10 Fixes: What Every New VP Marketing Should Fix in Their First 30 Days

Stepping into the VP of Marketing role is a career-defining moment, but the first month is a high-stakes sprint where pressure mounts to listen, learn, and lead-all while demonstrating immediate value. Success in this initial phase is not defined by launching a massive, disruptive campaign on day one. Instead, it requires a methodical, strategic approach to diagnosing the health of the marketing function and making targeted fixes that build critical momentum. The actions you take now will set the tone for your tenure, build trust with leadership, and establish your credibility across the organization.

This guide provides a prioritized, actionable checklist designed to move beyond generic advice. We will detail precisely what every new VP Marketing should fix in their first 30 days, focusing on immediate impact and long-term stability. You will learn how to audit your team and tech stack, align with key stakeholders like Sales and Finance, and reallocate budget for maximum effect. This is not just a list of tasks; it's a comprehensive playbook for turning a critical transition period into a launchpad for scalable, sustainable growth.

We will cover the specific, tactical steps required to:

• Assess team capabilities and restructure for performance.
• Establish clear, business-aligned KPIs and reporting cadences.
• Audit the campaign backlog and tech stack to eliminate waste.
• Secure quick wins that demonstrate your strategic value.
• Build a foundational 90-day plan that aligns marketing efforts with company objectives.

By following this blueprint, you will move from analysis to action quickly, ensuring your first month is spent building a robust foundation for the future rather than simply observing from the sidelines.

1. Audit Existing Marketing Stack and Tools

Your marketing technology stack is the engine powering your team's execution, but it can quickly become bloated, inefficient, and costly if left unchecked. One of the most impactful things a new VP Marketing should fix in their first 30 days is conducting a comprehensive audit of all marketing tools. This process involves a deep dive into every platform, license, and subscription to evaluate its true value, usage, and integration within the broader ecosystem. The goal is to identify redundancies, slash budget waste, and ensure your team is equipped with the right tools, not just more tools.

This audit reveals immediate opportunities for optimization. For instance, a new VP might discover the company pays for three separate email marketing platforms when one centralized solution would save over $50,000 annually. Another common finding is a high-cost analytics tool, perhaps $20,000 per year, that is actively used by only one or two people on the team. These discoveries represent quick wins that can fund more strategic initiatives.

How to Conduct a Martech Audit

To kickstart your audit, create a centralized inventory. This can be a simple spreadsheet that documents every tool, its annual cost, the renewal date, the primary owner, and the number of active users. Beyond merely listing tools, a new VP Marketing should delve deeper into how to evaluate your existing martech stack against industry benchmarks and strategic needs.

Follow these actionable steps:

• Interview Power Users: Schedule brief 15-minute chats with the primary users of each significant tool. Ask them about pain points, wish-list features, and how the tool contributes to their goals.
• Review Invoices: Don't rely solely on what people remember. Scrutinize the past 12 months of invoices from finance to get a complete and accurate picture of all technology-related expenditures.
• Analyze Usage Data: Log into the admin panels of your major platforms. Check the user activity logs to see who is actually using the software and how frequently. This data separates perceived value from actual utility.

A thorough audit not only trims unnecessary expenses but also streamlines workflows, improves data consistency, and ensures your team's digital tools are effectively managed. For more insights on organizing your resources, explore this guide on streamlining marketing asset management.

2. Establish Clear Communication with Sales Leadership

The relationship between marketing and sales is the lifeblood of revenue generation. As a new VP of Marketing, one of the most critical things to fix in your first 30 days is establishing a strong, collaborative partnership with sales leadership. This foundational alignment ensures marketing efforts are directly tied to revenue goals, lead quality improves, and the entire go-to-market engine operates smoothly. The goal is to move beyond siloed functions and create a unified "smarketing" powerhouse focused on shared success.

This alignment delivers immediate and measurable results. Companies like HubSpot and Salesforce have long championed this integrated approach, with studies from Marketo showing that tightly aligned teams achieve 67% higher MQL-to-customer win rates. A new VP might quickly discover that sales discards 50% of marketing-generated leads due to perceived low quality. By collaborating on a shared definition of a qualified lead, you can dramatically increase pipeline velocity and prove marketing's direct contribution to the bottom line.

How to Build Sales and Marketing Alignment

Building this partnership requires proactive, consistent, and structured communication from day one. It’s about moving from occasional, problem-driven interactions to a regular, strategic cadence. A new VP Marketing should treat their sales counterpart as their most important internal customer, actively seeking their feedback and understanding their challenges.

Follow these actionable steps:

• Schedule a Weekly Sync: Book a recurring 30-minute meeting with the VP of Sales or CRO. Make this meeting non-negotiable and use it to review pipeline health, lead quality, and campaign performance.
• Ask the Right Questions: Go into your initial meetings with a learning mindset. Ask pointed questions like, "What are your team's top 3 pipeline challenges right now?" and "What does an ideal, sales-ready lead look like to you?"
• Attend Sales Meetings: Join the weekly sales team huddle as an observer. This is the fastest way to understand their language, daily pressures, and objections they face, providing invaluable context for your marketing strategies.

A robust sales-marketing relationship not only boosts revenue but also improves team morale and operational efficiency. To further enhance these connections, explore new ways of using video for better internal communication.

3. Review and Realign Marketing Budget Allocation

A new VP Marketing often inherits a budget built on historical precedent rather than current performance and strategic priorities. One of the most critical fixes in the first 30 days is to challenge this status quo by conducting a thorough review of budget allocation. This process involves scrutinizing how funds are distributed across every channel, campaign, and initiative to ensure spending is directly tied to revenue impact and data-driven insights, not just "the way it's always been done."

This analysis frequently reveals major misalignment between spending and results. For example, a new leader might discover that paid search generates five times the qualified leads as event marketing but receives only a third of the budget. Another common finding is a significant portion of the budget allocated to traditional print advertising when programmatic display campaigns are delivering a demonstrably superior return on investment. Identifying these gaps creates immediate opportunities to reallocate funds for a powerful impact on the bottom line.

How to Realign Your Marketing Budget

To begin this review, you must ground your analysis in hard data. Move beyond anecdotal evidence and create a clear financial picture that connects every dollar spent to a tangible business outcome. This data-driven approach is essential for making defensible decisions and demonstrating early value to the executive team.

Follow these actionable steps:

• Gather Financial Data: Request the last 12 months of marketing spend from the finance department, organized by channel and campaign. Simultaneously, pull performance data (leads, MQLs, opportunities, revenue) from your CRM and analytics platforms for the same period.
• Calculate Channel ROI: Create a simple spreadsheet to map spending against outcomes. Use columns for Channel, Total Spend, Revenue Impact (or leads/MQLs if attribution is immature), and calculate a basic ROI for each. This visualization will quickly highlight top and bottom performers.
• Identify Quick Wins: Pinpoint 2-3 of the most glaring misallocations. Present these findings to your team and stakeholders as opportunities for optimization, not as criticisms of past decisions. For instance, shifting a portion of a high-cost, low-return trade show budget to high-intent video marketing can be a straightforward win.

A well-aligned budget ensures that financial resources are fueling growth, not just activity. For deeper insights into measuring the effectiveness of specific initiatives, you can calculate the ROI of your video marketing efforts.

4. Create a 90-Day Marketing Strategy and Roadmap

While the first 30 days are about listening and learning, you must quickly translate those insights into a clear, actionable plan. One of the most critical fixes a new VP Marketing can implement is creating a documented 90-day marketing strategy and roadmap. This document serves as a North Star for your team, aligning everyone around a core set of priorities, key initiatives, and measurable success metrics. It moves the department from reactive, scattered efforts to proactive, strategic execution.

This plan demonstrates decisive leadership and provides immediate direction. For instance, a new VP might inherit a team trying to execute ten different major initiatives at once with limited resources. The 90-day plan forces a ruthless prioritization, perhaps focusing all energy on just three high-impact areas, such as revitalizing demand generation and launching a new customer case study program. This focus prevents burnout and ensures meaningful progress on goals that matter to the business.

How to Build Your 90-Day Roadmap

The foundation of your strategy should be built on the data and conversations from your first few weeks, not on preconceived notions. It must connect directly to overarching company objectives like revenue growth, market expansion, or customer retention. This is a key step in learning how to effectively implement your marketing strategy and get buy-in from leadership.

Follow these actionable steps:

• Interview Key Stakeholders: Sit down with the CEO, Head of Sales, Head of Product, and other key leaders. Ask them what marketing success looks like in the next quarter.
• Limit Your Priorities: A plan with ten priorities is a plan with no priorities. Select just 3-4 major strategic initiatives to focus on for the next 90 days.
• Define Success Metrics: For each initiative, define both leading indicators (e.g., website traffic, content downloads) and lagging indicators (e.g., pipeline generated, new customers).
• Share and Solicit Feedback: Present a draft of your roadmap to your CEO and executive peers. Incorporate their feedback to ensure your plan is fully aligned before rolling it out to your team.

A well-crafted 90-day plan not only guides your team but also manages expectations across the organization. It establishes you as a strategic leader who can translate business goals into a concrete marketing execution plan.

5. Conduct Marketing Team Assessment and Capability Audit

Your marketing team is your single most valuable asset, and understanding its strengths, weaknesses, and potential is a critical task for any new VP Marketing in their first 30 days. Conducting a comprehensive team and capability audit goes beyond reviewing org charts. It involves a qualitative assessment of individual skills, career aspirations, team dynamics, and overall alignment with the company's strategic goals. The objective is to identify talent, pinpoint skill gaps, and ensure the right people are in the right roles.

This process often uncovers immediate opportunities to boost morale and output. For instance, a new VP might find a product marketing manager with exceptional data analysis skills being underutilized in event planning, or discover that critical institutional knowledge about a key channel is held by a single person with no documentation, posing a significant risk. These insights allow for quick, impactful adjustments that demonstrate your commitment to the team's growth and effectiveness.

How to Assess Your Team's Capabilities

To begin your assessment, prioritize one-on-one conversations. These meetings are your primary tool for gathering honest feedback and building rapport. Your goal is to understand each person's role, motivations, frustrations, and potential. This groundwork is essential before considering any changes and helps you explore how to build an effective marketing department structure that leverages existing talent.

Follow these actionable steps:

• Schedule 1-on-1s: Set up 30-45 minute informal meetings with every direct and indirect report within your first two weeks. Be clear that the goal is to listen and learn.
• Ask Open-Ended Questions: Use prompts like, "What part of your work are you most excited about?", "What roadblocks are slowing you down?", and "If you had a magic wand, what's one thing you would change about our marketing?"
• Create a Skills Matrix: During these conversations, discreetly map out each team member's skills, expertise, and interests in a simple spreadsheet. This visual tool will help you identify both strengths and gaps across the entire department.
• Observe Team Dynamics: Pay close attention to how the team collaborates in meetings. Note who speaks up, who defers to others, and the overall communication flow. This provides context that individual conversations might miss.

A thorough team audit not only informs future hiring and training decisions but also builds trust and psychological safety. It shows your new team that you value their individual contributions and are invested in their professional development.

6. Establish Marketing and Finance Partnership for Reporting

Nothing derails a new VP Marketing's credibility faster than a disconnect with the finance department. To secure budget and prove value, your numbers must align with their numbers. Establishing a strong partnership with the CFO or finance team within your first 30 days is a critical fix to ensure marketing's impact is understood, trusted, and measured in terms of business revenue, not just vanity metrics. This alignment transforms marketing from a cost center into a documented revenue driver.

This strategic relationship is built on a shared understanding of success metrics. For example, a new VP might find that marketing has been reporting on Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), while finance only cares about Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Lifetime Value (LTV). By working together, they can transition to reporting on pipeline influence and CAC payback periods, metrics that directly tie marketing efforts to financial outcomes and resonate with the executive team and board.

How to Build the Marketing-Finance Alliance

The first step is initiating a conversation to understand finance's perspective. It’s not about imposing your preferred metrics; it's about co-creating a reporting framework that satisfies both teams and accurately reflects marketing's contribution. This proactive collaboration builds trust and solidifies your role as a strategic business partner.

Follow these actionable steps:

• Schedule a Meeting: Get a meeting on the CFO’s calendar within your first two weeks. Come prepared to listen, not to present. Ask questions like, "What are the most important business metrics you track?" and "How do you currently view marketing's financial impact?"
• Agree on Definitions: Work together to create a single, documented source of truth for key terms. Formally define what constitutes an MQL, a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), and how you will calculate CAC and LTV. This prevents future misinterpretations.
• Co-Develop a Dashboard: Propose a shared dashboard with a handful of key metrics that both teams can view weekly. This could include metrics like Pipeline Sourced by Marketing, Marketing Contribution to Revenue, and CAC Payback Period.
• Start Conservatively: When forecasting, it's always better to under-promise and over-deliver. Use conservative estimates in your initial reports to finance to build a track record of reliability and credibility from the outset.

7. Document Customer Insights and Competitive Intelligence

A marketing strategy built without a deep understanding of the customer is just guesswork. One of the most critical foundational tasks a new VP Marketing should fix is to immediately compile and organize all existing customer insights and competitive intelligence. This process involves gathering scattered data from customer interviews, market research, sales notes, and support tickets to build a centralized source of truth. The objective is to quickly grasp market positioning, core customer pain points, and messaging priorities without starting from zero.

This consolidation of knowledge prevents the team from relearning expensive lessons and accelerates strategic alignment. For instance, Slack discovered its core value proposition was not replacing email but offering superior integration and user experience after analyzing early user feedback. Similarly, Salesforce shifted its focus to simplicity after lost deal analysis revealed a competitor was winning on ease of use. These insights become the bedrock of effective campaigns and product marketing.

How to Systematize Your Insights

To begin, create a central repository, such as a shared document or wiki page, to house all findings. The goal is to make customer and competitor data accessible to the entire team, not just locked away in individual inboxes or notebooks. Beyond just collecting raw data, a new VP Marketing must prioritize effectively analyzing customer feedback to uncover actionable insights and inform strategic decisions.

Follow these actionable steps:

• Request Past Research: Ask for all customer interview recordings, survey results, and lost deal analysis from the sales and product teams from the last 12 months.
• Conduct Your Own Interviews: Schedule and conduct 10-15 interviews with current customers yourself. This first-hand experience is invaluable for building empathy and conviction.
• Create a Competitive Matrix: Document key competitors, their primary messaging, target audience, and perceived strengths and weaknesses in a simple matrix for easy reference.
• Meet with Sales: Schedule lunch-and-learns with the sales team to hear their unfiltered perspectives on customer objections, competitive threats, and what truly resonates in the market.

8. Define Clear Marketing-to-Business Metrics and Success Criteria

Impressions, likes, and website traffic are interesting, but they don't pay the bills. One of the most critical fixes a new VP Marketing must implement in their first 30 days is establishing clear metrics that directly link marketing activities to core business outcomes. This pivot from vanity metrics to business-impact metrics is crucial for proving marketing's value, securing budget, and aligning the team with company-wide goals like revenue growth, customer retention, and market expansion. The objective is to build a performance framework that tells a clear story of how marketing investment translates into tangible financial results.

This shift in focus creates immediate clarity and credibility. For example, instead of reporting 10,000 new website visitors, a new VP can report on the pipeline value influenced by those visitors, a metric that resonates with the C-suite. Tech giants exemplify this approach: Salesforce meticulously measures pipeline influenced over raw leads, and HubSpot pairs Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) with Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) to demonstrate profitable growth. These are the kinds of success criteria that elevate marketing from a cost center to a revenue driver.

How to Establish Business-Centric Metrics

To start, focus on a handful of high-impact metrics rather than overwhelming the organization with dozens of data points. A successful framework balances leading indicators (activities that predict future success) with lagging indicators (past results). This provides a holistic view of both performance and momentum.

Follow these actionable steps:

• Select 3-5 Core Metrics: Choose a small set of primary metrics that matter most to the CEO and CFO. These often include Marketing-Sourced Revenue, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Pipeline Influence, and Marketing Return on Investment (MROI).
• Define Leading and Lagging Indicators: For each core metric, identify contributing factors. For MROI (a lagging indicator), leading indicators could be Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), sales-accepted lead rates, and demo completion rates.
• Create a Simple Dashboard: Build a one-page dashboard that tracks your key metrics monthly. This should show the target, the current performance, and the trend over time. This becomes your central source of truth for executive conversations.
• Establish a Baseline: Use your first 30 days to measure the current state of these metrics. This baseline is essential for setting realistic improvement targets for the upcoming quarters and demonstrating progress over time.

9. Revamp Marketing Communications and Messaging

Your company's messaging is the foundation of every marketing campaign, sales conversation, and customer interaction. If it's stale, unclear, or misaligned with your target audience's needs, everything else suffers. One of the highest-leverage fixes a new VP Marketing can implement in their first 30 days is a rapid audit and refresh of core communications. The goal is to ensure your value proposition is sharp, compelling, and consistently articulated across all channels, from the website homepage to sales enablement materials.

This initiative delivers immediate clarity and impact. Consider Slack's pivot from the narrow "Email Killer" tagline to the broader, more inclusive "Where Work Happens." This change repositioned the product from a simple tool to a central collaboration hub, significantly expanding its market appeal. Similarly, Zoom’s simple messaging, "Video Conferencing That Works," cut through the noise of competitors listing complex features, focusing instead on the core customer benefit of reliability.

How to Overhaul Your Messaging

To begin your messaging revamp, start by listening, not writing. Your first priority is to understand the customer's perspective and the sales team's reality. A new VP Marketing must gather qualitative data to inform a new messaging framework that truly resonates and drives action.

Follow these actionable steps:

• Interview Customers and Sales: Schedule calls with 10-15 recent customers to ask about their pain points and what language resonated during their buying journey. Do the same with your top sales reps to learn what messages close deals and what objections they face.
• Create a Messaging Framework: Structure your findings into a simple, powerful framework. Document the core Problem you solve, your unique Solution, your key Differentiation from competitors, and the Proof points (case studies, data) that back it up.
• Prioritize High-Impact Updates: You can't change everything at once. Start by updating the highest-visibility assets first, like the website homepage, key landing pages, and the primary sales deck.
• Test and Validate: Before a full rollout, A/B test new headlines and value propositions in your digital advertising. Share new sales enablement documents with the sales team to gather feedback on their effectiveness in real-world conversations.

10. Identify and Execute High-Impact Quick Wins

Building momentum is crucial for a new executive, and nothing achieves this faster than delivering tangible results. One of the most effective things a new VP Marketing should fix in their first 30 days is identifying and executing two to three high-impact quick wins. These are focused initiatives that can be completed within a short timeframe, typically 30 to 60 days, to showcase marketing's competence, build team confidence, and generate immediate positive momentum.

These wins should be visible, measurable, and ideally tied to revenue or other critical business metrics. For instance, a new VP might discover that improving email subject lines based on A/B testing data can boost open rates by 15% within weeks, directly impacting lead engagement. Another powerful quick win is to collaborate with sales to implement a basic lead scoring model, which can immediately improve lead quality and increase sales efficiency. These early successes create a powerful narrative of progress and earn political capital for larger, long-term strategic projects.

How to Secure Quick Wins

To get started, the focus should be on initiatives with low effort and high impact. This requires gathering intelligence from the team and key stakeholders to find opportunities that are ripe for improvement. It's about finding the "leaky buckets" that can be patched quickly for an immediate positive effect.

Follow these actionable steps:

• Ask Sales: Schedule time with sales leaders and ask, "What is the one marketing deliverable that would most help you close deals in the next 30 days?" This often uncovers needs like competitor battle cards or targeted case studies.
• Brainstorm with the Team: Host a working session with your marketing team focused on one question: "What is broken that we know how to fix quickly?" This empowers the team and often reveals obvious but overlooked issues, like a poorly converting landing page form.
• Define Success Metrics Upfront: For each chosen initiative, define a clear, measurable goal before you start. For a landing page optimization project, the goal might be "Increase form submission rate from 2% to 4% in 45 days."
• Communicate and Celebrate: Provide weekly progress updates to leadership to maintain visibility. Once a win is achieved, celebrate it publicly with the team and the entire organization to reinforce a culture of execution and success.

VP Marketing: First 30 Days — Comparison of 10 Critical Fixes

‍

From Diagnosis to Direction: Charting Your Course Forward

Stepping into the role of VP of Marketing is like taking the helm of a moving ship. Your first 30 days are not about a complete overhaul but about stabilizing the vessel, understanding its mechanics, and charting a more intentional course. The ten areas we've explored are the essential diagnostics you must run. From auditing the tech stack and realigning the budget to fortifying alliances with sales and finance, each action creates a ripple effect, building the foundation for sustainable growth and measurable impact.

Completing this initial sprint is a significant achievement. You have moved beyond assumptions and replaced them with data, insights, and firsthand knowledge. You’ve assessed your team’s capabilities, documented customer and competitive intelligence, and, most importantly, secured tangible quick wins that build crucial momentum and political capital. This isn't just about what every new VP Marketing should fix in their first 30 days; it's about establishing a new operational standard for the entire marketing organization.

Your Blueprint for the Next 60 Days

The work you've done is not a one-time fix; it's the launchpad for your 90-day strategy. The clarity you've gained from these initial fixes directly informs your next, more ambitious moves.

• From Tech Audit to Optimization: Your initial review of the martech stack now evolves into a strategic optimization project. Which tools can be consolidated? Where are the data integration gaps that are hurting campaign performance? You now have the evidence to make a business case for necessary changes.
• From Team Assessment to Talent Development: The capability audit you conducted becomes a roadmap for professional development. You can now design targeted training, identify key hiring needs, and restructure roles to better align with the business objectives you've defined.
• From Budget Review to Strategic Investment: Your initial budget realignment was about plugging leaks and funding quick wins. Now, armed with performance data and a stronger partnership with finance, you can build a forward-looking budget that allocates resources to the highest-potential channels and strategic initiatives.

Key Takeaway: The primary goal of your first month is to transition from a reactive problem-solver to a proactive strategic leader. By systematically addressing these foundational areas, you build the trust and operational stability needed to drive transformative change.

Accelerating Your Impact Beyond the First Month

As you look toward executing your 90-day roadmap, the pressure to deliver results will only intensify. This is where you must distinguish between what your team must own versus what can be accelerated through strategic partnerships. Revamping creative operations and scaling content production are often significant bottlenecks that can stall your momentum.

This is where leveraging an on-demand creative infrastructure becomes a strategic advantage. Instead of spending the next 60 days interviewing, hiring, and onboarding a new creative team, you can partner with a platform like Moonb to access a dedicated team of creatives, project managers, and strategists immediately. This allows you to:

• Launch Campaigns Faster: Turn your strategic plans into market-ready assets without internal delays.
• Maintain Focus: Keep your internal team focused on core strategy, customer insights, and brand direction while the execution is handled by experts.
• Scale with Predictability: Flex your creative output up or down based on campaign needs without the overhead of full-time hires.

Your first 30 days were about diagnosis and immediate fixes. The next 60 are about building and scaling. By mastering the fundamentals and strategically augmenting your team’s capabilities, you transform the insights from your first month into the triumphs of your first quarter. You have laid the groundwork. Now, it's time to build upon it and lead your team toward a new era of marketing excellence.