The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a way of measuring a company’s strategy from four angles instead of one: financial results, customers, internal processes, and learning and growth. Robert Kaplan and David Norton introduced it in the Harvard Business Review in 1992, because financial results on their own tell you how you did last quarter, not whether you’re building what will produce next year’s.
Marketing has a version of the same problem. Most marketing measurement lives in one corner, usually activity like traffic, leads or cost per lead, and never connects cleanly to the company’s goals. Applied to marketing, a balanced scorecard forces the connection: every marketing measure has to explain which business objective it serves, and how. One caution up front: four buckets of KPIs aren’t a balanced scorecard on their own. The strategy has to produce objectives, measures and targets that connect across the perspectives.
This article is for owners and leadership teams who want marketing measured on the company’s numbers.
The four perspectives
Kaplan and Norton framed each perspective as a question.
| Perspective | The original question | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Financial | How do we look to shareholders? | Revenue, margin, cash, return on investment |
| Customer | How do customers see us? | Who buys, why they choose you, whether they stay and grow |
| Internal process | What must we excel at? | The operations that create value for those customers |
| Learning and growth (originally “innovation and learning”) | Can we continue to improve and create value? | People, skills, information systems and culture: the capabilities that make the strategy executable |
The word “balanced” refers to the balance between them: lagging financial results and the leading measures that drive them, outside views and inside ones, short term and long term.
The strategy map ties them together
The perspectives become useful when they’re connected. Kaplan and Norton later added the strategy map, a one-page picture of the cause-and-effect logic you’re betting on: if we build these capabilities (learning and growth), we expect these processes to improve (internal process), which should improve what customers experience and choose (customer), which should improve the financial result.
A simple marketing version might read like this, from the bottom up:
- The team gets better at turning what buyers say on sales calls into the company’s messaging.
- So marketing produces more conversations with the right kind of buyer, and hands them to sales with an agreed definition of qualified.
- So more of the right customers should choose you, with fewer deals turning into price fights.
- So revenue should grow with healthy margins.
Each line is an objective, and each objective gets one or two measures. The map is also a set of assumptions you’re testing. If the measures at the bottom improve and nothing moves at the top, one of the links is wrong.
Balanced scorecard vs weekly scorecard vs dashboard vs OKRs
These get confused constantly, and the original version of this post mixed them up too. They do different jobs.
| Tool | What it is | Typical rhythm | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Balanced scorecard | Strategy measured across four perspectives, connected by cause and effect | Measures vary; the strategy is commonly reviewed quarterly | Checking whether the measures add up to the strategy |
| Weekly scorecard (EOS, from Traction) | 5 to 15 numbers, each with an owner and a weekly goal | Weekly | A weekly pulse on whether the business is on track |
| KPI dashboard | A live view of selected metrics | Continuous, or as data updates | Watching operations |
| OKRs | Objectives and measurable key results | Set for a defined cycle, often quarterly | Focusing effort on a few changes |
I made a short video in early 2024 about building a weekly scorecard for my company’s marketing, after reading Gino Wickman’s Traction, which is where that weekly format comes from.
Scorecards in business and marketing
Listen to Rodney talk about the importance of making data-informed improvements.
At the time I said the marketing KPIs were “pretty obvious”: more traffic, more leads, lower cost per lead. My view has moved since. Cost per lead and lead volume can look great while the business goes nowhere, because they don’t tell you whether the leads were the right ones. On my ads consulting page I now put it this way: “It doesn’t matter if an account sends you fifty billion leads. If they don’t make you money, it didn’t do its job.”
An EOS-style scorecard gives you a weekly pulse on whether the business is on track. A balanced scorecard asks a different question: whether the measures you’re watching add up to the strategy you say you’re pursuing. Many companies benefit from both: a short weekly scorecard, and a quarterly review of the balanced view.
Why marketing needs the balanced view
As companies grow, departments start defining success for themselves. Marketing can improve lead volume while lead quality falls. Sales can improve its close rate by accepting fewer opportunities. Each function can look good while the company does worse. In my piece on the stages of business growth I put the fix this way: “one shared set of company goals that every department’s numbers ladder up to.” A shared scorecard makes those tradeoffs visible.
A marketing balanced scorecard example
Here’s an illustrative example for a B2B services company that wants to grow revenue with healthy margins. It shows the mechanics, from objective to measure to target to initiative. The targets are deliberately left as “set by leadership,” because they should come from your own economics, not from an article.
| Perspective | Objective | Measure | Target | Initiative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Financial | Grow profitable revenue from new customers | Gross margin on new work; fully loaded cost to acquire a customer against what a customer is worth | Set by leadership | Price and scope new work from the cost you can afford |
| Customer | Win more of the buyers we serve best | Win rate on qualified opportunities with ideal-profile buyers; retention and expansion of ideal customers; how often wins cite the reason we want to be chosen for | Set by leadership | Sharpen positioning around why the best customers choose you |
| Internal process | Produce, hand over and learn from qualified conversations | Qualified opportunities created by marketing, against a written definition; speed of follow-up; sales feedback on lead quality reaching marketing each month; experiments reviewed on their date | Set by leadership | Agree the definition of qualified with sales; set up a monthly feedback review |
| Learning and growth | Build the capabilities marketing needs to execute | Share of the team trained on the positioning and sales process; share of opportunities with source, outcome and loss reason recorded; buyer research accessible to the people creating campaigns | Set by leadership | Train the team; fix CRM fields; build a shared library of buyer insight |
Two things make this work. Every measure has an owner, and every measure has a written definition. “Qualified” means nothing until someone writes down what it means at your company, and the definition has to be agreed by marketing and sales before either is measured against it.
The question bank
The hardest part of a balanced scorecard isn’t the format. It’s asking the right questions before choosing the measures. These are the ones I’d put to a leadership team.
Financial questions
- What can we afford to pay, all in, to win a new customer? On what assumptions?
- Which customers and service lines actually make us money once delivery is counted?
- How exposed are we to our few biggest customers?
- If marketing hit every target this year, what would change in the financials, and by when?
Customer questions
- Where do our best customers actually come from?
- Are more of the right buyers arriving already knowing who we are?
- Why do we win, why do we lose, and would our customers say the same?
Internal process questions
- What does “qualified” mean here, in writing?
- Which numbers belong to marketing, which to sales, and which do we own together?
- Does every marketing effort have a hypothesis, a way to measure it and a date we’ll look at it?
Learning and growth questions
- Does our team have the skills and information to execute the positioning we’ve chosen?
- Is our CRM data good enough to trust: source, outcome and loss reason on every opportunity?
- What did we learn from our numbers last quarter that changed a decision?
- What would we need to see in the data to make us stop, change or double down?
That last question is one I think every owner should ask before any marketing plan starts: at this budget, what can we realistically expect and by when, and what would make us change course?
How to build one in a leadership session
- Start at the top. Write the company’s financial objective for the year in one sentence.
- Work backward. What has to be true about customers for that to happen? What do you have to do well internally to make that true? What do your people need to get better at?
- Draw the map. Put those objectives on one page, connected from bottom to top. If you can’t explain how an objective connects to the one above it, question whether it belongs.
- Choose few measures. I’d keep it to one or two per objective. It also helps to mark each one as either a number you’ll hold someone to or one you’re watching for context.
- Write the definitions. For each measure: what it is in plain English, exactly how it’s calculated, where the data comes from and who owns it.
- Set the rhythm. Leading indicators can go on a weekly scorecard. The balanced view gets a real review quarterly. Some numbers, like acquisition cost, are worth calculating monthly and deciding on quarterly, because weekly swings create false urgency.
- Review the links, not just the numbers. Each quarter, ask whether the cause and effect on the map is holding.
What usually goes wrong
- Too many measures. A scorecard with forty numbers is really a report. Nobody can act on all of it.
- Measures that don’t connect to strategy. A metric that wouldn’t change any decision whether it went up or down is decoration.
- Untested cause and effect. The map is a set of assumptions. Critics of the balanced scorecard have pointed out that the links between perspectives are often assumed rather than proven. Treat them as hypotheses and check them.
- One department held to a number several produce. Revenue from new customers depends on marketing, sales and delivery. Split shared numbers at the handoff so each team owns the part it can move.
- Tying it to pay too early. Make the numbers visible and trusted first. Tie them to reviews or compensation too soon and people start managing the number instead of the work.
- Chasing perfect attribution. You won’t be able to trace every deal to the marketing that influenced it. Name the limits and decide anyway.
What about work that’s hard to measure?
The original version of this post asked a fair question: how do you score something like a logo or a brand? You probably can’t score the artifact directly. You can score what it’s supposed to change, using leading indicators that sit on the customer side of the scorecard: whether more of the right buyers know who you are, whether they arrive better informed, whether you win more often and on better terms. Read those quarterly. Some work, like brand foundations, will never produce a clean weekly number. Defend it as strategy, with its own indicators, instead of forcing it into a metric that misleads.
Is the balanced scorecard still relevant?
Yes, as a way of thinking, even if you never use the name. The tools have changed and many companies now use OKRs or EOS-style scorecards for the operating rhythm. But the core idea, that financial results lag and you need balanced, connected leading measures to manage what drives them, is as useful as it was in 1992. For marketing in particular, it’s still one of the clearest ways to stop measuring activity and start measuring contribution.
Common questions about the balanced scorecard
What are the four perspectives of the balanced scorecard?
Financial, customer, internal process, and learning and growth.
What is a balanced scorecard example for marketing?
A financial objective such as growing profitable revenue from new customers, supported by customer measures like win rate with ideal buyers, process measures like qualified opportunities created against a written definition, and learning measures like the quality of CRM data and team training. The example table above shows one version, with targets and initiatives.
What’s the difference between a balanced scorecard and OKRs?
A balanced scorecard measures whether the overall strategy is working across four perspectives. OKRs focus a team on a few specific changes for a set period. They can work together: the scorecard shows where performance is weak, and OKRs focus the effort to fix it.
What’s the difference between a balanced scorecard and an EOS scorecard?
The EOS scorecard from Traction is a short weekly list of numbers with owners and goals, used in a weekly leadership meeting. A balanced scorecard is a broader, usually quarterly view of strategy across four perspectives. Many companies benefit from both.
How many measures should a balanced scorecard have?
Few enough that a leadership team can discuss all of them in one meeting. One or two per objective is a good discipline.
Where to go from here
Write your financial objective for the year in one sentence, then work through the question bank with your leadership team before choosing a single metric. The questions will tell you more than any template.
If you’d like help connecting marketing to your company’s numbers and building the measurement your leadership team can trust, that’s part of the work I do as a fractional CMO. You can start a conversation on Work With Me.
