A marketing audit’s job is to find the two or three places where the growth math actually breaks, fast enough that the findings still matter. Below is the checklist I run on B2B SaaS companies, organized into seven areas. It is built for a two-to-three-week pass, not a quarter-long consulting project; copy it, delete what does not apply, and be brutal about the answers.
I’m Andrii Byzov, an AI-native fractional CMO for B2B tech; this is the checklist behind the audit phase of my 90-day plan.
Key takeaways
- Audit to decide, not to document. The output is a ranked gap list with sizes, not a report.
- Funnel math first: most teams I audit cannot trace a dollar from traffic to revenue; in my audits, assembling that chain usually surfaces the biggest gap by itself.
- Search now means two surfaces: Google rankings and AI-assistant visibility. Audit both.
- The sales conversation is half the audit. Marketing self-assessments miss what reps hear every day.
1. Positioning and ICP
- Can the CEO, the sales lead and the homepage state the same one-sentence value proposition?
- Does the positioning name a problem the buyer already knows they have, or does it describe product features?
- Do the last ten closed-won deals share an identifiable profile (size, trigger, use case), and does the stated ICP match it?
- What do lost-deal notes say buyers chose instead, and why?
- Is there a named primary competitor set, and a one-line answer to “why you over each”?
- Price positioning: does ACV match the motion (self-serve, inside sales, field), or is an enterprise price sold with a self-serve funnel?
2. Funnel math
- Can you trace last quarter end to end: visitors → leads/signups → qualified → opportunities → closed-won, with conversion rates at each step?
- What is a lead worth, calculated backwards from ACV and conversion rates? Does anyone use that number in channel decisions?
- Where is the single largest drop-off, and is it a volume problem or a quality problem?
- CAC by channel, even roughly. Which channel would you cut tomorrow on the numbers alone?
- Sales cycle length and win rate: trending which way over the last three quarters?
- Pipeline coverage entering the quarter: above or below 3x, and does anyone own the gap?
3. Website and conversion
- Does the homepage pass the five-second test: what is it, for whom, why believe?
- Is there one primary conversion action per page, and does anyone know the rate per key page?
- Do high-intent pages exist (pricing, comparisons, use cases), and are they findable within one click?
- Proof density: real customer logos, numbers, named quotes, recent dates, or stock-photo trust theater?
- Forms: how many fields stand between intent and a conversation, and is each one earning its keep?
- Page speed and mobile rendering on the top ten pages by traffic.
4. Content, SEO and AI search
- Which pages drive qualified sign-ups or pipeline, not just traffic? Does the content plan feed those, or feed a publishing quota?
- Keyword coverage where buying intent lives: comparisons, alternatives, pricing, “best X” queries in the category.
- AI-assistant visibility: ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI mode the questions your buyers ask. Does the company appear, get cited, or lose entirely to competitors? (How to improve that.)
- Is content structured for extraction: direct answers, clear headings, FAQs, tables, dated facts? (The GEO playbook.)
- Content operations: who briefs, who writes, who reviews, what does a piece cost, and how long from idea to live?
- Is anything compounding (rankings, citations, subscribers), or does traffic die when publishing stops?
5. Channels and spend
- Full list of active channels with last-quarter spend and pipeline contribution side by side.
- Which two channels produced most of the qualified pipeline? What share of budget do they get?
- Paid: when did anyone last rebuild (not tweak) targeting, creative and landing pages? Is incrementality even discussable with current tracking?
- Outbound-marketing assist: does marketing feed outbound with intent data, content and air cover, or do SDRs hunt cold?
- Events, partnerships, community: real pipeline attribution or faith-based spend?
- What has never been tested that the funnel math says should be?
6. Sales alignment
- Sit in on three sales calls or demos. Does the deck match the website? Does either match what customers said in interviews?
- What do reps say the best leads look like, and does marketing’s qualification logic agree?
- Lead handoff: SLA for follow-up, and the actual median response time.
- Does sales use marketing’s content in deals, and which three assets do they wish existed?
- Is there a shared pipeline number both teams report against, or two dashboards that disagree?
7. Stack, data and team
- Can one person pull the funnel numbers above in under an hour? If not, the stack is decorative.
- Attribution honesty: what is actually knowable with the current setup, and is anyone pretending otherwise?
- Tool inventory against monthly cost: what would be cancelled tomorrow if someone looked?
- Team and agency map: who owns what, where are the single points of failure, what is duplicated?
- Where is AI leverage already applied (research, content production, reporting), and where is the team doing by hand what tooling does in minutes? (What AI-native operations look like.)
- Budget as a whole: people vs programs vs tools split, and how it compares to plan.
Turning the checklist into decisions
Score each area red, yellow or green; then ignore the colors and ask one question: which two gaps, if closed this quarter, would move pipeline most? That ranked answer, with rough sizes attached, is the entire point of the audit. Everything else is documentation.
Two honest warnings from running these. First, in my audits, positioning problems outnumber channel problems; teams hope for “spend more on X” and usually get “your message does not match your best deals.” Second, do the sales-alignment section even if everything else gets cut; in my experience it has the highest finding density per hour of any section here.
If you run this on your own company and want a sanity check on the gap ranking, send me what you found on LinkedIn.
FAQ
What does a B2B SaaS marketing audit cover?
Seven areas: positioning and ICP, funnel math, website and conversion, content plus search visibility in both Google and AI assistants, channel performance and spend, sales and marketing alignment, and the data stack. The output is a short list of the highest-leverage gaps, not a hundred-page report.
How long should a marketing audit take?
For a typical B2B SaaS at $1M-$20M ARR, two to three weeks part-time: one week for access and numbers, one for customer and market context, and a few days to synthesize. Longer than a month usually means the audit has become a deliverable instead of a decision tool.
What is the most common finding in B2B SaaS marketing audits?
In the audits I run, the most common finding is positioning that describes the product instead of the buyer’s problem, sitting on top of funnel math nobody has assembled end to end. Most teams I audit know their traffic and their closed-won numbers but cannot say where in between the economics actually break.
Should an audit include AI search visibility?
Yes. B2B buyers now also research inside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. An audit that checks Google rankings but not whether AI assistants mention or cite the company is only checking yesterday’s surface.