordered by the board's three questions. The slide headlines are Kanso's suggestion.

Two pages is the ceiling. McCracken Marketing says a marketing section that runs past two pages will be skimmed.

Slide 1: how do you lead with three numbers and a decision?

Lead with three numbers, one line on each, then the decision you need, so a board member who reads only this slide still knows where marketing stands. This is McCracken Marketing's instruction, and it does not say which three numbers to pick.

Kanso's suggestion is one number per board question: cost per customer won for the money, qualified pipeline against target for the pipeline, and the request itself for the decision. If payback is the sharper problem in your business, swap it in for cost per customer won.

three numbers → one line each → the decision → detail in the appendix

Write the headline as a finding, not a label. “Marketing” tells the board nothing, while a sentence that states the three numbers and whether each hit target lets the slide stand alone.

Slide 2: how should the deck show pipeline?

Show qualified pipeline created against target, plus one forward-looking figure. McCracken Marketing prefers value over volume because a board can reason about pipeline that turns into revenue but not about marketing qualified leads, and it picks pipeline coverage of next quarter's target as its example of a number that looks ahead.

Kellblog builds the same slide more precisely. It counts opportunities instead of dollars, shows conversion of that pipeline over a trailing twelve months, and sets a day-one coverage of 3.0x across all pipeline sources, which it argues the marketing lead should own.

Kellblog's conversion measure has a lag built in, because pipeline created this quarter closes over several. Its post gives the pattern for one cohort: about 2% closing in the quarter of creation, 4% in the next and 10% in the one after, with 23% closing eventually. The table recalculates its example, and the last row uses inputs Kanso chose to show what 3.0x means in practice.

Kellblog's post also describes four pipeline sources with a target for each, for example 60% from marketing, 20% from partners, 10% from outbound sales development reps and 10% from sales. If the 3.0x coverage held across that mix, marketing's 60% would be 1.8x of the quarter's target (0.60 × 3.0). That is Kanso's arithmetic on the post's example split, not a figure the post states.

Slide 3: how do you show what growth costs?

Show cost per customer won by channel and the payback period, because together they tell a board whether growth is affordable and how long the cash is out. McCracken Marketing defines the first as the full marketing and sales cost divided by customers actually won, not cost per lead.

Payback is the number of months of gross margin it takes to earn back the cost of winning a customer. The guide calls under twelve months healthy and over eighteen a cash problem that looks like growth, and it says nothing about the range between them.

payback in months = cost to win a customer ÷ gross margin per customer per month

The table runs three sets of invented inputs against those two thresholds. The inputs are Kanso's, chosen only to land in each band.

If you want the formula with each input defined and a longer set of worked cases, Kanso's CAC payback guide for early-stage SaaS covers it. Kellblog offers a different cost view, demand-generation cost per opportunity, and the disagreement section below explains when each fits.

Slide 4: how do you show where new business comes from?

Show the split of new business across referral, inbound, outbound and existing relationships. McCracken Marketing calls it the best single sign of whether marketing is changing the shape of the business or only serving the network the company already had.

This is also the slide where attribution honesty matters most. The guide warns against presenting attribution as precise, because long sales cycles, word of mouth and offline conversations do not track neatly, and a board that later finds the figures were softer than claimed will doubt everything else you show.

Its practical fix is a plain “How did you hear about us?” question at the point of enquiry, checked against tracking data. It says that where the two disagree, the human answer is usually closer to the truth, which is the guide's claim and not a measured result. Consistent tagging of campaign links, covered in Kanso's guide to naming UTM parameters, keeps the tracked half of that comparison usable.

Put both columns on the slide, the tracked source and the self-reported one, and label the gap. A visible disagreement reads as honest, and an unexplained one invites the question the guide is warning about.

Slide 5: how do you present the decision, and a bad quarter?

Present the decision as two options with a recommendation, and if the quarter missed, say so in the first line. McCracken Marketing says boards forgive underperformance that is understood, and do not forgive finding the problem themselves three slides in, because then the question becomes whether they can trust the presenter.

The same guide says a problem on its own reads as a report, while a problem with two options and a recommendation reads as leadership. Kanso's suggested order for a miss is below.

1. State the miss and its size in one sentence, on slide 1.
2. Give the cause in one sentence, with the evidence for it.
3. Offer two options, each with its cost and what it would change.
4. Recommend one and say what you would check next quarter to know it worked.

Steps one to three follow McCracken Marketing's advice in outline. Costing each option and step four, naming the check, are Kanso's additions, so the board can hold the recommendation to a number.

Where do the two guides disagree?

They disagree on how to count pipeline, which cost to show, whether website traffic belongs, and whether awareness does. The table sets the two positions side by side, with Kanso's view on when each fits.

Some of the gap is audience. Kellblog writes for a software company with a sales team running quarterly business reviews, while McCracken Marketing does not tie its list to one business model. A founder with no sales team can use Kellblog's pipeline logic only after deciding what counts as a stage-two opportunity.

Which marketing metrics belong in the appendix?

Metrics that fail the 30% test belong in the appendix or out of the deck: if the number moved 30% either way and no board decision would change, keep it for the operating review. McCracken Marketing names impressions, reach, followers, website sessions on their own, open rates and engagement rate as examples, and calls them noise at board level.

The same logic covers marketing metrics for social media, which is a keyword this page was asked to cover. Likes, shares and follower counts are useful to the person running a channel, and none changes a decision about money.

For the weekly numbers behind these slides, Kanso's article on the marketing metrics a seed-stage founder should review weekly sets out seven that feed this kind of board summary.

How is a board deck different from an investor update?

A board deck is material for a meeting where decisions are made, while an investor update is a written summary sent to people who hold shares. Carta describes an investor update as an overview of company performance, operational milestones, market trends and other recent developments.

The marketing content can be the same few numbers in fewer lines. This is Kanso's reading and not something either marketing guide covers, since neither is about investor updates. In an update, slides 2 to 4 compress to a line each, and slide 5 becomes the specific help you want from investors.

The research for this page did not include a full investor-update guide, so it offers no investor-update template. Carta's own page is the place to start for the format.

How do you keep the marketing section useful over time?

Agree the format once with the chair and keep it the same, because boards read by comparison. McCracken Marketing adds that changing the layout every quarter breaks that comparison and makes it look as if the numbers were chosen to flatter the period.

Two habits follow from it. Write each metric's definition once, on an appendix page, so cost per customer won is calculated the same way every quarter. And give every metric one owner, since Markit Media says shared responsibility for metrics usually means nobody is watching them. Both habits are Kanso's application of the guides, not their stated advice for decks.

Dashboards are a related question. A deck is a meeting document with a fixed length, so the two-page rule and the three-number lead do the work that filtering does on a dashboard.

What is documented and what is Kanso's analysis?

The documented points come from named sources, and the analysis is Kanso's own judgment built on them. The lists keep the two apart.

Documented in the sources:

• McCracken Marketing names five metrics for a board pack (cost per customer won by channel, qualified pipeline created against target, where new business comes from, payback period and one forward-looking number) and lists six categories to leave out.
• McCracken Marketing gives the 30% test, the two-page limit, the advice to state a miss in the first line and the advice to agree one format with the chair.
• McCracken Marketing says under 12 months of payback is healthy and over 18 is a cash problem that looks like growth.
• Kellblog names seven QBR and board metrics and explains pipeline counted by opportunity, time-based close rates, 3.0x day-one coverage and demand-generation cost per opportunity.
• Kellblog's example of 120 opportunities, 24 closed and a 20% trailing twelve month close rate, and its 110 target against 120 generated.
• Carta, in its search description, defines an investor update as an overview of performance, operational milestones, market trends and other recent developments.

Kanso's analysis:

• The five-slide structure, the headline for each slide and the mapping of the board's three questions to slides.
• The choice of which three numbers lead slide 1. McCracken Marketing says to lead with three key numbers but does not name them.
• The disagreement table, and each recommendation for when to use which version of a metric.
• The placement of Kellblog's seven metrics, and of social media metrics, in the appendix.
• The arithmetic: every figure in the worked tables is calculated from the stated inputs, and the coverage and payback inputs are illustrative.
• The suggestion to keep a definitions page in the appendix, and the way an investor update compresses the same slides.

What is not covered: no source here gives data on how many boards use these metrics, what thresholds work in your sector, or what a good coverage ratio is outside Kellblog's 3.0x example. Check the thresholds against your own history and your board's expectations before you rely on them.

Marketing metrics for a board: frequently asked questions

Sources

• Marketing Metrics Your Board Actually Wants to See, McCracken Marketing
• The Top 7 Marketing Metrics for a QBR or Board Meeting, Kellblog
• Marketing Metrics That Board Members Care About, Markit Media
• How to Write an Effective Investor Update | Tips & Templates, Carta