Six Questions to Ask Your Marketing Team This Week

You can learn more about the health of your marketing infrastructure in a 20-minute conversation than in a month of campaign reports. These six questions cut to the foundation — the systems that determine whether your marketing investment compounds or evaporates.

The Six Questions

1. "What is our DMARC policy, and what does it mean?"

If your marketing team can't answer this, your email infrastructure is almost certainly incomplete. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) is the policy that tells receiving mail servers what to do when an email claiming to be from your domain fails authentication checks.

A correct answer sounds like: "We're at p=quarantine, moving toward p=reject. We finished DKIM alignment last month." An answer that doesn't include a policy level means the configuration is incomplete.

Why it matters: DMARC at p=none (or absent entirely) means anyone can spoof your email domain. It also means Gmail and Yahoo may be soft-failing your marketing emails, suppressing deliverability across your entire list.

2. "If a buyer asks ChatGPT to recommend solutions in our category, do we appear? How do you know?"

Most marketing teams have never checked this. AI visibility isn't a theoretical future concern — it's a present reality for any business whose buyers do research online. The answer to this question reveals whether your team has done a basic AI brand audit.

A correct answer involves actually having run the query and knowing what came back. If the answer is "I assume we appear because our SEO is good," that's not a correct answer — AI and SEO visibility are related but not identical.

3. "How many verified reviews do we have on G2 and Capterra, and what was our volume last quarter?"

Review velocity — not just total count — matters. A brand with 400 G2 reviews that hasn't had a new review in 18 months tells a different story than a brand with 150 reviews growing at 20 per quarter. Both the absolute number and the recency signal are evaluated by buyers and by AI systems.

If your team can't give you a number and a trend, you don't have a review program. You have a review page.

4. "What email service provider are we using for cold outreach, and is it the same domain we use for company email?"

If your team is sending cold prospecting from the same domain as product emails and executive communications, that's a structural risk that needs to be addressed before the next campaign runs.

5. "Do we have a newsletter? If so, what percentage of our subscriber list opened last month?"

A newsletter is the cornerstone of owned audience strategy. It's the only marketing channel where you have a direct, algorithm-free line to an audience you've built. If you have one, the open rate and list size are basic operational metrics your team should know.

If you don't have one, the follow-up question is: "Where is our owned audience? What channel do we control directly, without depending on a platform?" If the answer is "our social following," that's a rented asset, not an owned one.

6. "What does our competitive review landscape look like on G2 right now — specifically, how many reviews does our top competitor have versus us?"

Most marketing teams can describe their competitors' products. Fewer can describe their competitors' review profiles. But for buyers who independently validate vendor claims, the review gap is often the deciding factor in final selection — particularly when the product capabilities are similar.

Knowing you have 80 G2 reviews while your top competitor has 600 isn't just a vanity metric gap. It's a buyer confidence gap that shows up in win rates.

What to Do With the Answers

These six questions map directly to the REASON method's six pillars: Email (DMARC), AI Visibility, Reviews, Outreach, Network (newsletter), and Reviews/Social (competitive benchmark). Your team's ability to answer them tells you exactly where your infrastructure is solid and where there are gaps costing you pipeline.