The J.M. Smucker Company produces some of the world’s most iconic food products, including Smucker’s® jams, Jif® peanut butter, and Folgers® coffee. Their award-winning marketing campaigns only bolster their beloved international brands.
However, the manufacturer’s legacy budget management tools were creating some sticking points for the marketing operations team trying to manage millions of dollars.
Jill Carson Rennels, Sr. Director of Sales & Marketing Operations and Enterprise Analytics, set out to help The J.M. Smucker find a better way to allocate millions of marketing spend to drive growth across hundreds of products and markets. But her main tools for managing marketing budgets were inconsistent, disconnected spreadsheets and a calculator. These spreadsheets created a lot of time-consuming, manual work for the team, and they made it impossible to get a real-time view of their budgets or quickly shift investments.
“Thirty spreadsheets for an $8.5 billion company wasn’t going to cut it anymore,” says Jill. She set out to make the marketing team’s financial management systems more efficient.
Jill shared her process for transforming J.M. Smucker Co.’s marketing budgeting, planning, and performance tracking during a presentation at Gartner’s Marketing Symposium. Here’s an inside look at how Uptempo’s marketing planning software helped J.M. Smucker Co. streamline operations and pivot faster than ever before.
When Spreadsheets Outlive Their Usefulness
To get a clear picture of marketing budgets across 40+ brands, the team was manually calculating amounts across disconnected, inconsistently formatted spreadsheets each month—which was consuming their time, patience, and ability to be agile.
The company’s invoicing and financial review processes also slowed them down. Jill only received financial statements for spending accounts once a month. Then, she would need a few days for reconciling before she could tell if marketing was over budget or had leftover funds to shift to other initiatives. “To make a budget cut or shift, we’d have to put 20 or more people in a room, and it would take us half a day to figure out what our starting point was,” says Jill.
The marketing team consistently produces amazing work and JMS has a desire to track holistic business outcomes. For example, their “Lil Jif” campaign garnered 7 billion TikTok views, 209 media placements, and 345 million media impressions. With award-winning campaigns, the team wants to quickly and accurately track the total cost of the campaign against the results.
JMS knew creating a single source of truth for marketing budgets and plans would be the best path forward. So, they set out to find an integrated solution for financial and campaign management.
Envisioning a “Single Source of Truth” For Marketing Budgeting and Planning
Jill knew that creating a more agile approach to financial management would require new technology.
“My team goals are to provide the team, processes, technology, and analytics that our marketers and our salespeople need to do what they do best: sell to our markets,” says Jill. “We set out to come up with an agile, integrated solution that provided a single source of truth for marketing that would streamline planning, budgeting, forecasting, and campaign management.”
Included on her list of new system requirements were:
- Integration with ERP tools. It was tough getting marketing and finance aligned since neither team spoke the same language or worked in the same tools. They wanted a solution that would integrate with their existing ERP systems to help align the departments and make tracking ROI easier.
- A campaign calendar. The sales team often wanted visibility into when certain media was running so they could reach out to their retailers at the right time. A calendar tool both sales and marketing could trust would streamline plan communication.
- Real-time spending updates. JMS wanted to know when marketing spend was committed sooner (vs. waiting until the start of each month to view financial statements). A requirement for the new system included an automated integration with their PO tool to improve budget accuracy and reduce manual input of orders.
After putting out an RFP, J.M. Smucker Co. chose Uptempo, an enterprise marketing planning software as their new system of record.
Driving Accuracy and Agility Across Marketing and Sales Operations
By bringing planning, budgeting, and analytics together with a unified system of record, the team can focus on delivering new insights and agility to the organization.
With Uptempo, invoices are now added to the budget within 24 hours. This gives J.M. Smucker Co. real-time visibility into planned, forecasted, and actual marketing spend. It has also helped marketing and finance work better together. “Finance loves that our marketers can answer questions much more articulately than before,” says Jill.
The new system has also given the team:
- A 400% improvement in budget re-allocation.
- A 75% reduction in calculation time for working vs. non-working dollars.
- The ability to build a plan based on forecasted actuals in 24 hours.
“We have the ability to start talking about budgets and making decisions faster,” says Jill. “We can see that if we move dollars, here’s what it will do to our ROI. That’s a huge improvement for us.”
Key Learnings: Tips for Building a Unified Budgeting and Planning System
Here are a few tips from Jill on creating an integrated source of truth for your marketing planning and spending:
1. Create a shared vision across teams.
Finance and marketing may not be excited to switch tools or processes. But Jill says it’s important to get them both on board with consistently working in a shared tool. To do this, you must build a shared vision of success for both teams. “We needed to make sure that it wasn’t just a marketing system or a finance system—it had to serve both needs.”
Focus on creating a long-term vision of the benefits of a new system by asking stakeholders questions like “What if we could generate a results slide like this in minutes vs. hours?” or “What if we could tell you that when we put more dollars into this campaign, you’ll get this return?”
2. Be prepared to update your processes—not just your tech.
“Systems don’t solve everything on their own,” says Jill. “You have to put in processes on top of the system.” That’s why training and change management must be an integral part of your roll-out plan. As an example, Jill shares that ensuring the team was consistently using the correct campaign tags was crucial to their reporting. “Everything fails if you don’t tag your data properly,” she warns.
It also took time for the team to adjust to having real-time budgets. For instance, if someone pulled a report a few hours later than someone else, they may show different numbers if a new invoice was added in the meantime. Expect that getting everyone on the same page will take time, discipline, and practice.
3. Take small steps today vs. trying to boil the ocean.
Jill says her one regret along J.M. Smucker Co.’s transformation journey was focusing too much on getting the perfect tools in place before making small improvements to their processes. “I was trying to get the whole thing done at once,” says Jill, “But it took a year to get buy-in to do an RFP. I think if you take smaller steps, you can do it a little bit more efficiently.”
She recommends starting with simple things you can do today to work towards your goals. For example, you can make your spreadsheet templates the same so you can combine them more easily. You can also ensure you’re talking about planning and campaigns in the same way across teams to drive alignment.
