The Marketing Dashboard Your CEO Actually Needs in the AI era

How to measure marketing when AI changes everything

Marketing is changing.

As a subscriber of this Substack, you already know that :)

But, of all the complex challenges to solve, how we show the success of marketing might be the hardest.

There’s a reason the average tenure of a CMO is 18 months. Marketing is already hard to measure, which makes its assessment subjective.

However, it’s going to get harder.

Over the past month, I have spoken at several events about AI. The number one question I get asked by marketers about AI isn’t on Agents, or Prompting; it’s “How do I show the value of marketing to my CEO?”

Measurement is getting harder

Over the past 10 years, most b2b marketing was a mix of SEO, paid advertising & marketing automation. Highly measurable.

Today, more of a user’s search habits are moving into LLMs. Clicks are disappearing. Quantifying how many people are finding your brand through these AI engines is hard to measure.

Alongside that, since ChatGPT was launched, it’s estimated that the cost per click has increased between 50% to 100%. More paid budget will switch from direct response advertising to brand advertising making this less measurable.

And, with AI & agents, marketers can now automate work they weren’t previously able to. They can automate the prospecting (outbound/inbound), and they can automate the first sales interaction via agents to do discovery and qualification, plus enable sellers to be more efficient via AI, improving closed-won conversion rates.

This means marketing can improve metrics not previously measured before, like improvements in deal velocity, closing deals with fewer human touches (reducing CAC, improving sales rep PPR), and increasing closed-won rates.

Marketers will need a new way to tell the story of ‘marketing’ and to do that, a new set of metrics.

The following is an illustrative dashboard built in Claude Code. Click on the headings ‘Grow Influence’, ‘Grow Demand’, and ‘Grow Revenue’ to see the full dashboard. It’s not meant to cover every metric possible.

1. Grow Influence

This is the hardest column to defend with your CEO and the most important one to get right.

Influence metrics are indirect. They don’t convert to pipeline this quarter. They create the conditions for pipeline to convert easier next quarter.

Four things live here:

a. LLM Share of Voice: When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini “what’s the best CRM for a growing startup,” does your brand show up? This is the new SEO. Except you can’t optimize your way into it with keywords. You earn it through brand strength, product reputation, and being referenced in the content LLMs train on. We’re tracking this as a competitive share metric over time, like a brand metric.

b. Branded Traffic: Organic and direct visits from people searching your name. This is the downstream signal that influence is working. If your brand advertising, creator partnerships, and LLM presence are doing their job, this number goes up.

c. Aided & Unaided Awareness: Old school, but still matters. Aided = “Have you heard of HubSpot?” Unaided = “Name a CRM.” The gap between these two lines tells you how top-of-mind you are. Strong brands narrow that gap.

d. Total Impressions by Country: Reach across your key markets. Not a conversion metric. A “did we show up” metric.

2. Grow Demand

This is the column marketers know how to defend. Leads, meetings, pipeline. The problem is the economics are shifting underneath it.

Four things live here:

a. Paid Advertising Leads: Google, Meta, LinkedIn. Still works, still measurable, still getting more expensive. CPC has increased 50-100% since ChatGPT launched. You’re paying more for the same leads.

b. SEO Leads: Two lines, and they’re crossing. Informational traffic is declining as AI answers those queries directly. Transactional traffic e.g. the people ready to buy is holding or growing. The SEO playbook of “rank for everything, nurture over time” is compressing into “rank for the moments that matter.” If your SEO strategy is still weighted toward top-of-funnel informational content, this chart will show the problem before your pipeline does.

c. Meetings Booked: Inbound vs. outbound prospecting, side by side. This is where AI changes the game for marketing. AI prospecting, historically a sales function, is now something marketing can own and scale with AI. The trend line matters here. What we’ve seen is outbound (cold contacts) is getting very saturated, but Inbound (warm contacts) prospecting works great if you have the right prompts and data sources.

d. Website Chat: Volume and revenue on the same chart. Chat used to be a support function. Now it’s a conversion channel. AI chat can qualify, route, and even close deals without human intervention. Tracking MRR alongside volume tells you if chat is doing real work or just generating tickets.

The story this dashboard tells: demand gen isn’t dead, but the mix is changing. Paid is more expensive. SEO is more focused. Prospecting is more viable. Chat is more valuable. The marketers who win will be the ones who see these shifts early and reallocate accordingly.

3. Grow Revenue

This column didn’t exist on marketing dashboards two years ago. It couldn’t, because marketing didn’t have the tools to influence it.

Deal velocity, touches to close, rep time savings, closed-won rates. These are sales metrics. They live in the CRM. They’ve always been owned by sales ops, reported by sales leadership, and untouched by marketing.

AI changes that.

Four things live here:

a. Deal Velocity: How long does it take to close a deal? Marketing can now directly compress this number. AI-powered discovery calls gather context faster. AI-generated follow-ups keep momentum between meetings. AI research surfaces objections before they stall deals. Every day shaved off the sales cycle is revenue recognized sooner.

b. Sales Efficiency: This is the chart that tells the real story. Two metrics, inverse relationship. As average touches to close goes down, MRR per human touch goes up. AI handles the low-value interactions, the scheduling, the follow-up nudges, the basic qualification questions. What’s left for humans is the high-leverage work: negotiation, relationship building, complex problem-solving. The value of each human touch increases because AI is doing the rest.

c. Rep Time Reclaimed: Hours back in a rep’s week. This is marketing’s gift to sales. AI prospecting, AI research, AI prep, they’re marketing-built systems that give sellers time back. 6.2 hours per week is a full extra selling day. Multiply that by your sales team and you’ve created capacity without adding headcount.

d. Closed-Won Rate: Better discovery means better qualification. Better qualification means fewer dead-end deals in the pipeline. AI can ask the hard questions early, budget, timeline, decision-making authority, without the social friction humans feel. The result is a cleaner pipeline with higher conversion rates.

For years, marketing stopped at “hand off the lead.” Now marketing can own the systems that accelerate what happens after the handoff. The metrics in this column are proof that marketing’s influence extends further down the funnel than ever before.

If your CEO asks “what does marketing actually do?”, this column helps provide a fuller story.

Until Next Time,

Happy AI’fying

Kieran