Sherry Prescott-Willis is the person in the room who says, "If we don't hit X by week three, what are we going to do?" Most CMOs hope that doesn't come up. Sherry plans for it in advance, which is why she can kill a campaign in the middle of a quarter and everyone still trusts her at the end of it.
The sunk cost conversation every CMO avoids is the one where you admit that the money you already spent on a campaign doesn't mean you should spend more. Boards force it eventually. A CEO will ask you in a meeting, "Why are we still funding this if it's not working?" and you'll realize you have no answer except "we've already invested in it." That's when you know your decision-making has drifted.
Building a pipeline review cadence that surfaces problems early means you're not waiting for a monthly forecast to realize something's broken. You're reviewing pipeline contribution from each channel weekly. You're looking for: is this channel tracking to its committed number? Is the trend line moving the right direction? Are the conversion rates holding? You're not looking for perfection. You're looking for "this isn't on path" early enough to act.
What if-we-don't-hit-X-by-week-three planning looks like in practice is unglamorous and exact. At the start of the quarter, you say: "Channel A needs to generate $200K by week three, or we're going to reallocate budget to channel B." You put that number on the board. When week three hits and channel A is at $140K, you execute the plan. No emergency meeting. No "let's see if week four saves us." You knew this was possible. You prepared for it.
The cultural signal it sends when leadership kills something fast is that speed and honesty matter more than sunk costs and hope. Your team sees that. They learn that proposing something is not a lifetime commitment. They get more comfortable proposing bold things because they know the exit is clean. Most leaders fear that killing something will discourage risk-taking. Actually, it encourages it. Your team will take bigger risks if they know failure won't be a six-month death march.
Sherry built contingency plans into the quarter before the quarter started. Not after. She looked at her channels, her targets, her team's capacity, and she asked: "What if this one underperforms? Where does that budget go? What do we do differently?" She made those decisions in advance, so when the moment came to execute, it wasn't a crisis response. It was plan B, which she'd already decided was a good plan B.
The hardest part is the conversation with your CFO before the quarter starts: "I'm going to kill some of these campaigns mid-quarter if the data says I should." Most CFOs respect that more than you think. It means you're not going to be asking for emergency reallocations in week eight. It means you have a plan.
Your board would rather you kill something in week three than defend it in week thirteen.
Scott.