Is Your Marketing Actually Working? A Founder’s Test

There’s a specific, well-studied reason your dashboard can be green while your pipeline is flat. Behavioral researchers even have a name for it: surrogation.

Surrogation is the moment a measure of the thing quietly becomes the thing.

You set out to grow revenue, so you pick a metric to track it — leads, or traffic, or followers. Then, without deciding to, you stop chasing revenue and start chasing the metric. The number was supposed to stand in for the goal. Now it is the goal.

Michael Harris and Bill Tayler documented exactly this in Harvard Business Review: once a measure comes to represent a strategy, people optimize the measure and let the actual strategy drift (“Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business,” HBR, 2019). It has wrecked incentive systems at enormous companies, and it happens to your Tuesday marketing standup at small scale. Same bug.

Here’s the test that catches it. It takes about 45 minutes.

First, the trap in one sentence

“We’re doing a lot of marketing” and “marketing is working” are two different sentences. Most founders can defend the first one all day — look at the calendar, the posts, the agency invoice. Almost none can defend the second one in a sentence a skeptical investor would accept.

That gap is surrogation doing its quiet work. And AI is pouring gasoline on it: point a capable tool at a metric that was already the wrong metric, and you don’t get clarity — you get the wrong answer faster, in higher volume, with a confident-looking chart attached. As the economist Steven Tadelis put it, also in HBR, companies now need real discipline just to keep flawed analysis from scaling (“Don’t Let AI Make Bad Analytics Worse,” 2025). The tool didn’t fix your measurement problem. It industrialized it.

The 45-Minute Test: five questions

You don’t need a data team. You need three-quarters of an hour and the nerve to sit with some ugly answers.

What the ugly answers mean

Three or more “no”s isn’t a failure. It’s the most useful thing you’ll learn all quarter. It means your problem was never not enough marketing. It was no line of sight between the marketing and the money — surrogation all the way down.

The fix isn’t another platform. It’s a sequence:

• Pick one revenue outcome — booked calls, qualified pipeline, closed deals. One.
• Trace it backward to the two or three activities that genuinely feed it.
• Instrument those properly. A shared sheet and a “how did you hear about us?” field beats a glossy dashboard nobody trusts.
• Starve everything else of your attention until the core is proven. You can always add back.

That’s the discipline Harris and Tayler prescribe, shrunk to founder scale: never let the number replace the goal, and never scale spend or analysis until you trust the thing underneath it.

The founder’s real edge

Here’s what a big-company CMO would envy about your seat: you’re close enough to the business to actually know the answers to those five questions. You can name your customers. You do talk to sales. You just haven’t had the senior pattern-recognition to turn that closeness into a system — someone who’s sat in the chair and knows which three numbers matter and which twenty are theater.

That’s the whole game now. The tools got cheap and fast; judgment about where to point them didn’t. The companies that win the next two years won’t be the ones doing the most marketing. They’ll be the ones who can look at their own dashboard and say, in one clean sentence, here’s what’s working and here’s why — and then put every dollar there.

Sources: Michael Harris & Bill Tayler, “Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business,” Harvard Business Review, Sept–Oct 2019. Steven Tadelis, “Don’t Let AI Make Bad Analytics Worse,” Harvard Business Review, 2025.

superwired is a fractional CMO practice helping founder-led and growth-stage companies build marketing that’s wired for the AI era — real strategy and senior leadership, without the full-time cost.