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Too many times, an organization’s business plan is set up as a finished financial model of targets and margins, and marketing is expected to get the organization to those goals.  

But what if marketing got in earlier in the initial planning process?  What if marketing could have input along with the CFO, CEO, and other stakeholders?

Here are some steps to move marketing from a cost center to an important part of the organization’s growth.

• Redefine the planning process by connecting the three most common levels from the start.
  • The CFO and board, who see annual planning from a financial perspective: revenue targets and margins, along with the spending necessary to support them.
  • The CEO, who has more of an overview, seeing the organization’s strategic story being related to the board and the market.
  • The stakeholders, who are looking for specifics of campaigns, channels, content, and programs that require resources for execution. 

By learning the planned assumptions from the CEO, CFO, board, and stakeholders, the marketing team can better plan its role in meeting growth rates, regional priorities, product bets, and non-negotiables.  

• Question marketing’s resource allocation. Typically, marketing is allocated 8-12% of revenue. But is this amount appropriate or sufficient? With so many changes in markets, channels, technology, and expectations, a fixed allocation may not be adequate. Marketing leaders should be able to make their case for sufficient resources to meet goals by addressing:
  • Performance and risk profile of current budget
  • Areas that are under-funded for achieving goals
  • A comparison of outcomes with current budget vs. an additional 2-3% of revenue for designated areas.
• Create a systematic record that clearly shows marketing’s performance in real time. While other departments – finance, sales, etc. – do this, marketing often relies on a much more informal, less organized documentation approach of spreadsheets, dashboards, and placeholder metrics.
  • If you don’t already have an enterprise-grade documentation system connecting resource planning and CRMs with your execution stack to provide a clear view of spend, execution, and performance in real time, you should consider working toward it. This will provide all the players with a shared version of your marketing truth.
  • Be sure to categorize spend documentation in a manner consistent with the general ledger codes used by finance.
• Speak a common language with the CFO. Marketing metrics like engagement, likes, event attendees, attributed views of digital display ads, etc., tend to be representative indicators of performance. CFOs want to hear finite information like revenue, margin, productivity, and risk. Thus, there needs to be some interpretation when presenting marketing information to the CFO. Rather than reporting a specific outcome of increasing followers by 20%, show how $X was pulled from a lower-performing program to generate the increased followers at Z% lower customer acquisition cost. If you could only show one slide to your CFO, would he or she be able to connect it to dollars?
• Be proactive in the budgeting process. It is common for marketing to receive a budget that has already been approved, leaving the department with a fixed amount to work with. To get in earlier in the budgeting process, begin to document your department’s budget actions during the year, showing cause and effect, such as:
  • Reallocating funds from lower-performing efforts to efforts with higher yield.
  • Situations of adjusting on the fly to rapid, unexpected market changes that could have gone better with more budget flexibility.

Using this information from real examples during the year, have proactive conversations with the CFO and CEO to bolster your argument for more and earlier input into the budgeting process.

• Ensure against second-guessing. By developing a clear plan supported by data that can be understood by all, you can show how marketing is connected to the organization’s model. Demonstrate how marketing’s activities are mapped to the organizational objectives and financial targets.