The 90-Day Contract: What B2B Marketing Leaders and CEOs Owe Each Other

By Kristen Pecka, B2B Marketing Leader

Something ominous is happening in marketing right now, and no, it’s not AI.

CMO tenure has dropped 35% since 2010, and marketing leaders who started their roles in 2022 lasted an average of just 2.6 years. One in five Fortune 500 companies changed marketing leadership in the past year alone. And nearly half of the Fortune 500 no longer use the CMO title at all.

Marketing leaders are being hired faster, burning out faster, and getting replaced faster than at any point in my career.

After nearly 20 years in this field, I don’t think the problem is the people. It’s the expectations neither side says out loud before the job starts: the unspoken contract between CEO and marketing leader.

The first 90 days are critical for a new marketing hire. Here’s the contract every marketing leader and CEO should agree to before day one.

What does a marketing leader owe in the first 90 days?

A hill I’ll die on: stop looking for the magic bullet in marketing.

A new marketing leader’s first 90 days should go toward building the foundation for sustainable growth, and the CEO should be a partner in building it, not an obstacle.

By the end of month three, a marketing leader should be able to point to five things:

1. A real relationship with sales

This is first for a reason. In B2B, marketing that isn’t connected to the sales process is guessing. If you don’t build a real relationship with the sales leader and their team, you’re setting yourself up to fail.

A kickoff call doesn’t count. Sit in on live calls, hear the objections firsthand, and start closing the gap between what marketing says and what sales needs in order to close deals.

Next, take it a step further. Pull every sales call transcript from the last six months and run them through AI to find patterns: what customers actually say, where the story breaks down, and how to rework the narrative to fix it. You’re likely to walk away with a gold mine for your content plan.

2. A sharper narrative

This doesn’t mean go in and do a full rebrand. You don’t need to rewrite every page of the website or debate a new shade of purple in your first three months.

You do need to be able to articulate who the company is for, what problem it solves, why that problem matters now, and why the company is different, in language that didn’t exist before you walked in the door.

A sharper narrative isn’t necessarily a new tagline. It’s the sentence the CEO can use with an investor, the story a sales rep tells a new prospect, and the answer an employee gives when someone asks what the company actually does. If all of those sound different, you have a clarity problem. Clarity is one of the most valuable things a marketing leader can create.

3. A pipeline model you built yourself

A good marketing leader speaks to the numbers as fluently as the creative. You are accountable for them alongside sales.

By day 90, you should know conversion rates by segment, where deals stall, which sources actually influence the pipeline, and what marketing can realistically move. That doesn’t mean that marketing owns revenue. It means you understand the relationship between what your team does and what the business needs.

An inherited model tells you what someone else believed. One you build yourself tells you what’s true. If you can’t defend the math, you don’t own it yet.

4. Something you killed

Every marketing department has at least one thing running on autopilot that nobody has questioned in years.

At one company I joined, inbound content drove almost all of the pipeline. A single article brought in hundreds of leads a month, so it stayed up. The problem was, those leads weren’t converting. The article had been written for an earlier version of the business, and the audience it attracted wasn’t our ICP anymore. Volume was hiding the problem.

In your organization it might be a campaign, a legacy agency, a report nobody reads, or a standing meeting. Find it and cut it.

This isn’t about theatrics. Good marketing leadership requires judgment about what deserves resources and what doesn’t. I’ve walked into teams spending enormous time on work that existed because “that’s what we’ve always done,” and nobody could name the business outcome it drove. Stopping that work can create more value than launching something new. It also tells your team you’re paying attention.

5. One bet you made

Have one thing in motion that didn’t exist before you showed up.

By then you’ve learned enough to see an opportunity that wasn’t obvious on day one: a new segment, a positioning shift, a change to the demand model, or a new way of working with sales. A good first bet comes from something you learned inside the business, is small enough to test, and has a clear signal for whether it’s working. A reckless one is the playbook you brought from your last company.

The point isn’t to get everything right. The point is that you’ve moved from diagnosing to deciding where the business goes next. That’s what you were hired to do.

Most 90-day plans stop there. They measure what the marketing leader owes the business and nothing else. The problem is, that’s only half the contract.

What the CEO owes the marketing leader

A marketing leader can’t deliver any of the above in a vacuum. If you want marketing to succeed, you have to let them into the business.

1. Give access

The doors should be open from day one.

I once asked a CEO what the sales goals were. I got a long, suspicious stare, followed by “I’m not sure why you need to know that.” That number didn’t need to be under lock and key. Marketing couldn’t succeed without it. How was I supposed to do the job without knowing what I was working toward?

Put your new marketing leader on sales calls. Give them the pipeline data. Let them talk to customers, and introduce them to the people who actually know how the business runs. Don’t make them earn it by proving themselves first. That’s backwards.

You hired them to make good decisions, and they can’t make those decisions with half the information. The fastest way to accelerate a new marketing leader is to put them in the room with you.

2. Be transparent

Be honest about what’s actually going on beyond the numbers. There’s no reason to keep secrets.

“The messaging just needs a refresh” isn’t a briefing. Tell them what’s broken, what’s been tried, what didn’t work, and why. Tell them what you consider untouchable, whether that’s a product name, a tagline you wrote, or a channel the board loves, and why it matters to you.

A good marketing leader will figure all of this out eventually. The only question is whether they spend 60 of their first 90 days doing it. Every hard truth you withhold is time they spend rediscovering it instead of fixing it. 

3. Trust them

I’ll shout this from every mountaintop: give them room to lead.

If you’ve treated the relationship as a partnership from the start, your ideas, concerns, and questions have already been heard. Now trust the person you hired to act on them.

Have a real budget conversation by day 30, not a vague promise that resources will follow results. Protect them from fire drills, and don’t override their calls because you saw a competitor’s campaign on LinkedIn.

Give their bets time to play out. Checking on a new initiative every two weeks is like pulling up a plant to see how the roots are doing. You’ll learn something, but you’ll also kill the plant. In B2B, where sales cycles run months, patience isn’t a courtesy. It’s a requirement.

When the contract breaks

If either side doesn’t hold up its end, the hire fails.

When the marketing leader doesn’t deliver, it’s rarely a skills gap. It’s usually a fit problem or an environment problem. A fit problem means the person’s experience doesn’t match the stage. Think of a big-company leader who’s never built from zero, or a startup builder dropped into a matrixed org. An environment problem means they never got the access, transparency, or trust to succeed.

The way to tell the difference is to look at the CEO’s side of the contract first. If the company held up its end and the leader still can’t point to the five things above, it’s fit. If the company didn’t, you don’t actually know yet.

When the CEO doesn’t deliver, the marketing leader starts guessing instead of knowing. They build on assumptions instead of data. They spend the first 90 days navigating politics instead of building strategy. Then they get blamed for not having results.

Right now, most companies only evaluate one side of that equation.

Put it in writing

A 2.6-year average tenure is a lot of expensive turnover, and most of it starts with a conversation almost nobody has.

Before day one, sit down together and write out both halves of the contract: the five things the marketing leader will be able to point to by day 90, and the access, transparency, and trust the CEO will provide to make them possible. Revisit it at day 30 and day 60. It takes an hour, and it’s a lot cheaper than your next executive search.

The next time a marketing leader hire doesn’t work out, look at the contract before you blame the person. Both sides of it.