Scale. Fix. Cut. Investigate. Nothing else.
Category: Four Decisions
Your Monday marketing meeting should end with one of four verdicts per channel. If it ends with "let's pull more data" or "we'll revisit this next month," that's not a decision — it's a delay. Here's how to replace the drift with a system.
Scale
Trigger: cost-per-booked-job is dropping or stable for two consecutive weeks AND you have capacity to absorb more booked work AND no quality complaints are coming in from techs on job difficulty or parts availability. Action: increase budget by 20%. Set a calendar reminder to review in seven days. Don't wait a month — at 20% higher spend you'll know in a week whether the gain held or was noise. Owner: whoever manages the budget approves the increase; the CMO or marketing lead executes.
Fix
Trigger: cost-per-booked-job is rising for two consecutive weeks, but the channel is still producing booked jobs. Action: stop the budget from increasing, assign a fix owner with a named hypothesis (response time? CSR script? landing page? offer?), and set a 14-day fix window with a defined outcome metric. If the metric doesn't move in 14 days, the verdict becomes Cut. Owner: the fix owner is one specific person, not "the team." If nobody owns it, it won't get fixed.
Cut
Trigger: 60 days of underperformance with no fix path tested, or a fix path was tested and failed. Action: reduce spend to zero. Redeploy the budget to the next-best performing channel — don't let it sit unallocated. The money doesn't retire; it moves. Owner: the CMO or decision-maker executes the cut and documents the reason so the channel doesn't quietly come back to the budget six months later.
Investigate
Trigger: numbers don't reconcile across systems — CRM lead count vs. ad platform lead count vs. agency report disagree by more than 5%. Action: freeze all budget decisions for this channel until reconciled. Set a 7-day investigation window. Identify which system has the source of truth and audit the others against it. Action on bad data will always make things worse. Owner: whoever manages the CRM and the channel reporting jointly owns the reconciliation.
These four decisions cover every scenario that will come up in a weekly marketing review. Anything that isn't one of these four — "let's think about it," "we should monitor this," "the agency is optimizing" — is a delay tactic in better clothing.