The challenge for enterprise CMOs
Running marketing at scale isn’t easy. Tool sprawl, patchwork data, fuzzy attribution and budgeting stalemates make it nearly impossible for CMOs to see, decide, act, and report with confidence.
Many enterprises rely on Workfront to manage projects—but execution alone doesn’t answer the questions your CMO and CFO care about:
- Where is the money going?
- Are the right initiatives being funded?
- What’s working and what should we change?
To run marketing like a business, CMOs need visibility into budgets, clarity on financial alignment, and the ability to tie every investment back to business outcomes. That’s where Uptempo comes in—a platform of record for strategic plans, budgets, and performance.
Here’s why leading brands like Cisco, Estée Lauder, Charles Schwab, and Workday rely on both Uptempo and Workfront to drive impact and prove the value of marketing.
How Uptempo and Workfront fit together
Think of it as blueprint + engine:
- Uptempo provides the blueprint: strategic plans, budgets, forecasts, and performance tracking.
- Workfront provides the engine: projects, tasks, resources, and workflows.
In practice, this could look like Commvault’s Workfront and Uptempo integration where marketers can initiate a Workfront project directly from Uptempo with a single click. Campaign details flow automatically, eliminating duplicate entry and keeping strategy aligned with execution. The result is fewer errors, tighter alignment, and a unified view of plans, spend, and progress across the marketing lifecycle.
Workfront streamlines project management and campaign execution
Workfront is the enterprise standard for coordinating go-to-market work across global teams. It’s a cloud-based work management solution designed to help teams collaborate, manage projects, and streamline workflows. Workfront’s emphasis on automation ensures tasks are efficiently managed, reducing bottlenecks in campaign delivery.
What Workfront does best:
- Project management: plan schedules, assign tasks, and track progress.
- Work collaboration & integrations: deep Adobe Creative Cloud integration, file sharing, and discussion spaces for reviews.
- Resource management: allocate resources with visibility into capacity and timelines.
Bottom line: Workfront excels at giving enterprise marketing teams visibility into project status and ensuring go-to-market execution stays on track.
Uptempo streamlines budget planning and proves marketing’s impact
Where Workfront manages work, Uptempo manages budgets and business outcomes. It unifies top-down budgeting with real-time performance tracking so leaders can set strategy, fund the plan, and pivot based on results in hours instead of weeks.
Uptempo also has working vs. non-working spend classification built in at the line-item level, so leaders can see how much goes to media/activation versus production/overhead and rebalance fast.
What Uptempo does best:
- Flexible hierarchies: customize budgets and campaigns to mirror complex enterprise organizations and reporting roll-ups.
- Turn budgets into funded plans: allocate top-down budgets and reallocate based on performance in real time with audit trails.
- Automate controls: workflows for approvals, transfers, and reconciliation.
- See spend vs. plan vs. actuals: at any time, without manually stitching hundreds of spreadsheets together.
- Prove impact: tie every marketing investment directly to corporate objectives and KPIs.
Bottom line: Uptempo shows marketers exactly where the budget stands, what’s driving impact, and where to pivot investments as conditions change.
Where Workfront Plan fits (and where it doesn’t)
Workfront Plan gives leaders portfolio and roadmap views to prioritize initiatives, assess capacity, and align delivery teams. But it’s not built to be a finance-grade system of record for managing marketing budgets or performance data.
Workfront Plan is great for portfolio prioritization, as well as capacity and resource scenarios.
Workfront Plan is not designed for:
- Top-down marketing budgets and allocations across brands/regions/products
- Approvals, holds, and transfers with audit trails
- Plan vs. commit vs. actuals reconciled to finance systems
- ROI attribution tied to investment lines
Why it matters for CMOs
These two solutions, when properly integrated, give marketing teams a powerful system that governs the entire strategic planning to go-to-market continuum.
Together, Uptempo and Workfront give leaders what single-purpose tools can’t:
- Visibility: one view of spend, plans, and progress.
- Agility: faster approvals, campaign launches, and performance pivots.
- Credibility: the data CFOs need to see the value of marketing.
Workfront is the work management standard for enterprise marketing teams. Uptempo is a leading enterprise marketing performance platform, purpose-built for strategic marketing planning and financial management. Alone, each is powerful. Together, they deliver the complete system CMOs need to run marketing with confidence.
