Strategic bets & growth levers matrix

CMO Alliance's strategic bets & growth levers matrix is a decision-making framework that helps CMOs and marketing leadership teams surface, evaluate, and prioritize their biggest growth opportunities for the year ahead.

Instead of trying to do everything, this matrix guides you towards making deliberate, high-conviction bets that are grounded in business context and resourcing realities (and which factor in potential upside). We've designed it to help you think like a growth-focused executive, not just a campaign manager.

What’s inside the matrix?

The framework is split into four sections (awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention), and helps you map out your key strategic bets and evaluate them against four criteria:

1. Effort – How much time, budget, and resourcing is required?
2. Confidence – How certain are you that this bet will pay off?
3. Upside – What is the potential business impact (e.g., revenue, growth, efficiency)?
4. Strategic alignment – Does this align with the company’s long-term vision and current goals?

Each bet or initiative is scored across these dimensions, helping you quickly identify:

• High-conviction growth levers worth doubling down on
• Speculative or emerging bets to explore or test
• Expensive distractions to delay or deprioritize

The spreadsheet includes built-in scoring formulas and a clear visual summary—making it easy to communicate your thinking to stakeholders.

In short, the matrix gives you a structured, transparent way to make smart decisions about where to invest time, energy, and budget—so you can drive results without spreading your team too thin.

It also helps elevate marketing’s role in company strategy by tying marketing initiatives directly to business impact.

Download your strategic bets and growth levers matrix

Strategic bets & growth levers matrix

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