As I have discussed in The Revenue Marketing Book, at the heart of revenue marketing is — moving marketing away from being a cost center. Before you get to becoming a revenue center, you need to be a cost-effective center. So it all begins with asking the right questions around what we have and what we need. For instance, What stage of the GAME model are you in? Are your marketing and sales teams in sync with respect to the accounts they are working on? Do you have a process set up for how things flow from marketing campaigns to program management and onboarding to converting free customers to paid programs, customer success, etc.? Do you have the necessary resources and tools to measure and attribute engagement-to-revenue outcomes? Are you able to measure improvement in operational efficiency, conversion rate, etc.? In short – are you clear on what is working for you and what isn’t? The above questions are indeed indicative, which you can tweak according to where you stand in the revenue journey. But there are several aspects in the marketing journey, where we end up doing things that don’t add any value. In other words, the areas where we can cut our spending, take money away from the marketing line items that don’t yield results to the ones that you might want to pour more gasoline on. Let’s look at the top 4 marketing money wasters that you can stay away from.