Monthly review

The monthly review is the bridge between weekly execution and quarterly targets. While the weekly scorecard allows you to manage the engine in real-time, the monthly review provides the space to assess if the machine itself is built correctly. Held on the 24th of each month, this session allows the team to zoom out from the individual metrics and evaluate the health of the entire growth motion. It is the moment where you stop asking "what happened?" and start asking "why did it happen, and should we change our approach?"

In a fast-paced B2B environment, it is easy to become reactive. The monthly review forces a proactive stance. You are not just looking at a dashboard; you are looking for patterns that define the business's trajectory. Without this rhythm, teams often miss the forest for the trees, hitting weekly lead targets while failing to notice that the cost of those leads has been creeping up steadily.

The review is the safeguard that ensures your growth is sustainable and aligned with your broader commercial goals. It provides a shared reality for marketing, sales, and leadership. By identifying conversion leaks or performance dips over a thirty-day window, the team can make informed decisions rather than guessing during the next planning cycle.

Who is involved

The review requires a specific group of stakeholders to be effective. It is a session for those who own the numbers and those who have the authority to change them:

• The growth leader: Facilitates the meeting and ensures the discussion stays focused on high-level strategy.
• Functional leads: The heads of marketing, sales, and customer success who provide the context behind the data.
• Leadership: The CEO or founders who provide context on broader business shifts and approve significant budget or resource changes.

The core of the monthly review is an honest assessment of your performance against the quarterly model. We look at the twelve KPIs that define your growth engine and compare the actual results to the assumptions made at the start of the quarter.

Identifying signal in the noise

B2B data can be volatile week to week, but over thirty days, a clear signal emerges. We look for the conversion leaks that are costing the business money. A good example is a team noticing that while ad spend is on track, the meeting booking rate has dropped from 12% to 7%. During the review, the sales lead might explain that a new competitor has launched a lower-priced alternative, causing prospects to stall.

A bad example is a team that sees leads are down and simply agrees to try harder next month. They miss the fact that their LinkedIn ads have reached a saturation point. Because they did not dig into the data, they continue to burn budget on an exhausted audience.

Evaluating your growth bets

Every month, you place specific bets—initiatives designed to move a focus metric. The review is the moment of truth for those bets. We ask whether the rebuild of the nurture sequence actually led to more discovery calls, or if the new case study increased the lead capture rate. If an initiative failed to move the metric, we treat it as a failure of the hypothesis, not the person. This distinction is vital for maintaining a high-performance culture.

The monthly review follows a structured 90-minute agenda. It mirrors the weekly scorecard but allows more time for deep diagnosis and significant strategic pivots.

Successes and priorities (10 minutes)

Spend five minutes acknowledging what went well. If the sales team hit their win rate target for the first time, or a new ad creative outperformed expectations, capture that learning so it can be repeated. Follow this with five minutes on priorities. This is a sanity check to confirm that the focus for the current month still makes sense. If lead volume has collapsed, you may need to pivot your focus from activation back to demand generation immediately.

Scoreboard and issues (65 minutes)

Spend fifteen minutes walking through the KPIs. Since the analysis was shared via video beforehand, this is a quick alignment. Owners state their number, status, and a one-sentence summary of why it is red, orange, or green.

The following fifty minutes are the meat of the meeting: the issues discussion. Following the IDS method, you work through red and orange items. Straightforward issues, like a budget increase to combat rising CPMs, result in immediate decisions. Complex issues, like a dropping win rate where the cause is unknown, result in an assigned investigation. Do not try to solve everything; if an issue requires a total strategy rethink, flag it for the formal monthly planning session.

Decisions and actions (15 minutes)

Spend ten minutes capturing course-corrections explicitly. This includes target adjustments in the model, budget reallocations, or resource shifts—such as hiring a freelancer because the marketing team is underwater. Finish with five minutes reviewing actions. Each action must have an owner and a deadline, usually before the next weekly scorecard. Reading these back ensures the meeting ends with clear accountability rather than vague commitments.

The monthly review is where you make the calls that are too big for a weekly meeting. These decisions typically involve re-calibrating the arithmetic of your growth engine to match reality.

Updating the arithmetic

If your quarterly model assumed a 20% win rate but you have achieved 15% for two months, the model is no longer accurate. You must update the assumption. This transparency forces a strategic choice: do you accept a lower revenue target, or do you identify a new lever to pull to make up the difference? This prevents the "hoping for a miracle" strategy that leads to missed annual targets.

Resource and budget shifts

In B2B growth, resources are always finite. The review is your mechanism for moving money and people to where they will have the most impact. If Google Search is delivering leads at £40 and LinkedIn is delivering them at £120 with similar quality, the review is the time to shift the budget. Similarly, if marketing is over-delivering leads but sales cannot keep up with the volume, you might decide to pause certain campaigns to allow the sales team to catch up.

The review happens on the 24th because it serves as the perfect preamble to the next month’s planning. By concluding the review with a clear understanding of what worked and what did not, the subsequent planning session becomes much easier.

You do not have to guess what to focus on next month because the review has already highlighted the biggest gap in your funnel. If the review showed that lead quality is the primary reason the win rate is down, then lead quality becomes the obvious focus metric for the coming month. This ensures your growth rhythms are a continuous, self-correcting loop.

The monthly review is the moment where you regain control over your growth engine. It is the time to stop the frantic pace of execution and ask if the work you are doing is actually moving the needle. By looking at the full month of data, involving the right people, and making hard decisions about your model and resources, you ensure that your growth is engineered rather than accidental.

With the month reviewed and the strategy adjusted, the team can return to their weekly scorecards with absolute clarity. You have turned a month of activity into a month of insight, setting the stage for a successful quarter.

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