How To Close the Gap Between Strategy and Execution

All right. Welcome, everyone. Hopefully, we’re live. If you’re hearing this, let me know in the chat so we know you’re actually there. Uh, but yeah, make yourself comfortable. We’ll get started in just about 60 seconds as we let people trickle in.

Everything looking good on your end.

Yeah, looking good. I’m excited to get started.

Great.

All right. I’m seeing some people trickle in. Great to see you, everybody.

Matt, I see Matt.

Hey, everybody.

OK, thanks, Brett. Appreciate it. Thank you, Abu.

All right, well, we’re gonna pretty much jump into it. Um, the talk itself should be about 30 minutes. We’ll have some time for Q&A at the end.

Before we jump in, I’m gonna be mostly in the background. Leah’s gonna be your host.

We are FourFront. We’re a digital marketing agency that uses data analytics to help our clients focus on what really matters.

My name is Ben. I am product manager and UX strategist at FourFront, and I’ll be helping field questions and we’ll pop in if needed, but mostly you’ll just see me now at the end.

Leah is our star. She’s integrated digital marketing specialist at FourFront. Um, she brings a lot of expertise in SEO, social media marketing, everything digital, paid ads, um, and does a really good job for her clients. So I’m really excited to pass it to you, Leah, so that we get to hear all of your expertise.

Awesome, thank you so much, Ben.

All right. Thanks everyone for being here. Like Ben said, I’m gonna spend the next about 30 minutes, and my goal is to give you something that you can actually use, not just a nebulous framework to think about later, but tools that you can actually pick up and run with this week. Uh, the topic for this webinar has to do with the gap between strategy and execution.

Most teams I work with know what they want to accomplish. The problem is that by the time the work gets done, what actually has happened doesn’t match what was decided.

So today I wanna show you how that happens and how to close that gap. Um, so this is gonna be kind of a working session, not just a thought piece. I’m going to move you, move through a few frameworks, um, a worked example, give you a script you can use in your next meeting, and also give you a review cadence that you can put on the calendar today.

Before we jump into this, I do want to make a disclaimer. Share my office with my two pet pigeons. I’m using all of the technology in the world to try to make sure that you can’t hear them, but if you can, I apologize in advance.

So before we really jump in, I wanna just say that this event is part of Philly Tech Week 2026, which is a really cool event that’s running this week, the 4th through the 8th. Um, you can find all of the good stuff using the hashtag PTW26, and I definitely encourage you to check out the rest of the programming for this week, cause there’s some really good stuff, and we’re very excited to be a part of this today.

All right.

So, Before we get into the frameworks, I want to tell you a little bit about where I’m coming from personally, because the way I think about this shapes basically everything I’m going to say. So I consider myself to be a minimalist, both in life and in work. When I take on a new client, my first question is not else could not what else could we be doing, but what can we cut?

I’m not looking for more motion. I’m looking for the few things that are most likely to move us toward the outcome we want.

And we’re gonna be running everything I’m talking about today kind of through that lens. I’m not anti-activity, but I am anti-dilution. There’s a difference, and that distinction is going to be coming up a lot today.

So, here’s what I’m hoping to give you this session. A way to translate your business goals into digital priorities, so your team isn’t just doing things, they’re doing the right things. I’m gonna give you a rule for handling new initiatives, so that they don’t just quietly pile up and kill your focus. I’m going to give you a script for saying no, because knowing you should say no is not the same as knowing how to say no.

And then I’m going to give you a review cadence, both monthly and quarterly, that keeps your strategy visible instead of letting it drift. So those are the four deliverables. Let’s look at the problem we’re solving.

So, the issue is not effort. Every team I’ve ever worked with is working hard. The issue is dilution.

Most teams have good ideas. Most teams have activity. What they don’t have is a disciplined way to protect their focus. And when you spread a team, even an amazing team of super hard workers, when you spread them across 12 priorities, none of those priorities gets enough. They don’t get enough attention, they don’t get enough iteration, and they don’t get enough time to actually produce the results that you want. You get motion, but you don’t get movement.

And so this isn’t about teams being lazy or leadership being unreasonable, it’s a structure.

and it has a structural fix and that’s what the rest of this session is about.

So the first thing I want to give you is a translation tool translation tool that I call the latter.

So you start at the top with the business outcome. That’s the thing that leadership actually cares about. Maybe it’s new accounts or better attention or revenue growth, and then below that sits the marketing objective. What marketing has to deliver to actually support that outcome, and below that is the channel priority where you concentrate your effort. And at the bottom is the kind of weekly day to day work, the actual tasks that fill your team’s calendars.

And a lot of teams will kind of start from the bottom up. They start with the tasks that they need to do, and don’t necessarily check whether those tasks connect to anything at the top.

Using this ladder forces you to work from the top down, so everything has a reason to exist.

Let me give you an example of what that looks like, make it a little bit more concrete. So let’s say your business goal is to grow your new accounts, and here’s what that means for each of your channels. Say you’re working with SEO, paid media and analytics.

SEO here is not just about traffic, it’s about high intent visibility, putting the business in front of the people who are already looking for what you offer. That means, um, keyword strategy that’s focused on bottom of funnel intent, landing pages that are built to convert, and content that closes rather than educates.

And for this strategy, paid media isn’t just about awareness. It’s about capturing demand that already exists. You’re testing your messaging, you’re qualifying leads before they ever enter your pipeline, and you’re optimizing for cost per quality lead, not cost per click.

Analytics is where this can fall apart if you’re not careful. You have to define what a conversion actually means, not a page view, not a session, but a qualified lead. And then you measure quality, not just volume. And so you isolate what’s actually contributing to the goal versus what’s just generating noise. So here you can see there’s 1 goal, 3 channels being used to support that, and all the work is pointing the same direction. That’s the model. Hang on one second.

Sorry, I’m getting over a cold, and it is killing me.

All right, so the next thing we’re going to do is look at this kind of prioritization lens, and the title here is intentional.

This is the Pareto principle applied to your marketing roadmap. That idea of roughly 20% of the work drives 80% of your results, and I’m not saying you need to hit that number exactly, but it’s a it’s a way of thinking.

So most of what is on your list of things that your team is working on, might be noise, or maintenance, or things that felt urgent when someone added them to the list. But a small number of those initiatives are actually doing the work, and your job here is to find that 20% and protect it.

So before you commit to anything, run through these 4 questions.

Excuse me.

Which initiatives have the clearest path to your goal, not the most interesting ones, not the ones someone championed most loudly. But the ones with the clearest path. Which ones are supported by actual demand or performance signals, not just hope and intuition.

And which ones need concentrated attention from your team in order to work, because some tactics run fine in maintenance mode, but others need a real team behind them. And finally, which few are the most worth protecting? That last question is the most important, because you’re not just deciding what to do, you’re deciding what to defend when pressure comes.

Thank you all so much for your patience.

All right. So, how do we decide what stays? Here’s a filter I want you to use for evaluating every initiative. Whether it’s already on the road map or whether someone just walked it into the room.

So first, does it clearly support your goal, not just tangentially, but clearly.

Does it have a credible path to impact? Not a theory, but a real mechanism grounded in something.

Do we have the resources to do it well? Because the thinly resourced initiative might be worth might be worse than no initiative at all. It burns your capacity without producing results. And is it more important than something that’s already underway?

This last question is where prioritization processes fall apart. Teams add things without removing anything. That means your list gets longer and everything slows down. So that yes needs to be earned. That’s your operating principle.

All right.

I want to pause here and make a quick point about language. So this is a pet peeve of mine outside of the world of digital marketing too. But it’s really important that words mean something, and I think here language is shaping how a lot of people think about this problem.

So, a little history lesson for you. The word priority entered the English language in the 1400s as a singular noun. There was no plural.

Um, the idea of having priorities, multiple, only started in the 20th century. But think about what that means. By definition, only one thing can be first. 10 things cannot be first.

Um, we, when we say we have 10 priorities, we’ve already lost.

And multitasking has a similar history. The word first appeared in a 1965 IBM paper about computers. It was describing a machine’s ability to handle multiple instructions. We borrowed it for people, but it doesn’t work the same way. Research consistently shows that what we call multitasking is really task switching, and task switching carries real costs, including more time and more error.

So the answer here is not more priorities or better multitasking. It’s to cut, reduce, and prioritize.

All right, so, I think about this kind of like I think about my my closet, but for my closet, the rule is 1 in 2 out. So I’m being kinder to your team here than I am to my closet, and we’re gonna say.

One in, one out.

All right, so this rule does a few things. It makes capacity real. Teams understand we’re at capacity as kind of an abstraction. But they understand if we take this on, something else has to stop.

As a concrete choice. It also prevents accumulation. Every year without this rule, the roadmap gets heavier. Priorities from two quarters ago are still on the list because nobody made the call to remove them.

And this is important. It gives leadership a decision, not a complaint. You’re not saying we’re overwhelmed. You’re saying, here’s the trade-off, what do you want to do? And that’s a completely new conversation.

So nothing new enters the roadmap without displacing something else. If nothing leaves, your priorities become clutter.

All right.

When you start talking about cutting and prioritization, someone in the room is always going to hear it as you want us to do less, and that’s not what this is.

This is about choosing the highest impact work. And giving it the time, attention, and resources.

Choosing the high impact work and giving it the time, attention, and resources, it actually needs to succeed.

If you have 3 strong initiatives, but each one only gets a fraction of the focus it needs, you might get nothing from all 3. But if you cut one, and you focus on the two most important and you resource them properly, you might succeed at both. That’s not doing less, that’s increasing the probability of good results. So focus is a performance strategy, not a comfort strategy.

All right, let’s talk about the hardest part of putting this into practice.

Most people know they should prioritize. What they struggle with is saying no when the pressure is real, when that request is coming from a VP or the CEO. Or a client who signs a big retainer check every month.

Here’s the reframe I want you to hold. A good idea is not automatically a priority.

Quality of idea and timing of execution are two very different things. Every new initiative competes for the same finite resources. Every yes necessarily displaces something that’s already in motion.

If it’s not worth stopping or delaying something that’s already underway, it’s just not a yes, at least not right now. And that’s not a judgment about the quality of the idea, it’s a statement about your team’s current capacity, and that brings us to the script.

This is a slide I want you to maybe screenshot, um, or write it down, because you can use this tomorrow.

So when somebody brings you an initiative, and you need to hold the line, say this first.

I can see why this matters. That first line is not just you being polite. It signals that you’ve heard the idea, you understand why someone cares about it, and you’re not dismissing it. That matters, especially when there’s maybe some office politics involved.

Second, To take this on now, we would need to pause X and give a specific example of the thing that you would need to pause.

This line does the real work. You’re not saying no to the idea, you’re just making the trade-off visible. You’re showing what a yes actually costs, and that moves the conversation from you’re being difficult to here’s a real decision.

Third, you say, is it important enough to replace that, or should we put it on hold for the next quarterly review?

Now you’ve returned to the, you’ve returned the decision to the person with the authority. If they say yes. Then you stop X and you do the new thing.

If they say no, then the idea goes into the review queue.

Either outcome is fine, but you’ve protected your roadmap and you did it transparently.

Oh, I can see why getting a drink of water and coughing matters. Um, to take this on now, we would need to pause the webinar. So is this important enough to replace that or it for review?

Yeah, I think we should probably just continue with the webinar, but that was a very good execution of the script then. Thank you. Thank you.

All right.

So, we’ve covered how to set your priorities and how to protect them.

Now I want to talk to you about how you and your team stay honest about whether they’re actually working.

And this is the part that honestly a lot of teams skip. They set the strategy in Q1 or Q4, um, they do the work, and then they find out next time it’s time to set the strategy that maybe they’ve been off track for months. And by then, it’s way too late to course correct in any meaningful way. The fix is simple. You build in the time to check your work.

Not a big annual review, not a casual gut check, but a real structured cadence, and I’m going to recommend that you do this both monthly and quarterly.

Right. So we’ve talked about how to prioritize, and now I wanna talk about how to know if it’s working, and you’ll use this in both the monthly and quarterly check-ins that I was talking about.

And there’s a distinction that I want to draw between activity metrics and progress metrics, and I’m just going to pause here to plug and say that our last webinar was all about figuring out the difference between activity metrics and progress metrics. So if you want more information about that, My contact information is on the last slide. Shoot me an email and I’ll make sure you get the recording and all of the materials for that last webinar. But we’ll touch on it a little bit here too.

So Activity metrics count the things that you did. Campaigns launched, pages published, reports delivered. They’re not progress, they’re motion.

Progress metrics measure movement toward your actual goal, qualified demand, conversion quality, high intense visibility, spend efficiency. These tell you whether what you’re doing is actually working.

And I see this a lot where teams report on activity, because it’s easy to measure, it’s easy to see, uh, and it pretty much always looks positive. You can always say that you published something. You can always say you ran a campaign.

But if qualified leads aren’t moving, your strategy isn’t working, and reporting on just activity hides that.

So measure and report on what moves your goal.

Uh, and like I said, we did a whole webinar on this, so get in touch with me if you wanna hear more about that.

So the review cadence, like I said, has two loops. Monthly is a reality check. You’re not changing your strategy. You’re asking, are the current priorities actually moving? If something is stuck, you fix it. If something has clearly stopped working, you stop it now and wait instead of waiting for 3 months.

Quarterly is a strategy refresh. You’re asking a bigger question. Are we still working on the right things? Are they still the right priorities? You do this because business conditions shift, or, you know, maybe AI chatbots are introduced in your whole your whole industry changes kind of overnight.

The quarterly reset is where you reconnect your work to the business outcome, and give yourself permission to change direction without it feeling like a failure.

So both reviews still lead to the same possible outcomes for every initiative. You either continue, fix, or stop. Those are the only choices on the table.

So what happens in the monthly review? Here’s how I recommend running the monthly review, um, and after the webinar, I’m actually going to send out a whole really cool resource that I, um, put together that goes into this in more detail with an agenda and all of that fun stuff.

But the monthly review is a meeting, it’s not a memo, it’s not an email. You’re actually gonna get your team together, and you open with the goal, and you read it out loud.

That sounds silly and unnecessary, but it’s not. It resets the room and makes everything else filter through it, and then you go through the active, maybe 3 to 5 priorities, not the full list of everything that you’re working on, just the things that are supposed to be moving right now. And for each one, you take a look at the progress against a real checkpoint, not activity, and you name what’s falling short, and then you make a decision.

Continue, fix, or stop, and you don’t leave the meeting without a decision for each of those priorities. This should take 30 to 45 minutes, and if it takes longer, you probably have too many priorities, priorities.

All right, and then what happens in the quarterly reset? This is a bigger conversation. You’re not asking, are we executing well, you’re asking, are we executing the right things? And those are very different questions.

So you start by going back to the business outcome and asking honestly. Have conditions changed? Have we learned something in the last 90 days that changes what’s worth betting on? And then you review what produced real movement and what didn’t.

You decide what gets added, what gets removed, what needs to be redefined, and you reconnect everything to the business outcome. This is where you reset the ladder, and this is how you avoid one of the most common uh strategy failures that I see, where the strategy that your team set in January is invisible by March, April, May.

Here are some of the things that usually break this system, um, and I wanna name them so that you recognize them when they’re happening.

So, saying yes, just because the request came from someone senior.

Seniority is not a prioritization criterion, and the script from earlier works regardless of who’s asking.

Next is keeping weak initiatives alive just because work has already started. That, my friends, is the sunk cost fallacy, um, and what you’ve already spent on something doesn’t change whether it makes sense to continue working on it.

Put it Uh, mistaking activity for progress. You shipped something, great. Did it move the goal? And refusing to cut anything because everything feels kind of politically sensitive. That’s a really common one, and the one in, one out rule, and the script exists precisely for that situation. So when you see these patterns, name them, and then work with your team to fix them. They don’t go away on their own.

All right, so I want to take just a minute to talk about where FourFront fits into this, because we’ve been doing this work with clients for a long time, like 15 years, and I want to be specific about what that looks like. So we help teams clarify which priorities actually matter based on performance data and competitive signals, and what the business is actually trying to accomplish.

We align SEO and paid ads and analytics work to the business outcome, so that the channel decisions connect upward. We build reporting that supports decisions, doesn’t just give updates, and we help teams course correct when strategy and execution drift apart.

So to wrap things up, Find the valuable 20% of what you’re working on. Make room for it, and say no to what doesn’t earn space. Review it monthly and recommit to it quarterly. That’s the whole system. It’s not really complicated. What makes it hard is that every one of those steps requires a decision, and decisions require either authority or the willingness to maybe have a hard conversation. But the frameworks that I shared today are the scaffolding for those conversations.

All right.

So, that’s everything I have for you today. Thank you again so much for being here and for your time. This is a fun one to put together personally, uh, for many, many reasons. I want to shout out Matt if he’s still here. Thank you so much for helping me make these slides beautiful. Um, and I hope that you’re walking away with at least one or two things that you can actually use this week. Um, so I’m gonna call Ben back on to help me close this thing out.

Hey, great work, Leah.

Um, and yeah, these are some good looking slides. Um, I think we’re allowed to say we’re working with some friends at Myth, which is another Philly area agency, and, um, this is kind of our soft launch of this new branding that we’re trying out. We’re, I’m really excited about it. So, um, if anybody needs to jump out, feel free, we won’t be offended, but we do have some time for Q&A.

We, we can go a little past the half hour mark as well.

Um, we have one question submitted in the Q&A section, which I’ll bring up, but anyone else has any lingering questions, drop them there and chat, and I’ll pull them up. So let me see if I can get this, uh, added to the stream.

All right, so the monthly is about goals and the quarterly is about principles. Does this mean that each goal is attached to a priority or vice versa?

Yes. So, every, uh, I’m gonna say initiative, every initiative that you’re working on is attached to a priority.

So, in that monthly check-in, you’re seeing, are we making progress on these initiatives? Are we making progress toward our goal? Are the things that we’re working on actually driving progress?

So that’s what you check on in the monthly, and then in the quarterly review, you’re looking One or two steps higher on the ladder, at your priorities. And you’re saying, are these still the priorities based on market conditions, based on things that are going on in the industry? Are these still the things that we want to be focusing on?

And those are probably things that you set in your yearly strategy meeting in Q1 or the previous Q4, and said these are the things we’re gonna work on this year. But things change, industries change, new technology comes out, and sometimes you need to change your priorities accordingly.

So those quarterly reviews give you the opportunity to say, Are these goals, are these priorities still what we need to be focusing on in the business?

And the monthly review is where you look at the kind of sub-items, the initiatives that you’re working on under each goal, and deciding, is this working? Are we making progress? Is this moving us toward the goal? If not, is there something else we should swap in? Should we kill some of these initiatives so that we can focus more on the things that are working?

I hope that answered your question, Deborah.

Awesome. Yeah, that was a great question, um.

Yeah, we don’t have any others lined up. I’ll, I’ll ask one and if anybody else has something, drop it in, um.

I guess my, I don’t know if this is a fully formed question, but I’m wondering if you have thoughts, Leah, on like why is this so hard, you know, because it The, the problem isn’t that complicated, really. I mean, you’ve laid it out very, in a way that’s really easy to follow and that’s not easy, but you know the steps aren’t rocket science necessarily. But for some reason, I, I think this is actually really hard.

So do you have any thoughts on why that is?

Yeah, it’s super hard, and it’s because everybody’s marketing team, everybody’s team is busy, you know, I log on every morning and there’s 7.5 hours of work for me to do.

And, and I do the work, and sometimes I think, is this actually like the most important thing that we need to be doing right now?

And that’s a trigger to, to reconnect it to your ladder. But everybody’s team is busy, and so you, you come to work every day, and you work on the work, and you feel like you’re making progress, but it’s important to check back in and see whether the, the motion that you’re creating, the progress that you’re seeing, whether that’s actually aligned to your business goals, or whether it’s just Movement.

Yeah, that makes sense. It’s, I, I hear this advice to people that own their own business where it’s like doing the work versus like working on the work, something like, it’s hard to make time for it basically.

Yeah, that’s a great point. OK, I, I see another question. Um, last call, if anybody has a lingering one.

Post it now.

Here we got one from Rebecca. Thanks, Rebecca. Great talk. I’m a UX designer and I’m wondering if a product isn’t getting a lot of users, what are some ways to know if the product needs to change or if the marketing for it needs to change?

So I think this comes down to prioritization of some sort.

Yeah, that’s a big question, Rebecca, um, What, how do we know if the product needs to change or if the marketing for it needs to change? Um, I don’t know that I honestly have a good question, or I’m sorry, a good answer for you on that, Rebecca. I’ll bounce this over to Ben. He’s actually our UX and product guy. Do you have any insights there, Ben?

Yeah, uh, I think it comes down to confidence around whether or not you think you understand what your users really need, and if the product is solving that.

Um, and if it is, then it might be marketing if you’re just not reaching the right people.

So yeah, that, that gets pretty specific around a specific use case, but I think it, it kind of comes back to understanding your goals and that kind of thing.

All right, great. Well, I’m not seeing any more questions. Um, I think we mentioned the recording is coming out. Uh, we are sending a resource document. There was a question about slides specifically, Leah, are you sending the slide deck along with that resource doc or just the recording?

I sure can. I don’t think that it’s uploaded right now, but I could, I could send the slides.

Yep, uh, I think Fern wanted a copy. She said they look fantastic, or maybe she meant the content, but they’re both great.

Um, cool. And just another plug, if you’re interested in getting in touch with Forefront, you can reach out to us via this email. Find us on forefront.us and uh on our LinkedIn.

We monitor that pretty well. And then reach out to Leah directly. Her email and LinkedIn are on there and um she’s very responsive, so I’d love to talk to you guys.

So with that, thank you so much. We’re really excited to be part of Philly Tech Week again. Hope you’re all taking advantage of all the awesome events that are happening this week.

Uh, check out their calendar. I think it’s on Luma.

And yeah, thanks a lot. Any last words, Leah?

Oh, well, yes, just an actual invitation to please actually reach out to me if you have questions. I’m a real human being who really answers emails. I love helping people out, so don’t be a stranger. Shoot me a question if you have one. I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks, Leah. Thanks, everybody. Have a great day.