Most marketing audit checklists are tactical busywork. They ask you to verify that your meta descriptions are filled in. That's fine. It also has roughly zero to do with whether your pipeline is going to grow next quarter.
This checklist is different. It's built for founder-led B2B companies in the $5M to $20M range. It examines the things that actually move revenue: positioning, the homepage, content, lead gen, sales-marketing handoff, and brand consistency. The questions are binary. Yes or no. No "kind of."
Print it. Walk through it with two coffees. If you get more than seven nos, you have a real audit problem and the next question is what to do about it.
How to use this checklist
Score yourself honestly. The point isn't to score 35 yeses. The point is to find the three or four areas where the answer is no and the fix is high-leverage. Most B2B companies have predictable patterns. Positioning is fuzzy. The homepage is generic. The handoff between marketing and sales is broken. The brand sounds like five different companies. Knowing which one applies to you is half the work.
When you're done, you'll have a one-page summary of where the bottleneck actually is. That tells you what to fix next.
Section 1: Positioning (the upstream work)
This is the section most checklists skip. It's also the section that matters most. If positioning is fuzzy, every fix downstream is shoveling sand against the tide.
- [ ] Your sales reps can each describe in 30 seconds who you serve, what problem you solve, and why you're the obvious choice.
- [ ] All your sales reps say roughly the same thing when they describe the company.
- [ ] Your value proposition includes a specific buyer (a title, a team, a moment), not a generic "businesses."
- [ ] You can name three companies you are not for, and why.
- [ ] Your team can articulate what your closest competitor does better than you, without flinching.
- [ ] You've talked to at least five customers in the last six months about why they actually chose you.
If you got three or more nos in this section, stop. Nothing downstream gets fixed until this gets fixed. This is the positioning problem most founder-led B2B companies hit at $5M to $20M and try to solve with more marketing spend. More spend on a fuzzy message just buys more confusion.
Section 2: Website and homepage
The homepage is your most expensive page. Buyers judge the whole company by it in about ten seconds. Most B2B homepages fail that test because they lead with abstract noun stacks instead of saying what they do.
- [ ] Your homepage headline says something a competitor couldn't also claim by swapping their logo onto your page.
- [ ] The headline includes the specific buyer or use case, not just "businesses" or "teams."
- [ ] A first-time visitor can tell what you do and who you do it for within ten seconds.
- [ ] The hero section avoids the banned generic words ("innovative," "robust," "end-to-end," "AI-powered," "all-in-one").
- [ ] There is one primary CTA above the fold, not three.
- [ ] The About page tells a story a buyer would actually read, not a wall of mission and values.
- [ ] The pricing page exists (yes, even if you don't publish numbers, the page exists with the model explained).
- [ ] At least one customer-facing page features a specific named buyer with a specific outcome, not "our customers love us."
The website section is where most audits stop. It's also where most audits should start, because the homepage is the artifact every other channel sends traffic to. A great campaign that drives traffic to a confused homepage is just expensive churn.
Section 3: Content and SEO
Most B2B content is written for SEO ghosts. Generic posts on generic topics that rank for nothing and convert nobody. The audit question isn't how much you've published. It's whether any of it would help a buyer in your ICP make their decision.
- [ ] You can name three pieces of content from the last year that a real prospect actually read before booking a call.
- [ ] Your blog posts are written for a specific buyer, not for a generic audience.
- [ ] At least one of your content pieces takes an opinionated position a competitor wouldn't dare publish.
- [ ] Your content production has been consistent (at least monthly) for the last 12 months, not bursty.
- [ ] You can name the three keywords or topics you're trying to own, and they are specific to your category.
- [ ] You measure content by qualified meetings booked, not just by traffic.
Content consistency beats content campaigns. The compounding effect of showing up every week is invisible for four months and then becomes the most reliable lead source you have. Most B2B teams quit at month three.
Section 4: Lead generation and funnel
This is the path from first visit to booked meeting. If you can't trace it, you can't fix it.
- [ ] You know your top three traffic sources by volume and by qualified meetings booked.
- [ ] You know your conversion rate from website visit to demo or call request.
- [ ] You have a primary lead-capture mechanism that is not a gated PDF nobody reads.
- [ ] When a lead fills out the form, the response goes out within one business hour.
- [ ] You can name the channel where your best customers actually came from, with evidence.
- [ ] You don't rely on a single channel for more than 60% of pipeline.
Most B2B founders overestimate the number of channels they need and underestimate the consistency required to make one work. Pick the right two for your buyer, run them well, ignore the rest.
Section 5: Sales and marketing alignment
The handoff is where deals leak. Marketing reports green. Sales says the leads are garbage. Both are partly right and the gap kills pipeline.
- [ ] Sales and marketing share a single definition of a qualified lead.
- [ ] Sales gives marketing structured feedback on lead quality at least monthly.
- [ ] Marketing knows the win rate on the leads it sources.
- [ ] The sales team has been trained on the current positioning, not the positioning from two years ago.
- [ ] Sales-facing collateral (deck, one-pager, email templates) tells the same story as the website.
- [ ] The CRM is clean enough that you can answer "where did the last 10 closed-won deals come from."
If you missed half of these, marketing and sales are working in different countries and the seam between them is leaking deals.
Section 6: Brand consistency
The website says one thing. The deck says another. LinkedIn says a third. Each sales rep has their own version. The buyer hears five companies and trusts none of them.
- [ ] The homepage headline, the deck cover slide, and the LinkedIn company tagline say roughly the same thing.
- [ ] The voice on the blog matches the voice in sales emails.
- [ ] Your team uses the same one-line description of the company in their LinkedIn bios.
- [ ] A new hire could be onboarded onto your positioning in under 30 minutes from a single doc.
Brand consistency isn't a logo problem. It's a story discipline problem. The fix is upstream: write the story once, make it the source of truth, hold the team to it.
Scoring the audit
Count your yeses out of 35.
- 28 or more: Your marketing infrastructure is in good shape. The bottleneck is probably execution capacity, not the story. Look at whether you have the right team and channel mix.
- 20 to 27: You have a story-and-system problem. Fix the positioning and the homepage first, then tighten the handoff with sales.
- 12 to 19: This is where most founder-led B2B companies in the $5M to $20M range actually score. The story is fuzzy and everything downstream is paying the price.
- Under 12: You're past the point where a fractional CMO or another agency will help. The work that needs to happen is upstream of any program.
The honest answer for most companies that take this audit is somewhere in the second or third tier. That's not bad news. It's a clear signal about where the highest-leverage fix is.
Or get the audit done for you in 90 seconds
If walking through 35 questions on a Friday afternoon isn't on your list, you can get an AI-generated audit of your website, messaging, and positioning at /audit. It takes about 90 seconds. You paste your URL and it returns an honest read on the same things this checklist covers.
If the audit confirms that positioning is the real bottleneck, the Pipeline Story Sprint is the structured fix. Ninety days, fixed scope, you get the story sharpened and the three pages buyers actually read.
For the longer read on what a real marketing audit examines and why most of them miss the mark, see the full guide to running a marketing audit.
