Marketing planning at large companies can feel like a never-ending grind, with misalignment across teams, endless cycles of disconnected spreadsheets, and time wasted on tasks that don’t drive meaningful outcomes.
That’s the reality Evan Mager inherited when he stepped into his role at Workday as VP, Marketing Strategy and Operations. Over the past year, he’s led a complete reset of Workday’s planning motion. What started as a fragmented, reactive process is now a unified, disciplined system that’s reshaping how marketing collaborates with finance, sales, and the broader business.
At Gartner Marketing Symposium, Evan shared how Workday rebuilt its marketing planning process from the ground up. The conversation revealed how the team unified its approach, drove alignment across functions, and gained credibility to shape broader corporate planning.
The Problem: Planning That Couldn’t Answer Basic Questions
When Evan took the reins, the state of planning was clear—and painful. Teams worked in silos. Each leader had their own spreadsheets, their own assumptions, and their own cadence. Visibility across regions and programs was almost nonexistent.
“We had spreadsheets everywhere,” Evan said. “It felt like we were always playing catch up.”
Even simple questions such as “What are we spending in this region? What’s planned in this segment?” took too long to answer. There was no shared view of the truth, and no easy way to hold teams accountable.
The Shift: One Plan, Zero Assumptions
Evan and his team didn’t tweak around the edges—they rebuilt the planning process from scratch. First came consolidation: a single, unified plan across campaigns, budgets, and regions.
Then came a harder reset. They assumed zero budget and headcount growth. Every new initiative had to earn its way into the plan.
“We told the whole team—including myself: if you want to do something new, you’ve got to deprioritize something else,” Evan said. “Even if it’s a mandate.”
It was a forcing function. Tough, but transformative. Through this change, they were able to rationalize marketing spend across brand, demand, and events, using benchmarks to inform future allocations.
Suddenly, every conversation was grounded in tradeoffs, not wish lists.
The Alignment: Getting Finance and Sales in the Room Early
To avoid planning in a vacuum, Evan’s team brought corporate planning, sales strategy, and RevOps into the process from day one. They also engaged the CMO early—vetting every framework, ratio, and recommendation to match her mental model of how marketing should operate.
“We weren’t just building our own plan,” Evan said. “We were shaping how the business plans.”
The result: Marketing moved from a supporting role to a strategic driver. For the first time, they influenced the broader corporate and sales motions—instead of reacting to them.
The Tech: A System Built to Scale
Evan realized Marketing needed more than spreadsheets—they needed a single source of truth for their annual plans. He got the green light to implement Uptempo’s marketing planning platform.
Now, Uptempo gives Workday a dedicated system for managing marketing budgets, and soon all global marketing activities.
The Impact: More Credibility. More Clarity. More Budget.
By the time the new planning cycle wrapped, the payoff was clear.
Marketing earned new credibility with the executive committee. Teams aligned not just on where to invest—but where not to. They could finally have candid conversations about what to cut, what to pause, and where gaps remained.
That clarity made a difference. With a rock-solid business case in hand, the team secured an incremental seven-figure investment from the CFO—funding that wouldn’t have been possible under the old approach.
“We could all see what we were doing, move in the same direction, and hold each other accountable,” Evan said.
Looking Ahead: A Long-Term Vision for Planning
With the foundation in place, Evan is focused on what is next. His team is working to connect budget and performance data through Snowflake, aiming to tie every dollar spent to real marketing outcomes. He’s also pushing toward multi-year planning horizons, noting the importance of preparing for 2028—not just the next fiscal cycle.
As benchmarks and strategic planning become more sophisticated, Evan wants his team to guide—not just document—how Workday invests in marketing.
“We’re not just saying ‘here’s how we’re spending.’ We’re saying ‘here’s how we should be spending.’”
Elevating the Role of Strategy and Operations
Evan closed with a challenge for marketing strategy and operations teams: stop being reactive. Start leading.
He wants his team to be the connective tissue across marketing—to pull people together, solve cross-functional problems, and bring bold ideas forward before anyone else asks.
“We want to be indispensable leaders of how marketing works,” he said.
At Workday, that vision is already taking shape. The planning process is no longer a necessary evil—it’s a strategic advantage. With the right mindset and the right system, Evan’s team turned planning from a burden into a business driver.
