Dots Oyebolu is an operational craftsman who thinks about demand gen in clean 90-day cycles. "In 90 days you know exactly what is working and what is not working," he says. "Be honest, shut it down, move on." That's not luck. That's discipline applied to a calendar.
Why 90 days is the right evaluation window has to do with how marketing works. Four weeks isn't enough. Your campaigns haven't matured. Your targeting hasn't converged. You don't have signal yet. Six months is too long. You've already sunk resources. The sunk cost gravity has made it harder to kill something. Three months puts you in the window where you have real data, real feedback, but you still have runway left in the fiscal year to course correct.
By day 30, you should know if a channel is worth pursuing at all. You're not looking for success. You're looking for non-zero signal. Is this channel touching real people? Are conversion rates in the neighborhood of workable? Is the cost per acquisition pointing toward profitability or away from it? If day 30 looks like zero signal, you probably kill it. You don't wait ninety days to learn what you already know.
By day 60, you should know if this channel can hit your committed number. You've run enough volume. You've tested enough variations. The data is clearer. You know if the CAC is going to work. That's the number that determines whether you double down or prepare to shut it down. The metrics that tell you a channel is working before the quarter is over are the ones that predict the end-of-quarter result: pipeline to commit ratio, lead quality, and sales cycle length.
Killing a campaign mid-quarter without making it a political event is a matter of process and framing. You don't ambush your CFO in a meeting. You've built the decision into the quarter plan. You present the data to your VP: "Here's what we committed. Here's what this channel is tracking to. Here's the gap. Here's where we're moving the budget instead." You treat it like a reallocation, not a failure. Because it's both.
How to communicate a program cancellation to sales in a way that builds trust instead of breaking it is simple: tell them early, tell them why, tell them what's coming instead. Don't wait until the end of the quarter to tell sales that a pipeline source is drying up. Tell them at day 45: "This channel isn't going to hit its number. We're shifting to X instead. Here's when you'll see new pipeline from X." Sales doesn't hate changes. Sales hates surprises.
The 90-day cycle compounds. You run it once, and you build experience. You run it a second time, and you run it better. By the end of the year, your organization has evaluated multiple bets. Most failed. A few succeeded. But you know what succeeds, and you're not carrying ballast from something that never worked.
That's the advantage of being methodical about it. You end the year lighter, smarter, faster.
Scott.