With host Darrell Alfonso
Jim Williams
Chief Marketing Officer
Craig Moore
VP, Principal AnalystGuest Speaker
Marketing planning is always an experience — but it doesn’t have to be a bad one! You just need to have a solid strategic process to guide you, and the ability to make adjustments when needed. Watch our on-demand webinar on marketing planning in a dynamic environment, where you’ll learn to adapt for internal growth and economic challenges.
In this session, you will:
Transcript
0:07: I am Jim Williams I’m the CMO at Uptempo.
0:13: Many of you may not be familiar with Uptempo because it’s it’s a new brand, a new company that was forged from the merger of three companies that you may be familiar with the brand maker.
0:25: A company called Allocadia and Hive9 came together and rebranded as Uptempo.
0:30: We are planning software, we focus on the intersection of plan spend and work with a mission to help marketers plan better spend, smarter pivot faster and execute with confidence.
0:44: That’s our goal.
0:45: So obviously, it’s a timely topic for us given the space that we’re in as well.
0:51: I am delighted to be joined by Craig Moore who’s a VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research.
0:58: Craig.
0:59: Thank you for joining us.
1:01: Glad to be here.
1:03: Craig If you have not worked with Craig and I think many of us have we marketing and marketing leadership, but Craig has been at Forrester Research and prior to that it serious decisions for 12 years now, he is the person to go to when you talk about marketing planning.
1:19: He leads the marketing planning practice.
1:22: and he frequently consults with organizations of all sizes on how to tie your go to market initiatives to corporate goals, like revenue targets corporate objectives, how to get to RO I.
1:35: And of course, he could be the most popular man at Forrester right now in October, given his focus.
1:43: So thank you, Craig as well for joining.
1:45: I know I can imagine.
1:46: You’re very busy.
1:47: So I’m delighted to have you.
1:49: Have you here with us.
1:50: It’s planning season.
1:51: It’s a busy time of the year.
1:54: It is final thing I’ll do is just quick agenda.
1:59: What we’re gonna go through and and the housekeeping, which of course you have to do with every webinar.
2:03: So we got a little bit of a special agenda planned here today.
2:07: Craig and I will both be talking of course about marketing planning and how to be prepared for change, which I’m looking forward to, but we’ll, we’ll go probably 35 minutes.
2:16: We’ll be plenty of time for questions.
2:18: I was in a recent workshop with Craig where it seemed like every one of the slides you went through, it listed a lot of questions, a lot of comments.
2:27: So I would encourage the audience to get involved as well.
2:29: Please use the Q and A feature to ask questions.
2:33: You can use chat, the banter back and forth as well, but we will pay attention to the Q and a feature, we will of course record today’s session and we’ll make it available to you afterwards for you to share with your friends, family and loved ones.
2:48: And the last thing I think I’ve just mentioned is often you do these webinars, they’re sponsored and hosted by a vendor, vendor and they’re great, awesome thought, leadership learnings, best practices.
3:00: But you’re kind of left wondering what, why, why would Uptempo do this?
3:03: So for those of you that are interested in offering a special backstage path session.
3:07: So at the end of the Q and A, if you want to stick around and see how we provide a marketing system of record for planning, financial management and work management, stick around.
3:17: We’ll provide a 15 minute overview of the platform we provide to marketing teams.
3:25: So with that, I’m gonna go ahead and we’ll just jump into it.
3:28: Craig.
3:29: All right.
3:32: So I wanna ground our conversation today because the term planning is applied to many different things and as is the term strategy.
3:40: So today, what we’re gonna talk about is annual marketing planning.
3:46: And, and we just look at that as the process of lining up marketing’s objectives to the business objectives and to plot out what the organization wants to do for the next year.
3:57: But that kind of nests into a whole host of planning at the higher level, go ahead and put the build up.
4:04: There are other kinds of plans being developed.
4:07: So there’s a corporate strategy that should be written down somewhere, but it’s not always, but it generally is a 3 to 5 year view of where the company wants to go.
4:17: It represents the aspirations of the organization, the markets that the company desires to get into.
4:24: Maybe some of the trends of buyers or technology trends are encapsulated in a corporate strategy and, and that’s what the company sort of looks to as to where it wants to go from your year.
4:36: And then aligned with that are a product or a service offering road map.
4:41: And this operates somewhat asynchronously from the revenue plan and the and the marketing plan.
4:46: But it is bringing together the innovation of the organization and what the products or offerings are that you plan over a period of time and then in most organizations sales or in, in an emerging way.
5:00: Today, we see a lot of chief revenue officers coming in to build the revenue plan and all of those are being developed and in somewhat independent sets of activities from the annual marketing plan, but the annual marketing plan is fed by a lot of that information.
5:15: And then underneath the annual marketing plan are the campaign plans.
5:19: And when we think of campaigns and at forester, we think of these big marketing go to market initiatives that could last longer than a year.
5:27: So you might have plan campaigns that were started last year or before or you might be starting some this year and, and part of your planning process might be to end a campaign during the plan year as well.
5:37: So these campaigns are running somewhat asynchronously to the marketing plan.
5:42: And then within the campaigns, we look at the program plans and inside programs are tactics.
5:47: And so that’s our taxonomy and what we think about and what we’re gonna focus on today is the annual marketing planning process.
5:56: Let’s go to the next slide.
5:59: Great.
6:00: So I am looking forward to getting into this because of something that I certainly haven’t encountered over the last couple of years working at Uptempo and even more recently, this what I call plan, intense palpable anxiety around planning.
6:22: as you mentioned, this is an extremely popular topic right around now.
6:26: And you know, so why, why is that, why, why is there so much anxiety around planning?
6:31: I had a couple of conversations recently, I am involved in a community which I would highly recommend if you’re a marketing executive called the CMO Coffee Talk.
6:41: We regularly get together and talk about issues, topics of interest and planning comes up again and again.
6:47: And I, we also just recently did a customer advisory board, we had 10 enterprise customers.
6:52: They are talking about issues with planning and some of the things that I kind of pulled away from it is number one more.
7:02: Most fundamentally is not many marketers learned how to plan, I don’t have an MB A but maybe audience members do.
7:12: But there was no formal training process or education around how to build a plan, especially a plan that needs to hold up to the dynamic kind of environment that characterizes to today’s business.
7:24: you know, you start out as a marketer and you learn a specific area of function demand, product, marketing, customer, whatever it might be brand marketing.
7:34: And then eventually you lead a team and then eventually move to AAA leadership position.
7:39: And that’s when you have to start building plans.
7:42: Sometimes it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks.
7:45: So that’s one reason I think another one is there’s very, very high expectations around plans, right?
7:52: You just, you just showed how the marketing plan ladders up to corporate objectives and revenue plans.
7:57: So you are simultaneously managing up with the plan and making sure you meet expectations of people that might be a at a higher pay grade frankly.
8:06: And at the same time providing as much clarity down cascading down through very large, complicated distributed teams with the plan.
8:15: And that’s a challenge.
8:19: There’s very high expectations around that.
8:23: I would say that most people that I talk to are desperate for a framework a pattern.
8:31: If you will, we’re gonna talk about that.
8:32: What foresters planning framework looks like people are, are somewhat desperate for that akin to how, you know, they were desperate for something like called the demand funnel, like a sense of order to the job that they’re doing.
8:44: Right.
8:44: Or more recently, this notion of account based marketing or the customer experience management, there are frameworks and systems around that, but not as much around planning.
8:54: So that’s another reason there’s a lot of nuance to planning.
8:58: It is not just kind of a logical exercise, but you need to engage and motivate teams.
9:04: You have to kind of balance creativity with data around planning.
9:09: And then finally, and this is a bit self-interest on my part, but there’s no central system where plans exist reside, right?
9:18: There’s, there’s no platform really today that everybody can log into and get universal via visibility to understand what is the plan, what are we doing right now?
9:27: How does that support these corporate objectives?
9:29: How is that funded?
9:30: What’s the work happening?
9:31: There doesn’t seem to be existing that that marketing system of record?
9:37: And so that creates some anxiety around planning as well.
9:41: Let’s jump into at least some of these.
9:45: Yeah.
9:45: Yeah, I think the idea of marketing starting to think about a marketing system of record is a good move.
9:53: I mean, you look at all the technology that marketing uses, most of it’s about trying to do some form of demand, to understand intent and you know, there’s really not a broadly acknowledged sense of how, what is that the market is trying to achieve and how do we prove it?
10:07: And I think the idea of working towards a, a system record makes a lot of sense for marketers, those who want to be accountable, you know, and organizations wanna hold marketing accountable.
10:18: So it seems to be the right direction that we should all be heading.
10:22: Well, let’s go to the next slide and look at some of the common planning problems.
10:26: And you know, I talked to a lot of people in different organizations that are doing various forms of marketing planning and the problems kind of collect into these three categories.
10:36: One is that they take an approach to looking at what we did last year to try to build this year’s plan, sort of a bottoms up approach and, and what you end up with when you do something like that is probably a long list of, of tactics and often those tactics are sponsorships and events and they can consume a huge part of your budget.
10:56: And when you put all of those things together, it’s often very difficult to even at the very beginning of the planning process to see how that kind of a plan is going to be easy to map to the overall business objectives of the company, the revenue objectives by segment.
11:11: If you’re just doing bottoms up planning, it might be very difficult to do that.
11:15: The other thing that happens in marketing organizations is that you get a structure so that there’s a bunch of teams in marketing, usually aligned around disciplines and other experts in a certain aspect of marketing.
11:26: And often they have their own budget and they build their own plants.
11:30: And so what happens is you end up with these siloed teams in organizations, all you know, expert in their domain, but not necessarily working in a collaborative way.
11:40: So you end up with a lot of parallel activities taking place and you know, you end up with mixed messages to to to buyers and to customers.
11:48: It creates all kinds of problems when you’re not operating in a synchronized way.
11:53: And then finally, we see kind of an urgent focus on helping the short term sale, you know, supporting sales trying to either drive leads into the top of the funnel because you know, sales need something or supporting them in the late stage pipeline acceleration activities, but almost always just focused on what we can do in the near term and often that’s related to po power and politics in the organization where sales is sort of demanding that marketing, help them, you know, with their numbers.
12:22: But you know what what starts to happen is that if you over rotate on short term marketing planning, then you can’t do the longer term things that are really important to build an effective marketing organization over time.
12:34: So investment in things like developing personas, maybe even investment in your own organization and enabling them to learn more about modern marketing so that they can be more effective marketing personnel overall.
12:47: So the short term focus tends to, you know, forget about the long term and you end up constantly in this sort of treadmill of marketing activities all focused on the short run.
12:57: And it just becomes very hard to demonstrate the bottom line value that the organization delivers to the business overall.
13:04: And we see this in data and, and, and we did a a study, well, we do studies all the time and, and recently we did a study on asking CMO s about the importance of of planning and what they wanted to get out of it.
13:18: And you know, about half of them 42% anyway, told us that, you know, they really want to improve their marketing planning processes.
13:25They recognized that they were broken or insufficient and that they really felt that as a major priority, top two or three priorities for the next year, many of them told us that planning was, was high up on the list.
13:38And similarly, they also point out that it’s really important to be able to build a marketing plan and then adapt that marketing plan to circumstances as they change.
13:47: So recognizing that it’s not just about getting it all down and breathing a sigh of relief, but you have to recognize that, you know, the environment changes and you know, you may have products that get delayed or there may be some economic situation that occurs that you have to react to and being able to do that in an effective way is really critical.
14:06: Let’s go on to the next slide.
14:10: So what we want to look at are the things you need to do effective planning.
14:16: So we’ve broken this into four major categories.
14:20: First is the information you need to build a plant.
14:24: So you need to understand what the business objectives are.
14:27: You know, the targets for the organization, what you’re trying to achieve.
14:30: You need to know what the organization has to sell, right?
14:34: What are the products or the services, the offerings that the organization is going to sell and how does that affect what you do from a marketing program planning or campaign planning perspective?
14:45: You need to know the environment, that’s the competitive environment, the the the transactional environment that you’re operating within.
14:52: And you know, one of the things that really helps to know is the effectiveness of your marketing tactics.
14:57: I mean, every organization has its own fingerprint in terms of what works and what doesn’t work for them from a marketing perspective.
15:03: And to be able to leverage that past data gives you the ability to predict how well you’re going to do in the, in the year ahead.
15:10: Now you also need some sort of a process, some way of building a marketing plan of managing your, your budget.
15:16: I put content in here as a, as a as an element in this process because it just consumes so much of what you do in marketing execution.
15:25: And it’s the timing of creating and activating content is such that it really has a big effect on your ability to actually do marketing, that you need a process around that as well to be able to figure it out.
15:35: You also need to understand your resources.
15:37: So that’s budget, but it’s also the people and your partners that are, that are working with you and you need some tools or some sort of technology platform that you can work with so that you can capture your plans and then build you know, your goal, understand where you’re trying to, to go to be able to capture the measurement and performance that you’re achieving.
15:58: So maybe in some form of a calendar or something like that, that gives you the ability to know where you are, know where you are vis a vis your goals and then to be able to predict where you’re heading.
16:08: So these are the four major things that you need to do it.
16:11: When, when we look at the information, just having that information doesn’t constitute a marketing plan.
16:17: But what I’m gonna show you in a moment is how that by having that information where you can use it in your marketing planning activities.
16:26: Next slide.
16:28: So let’s look at the Forester B to B marketing planning process.
16:32: We’ve, we’ve built it as a process.
16:35: It’s there, it’s, it’s represented by these seven chevrons here.
16:39: And now the first one I just feel like is, is a really critical one and I, I’m gonna spend a moment describing it.
16:45: This is what we call the business review and alignment phase of planning.
16:50: It’s that, I guess it doesn’t surprise me anymore because I know that it’s gonna happen.
16:54: But it, you know, it still is a little bit mind bending to recognize that even if your top executives, your CEO and the board can hand the leaders of the organization the objectives for the business for the year.
17:11: Each one of those leaders interprets it slightly differently and it’s really incumbent upon marketing as they go through the planning process to make sure that their understanding of what the business objectives are for the year are understood and shared by sales and by product counterparts.
17:28: I can give you an example is, you know, think about from a business unit leader’s perspective or thinking about their products where they’re gonna sell, what they’re going to be launching.
17:37: And so their view of what the objectives are for the business are really met are in, in the, in the context of their products.
17:43: Sales is thinking about territories and maybe different account sizes and so forth.
17:47: And so when they look at their business goals, they’re gonna have a different view.
17:51: And then marketing needs to figure out how they’re going to balance all their program and campaign activities to support the different perspectives that these other parts of the organization have.
18:00: So step, one in the marketing planning process is to understand a common set of assumptions, understand what the assumptions are for the organization in terms of its business objectives.
18:11: And then from there, we get into looking at each of the sort of big rocks that you want to go after the big segments or big plan objectives and understand whether you’re going to be doing something brand new from a marketing perspective, or maybe trying to grow an existing segment, perhaps focus on retention, maybe extracting yourself from a particular segment because time is moving on and you’re moving out of a market that that’s what we call the marketing intent.
18:35: And as you develop a notion of what essentially what strategy you’re going to apply in each of these areas, you can then begin to factor in all of the priorities that marketing has to consider many of which are not directly related to revenue.
18:49: So it could be marketing enablement, it could be signage, it could be some sort of brand initiative or maybe some sort of customer initiative that needs to be put in place and added on to the work of marketing.
19:01: By the time you get through establishing the marketing priorities, you’re now ready to set specific marketing goals.
19:08: And that’s where you define objectives that you know is going to represent what it is that marketing is gonna achieve.
19:13: It might be contribution to pipeline in some way, it might be some level of engagement, it might be moving from some level of overall market awareness to another level of maybe brand strength kinds of metrics that you’re putting down.
19:26: But this at this point, what we’re looking for you to be able to do is to define what we call impact oriented metrics, impact oriented, meaning they really do push towards the bottom line of the organization, their strategic goals that you’re defining for all of the different segments you wanna go after.
19:45: And then at this point, you can figure out well, what are you gonna do?
19:47: What are you gonna execute?
19:48: And those are the, the campaigns, the programs that you’re going to go execute and then from there, you’ve got pretty good much the picture of what you’re going to do.
19:57: We believe it’s really critical to identifying risks and dependencies.
20:00: What are the things that have to be there in order to be able to be able to do your job?
20:04: So for example, if you’ve got new products coming out and you’re committing to revenue or some sort of contribution to revenue, then those products ought to be delivered on time and that might be a dependency that you have.
20:15: So, so from there, once you’ve captured all of that information, then you have to have a process for being able to evolve the plan as the situation changes.
20:23: So in a, in a nutshell, that’s the, the big picture planning process that we work with.
20:29: forester, a lot of our clients have adopted.
20:32: This turns out to be very useful and I’m gonna show you how to put it to work next slide, please.
20:38: The other thing that is really important to think about is how you want to allocate your budget resources.
20:43: So we have this budget allocation process and I I mentioned one of the challenges that that marketing organizations have is they start from a bottoms up perspective.
20:54: This is how you do a top down and what we look at is in any given year.
20:59: Marketing is gonna get a budget and that budget is gonna be something like last year’s budget might be less, it might be more.
21:05: But roughly you’re gonna be able to know whether it’s, you know, a little more or a little less than last year.
21:11: So you’ve got some idea of the scale of the budget.
21:14: You don’t even have to know the number.
21:15: But what you can do is begin to partition it out.
21:18: So we take this allocation approach where step one is to break the head count out from the marketing program spin so that you can focus on what the program spend is going to do because that’s where you’re gonna be able to drive action.
21:29: And and then when you look inside the program spend, we have found it really useful to think about what’s in a campaign where a campaign is aligned to specific business objectives.
21:42: And then what’s in this out of cam campaign category where there’s a lot of the necessary activities that marketing has to do that aren’t directly related to your revenue development or your revenue acquisition.
21:56: So we think of shared services as something that might fit in there, your overhead activities.
22:00: you might have an annual customer event that you know, everyone participates in and trying to account for that in terms of develop ro I for that might not be a practical thing to do.
22:09: So you might put that in and out of campaign about communications, pr some of the, you know, influencer kinds of activities that you do that are not specific to your market segments, they can fit in this out of campaign category.
22:22: And what that frees up is the ability to build campaigns that are focused on achieving specific revenue objectives that are a lot easier to measure.
22:31: Now, the 60 30 or a 70 30 split that I’ve got here.
22:36: This is pretty common, this is what we see over years of working with companies.
22:40: It seems to be a a pretty reasonable balance.
22:43: Some companies may be a little bit higher in one category of that versus another.
22:47: And there’s lots of reasons for that and we can help them figure out whether it’s a sign of problems or whether it makes sense given their particular circumstances.
22:55: But this is a big picture view of how we believe marketing budget should be allocated.
23:00: And what you’re doing here is looking at the campaigns trying to proportionally allocate the scale of the campaigns to your specific objectives.
23:08: Legend.
23:12: And then I just quickly want to give you some insight into how we think about marketing planning roles.
23:17: We’ve got the CMO and the marketing leader, we’ve got a marketing or a revenue operations group and we’ve tried to split out the responsibilities.
23:25: So the CMO owns the budget is responsible for the budget strategy is responsible: for making the plan aligned to the business objectives.
23:35: But then marketing operations is a very helpful partner in all of this process that understands the process develops.
23:41: It may support it with the technology, they help produce the measurement reporting, they do those sort of day to day aspects, operational aspects of managing the budget.
23:51: And there should be a really tight relationship between the marketing leadership and the marketing operations group to get that plan built, communicated and, and running next sliding great.
24:08: So I thought that maybe we would come back to the slide that you referenced earlier about the ingredients you need because that last one was tools right at the end of the day.
24:21: Tools like a system of record this concept.
24:25: And I thought maybe I would address a little bit about why we see this problem growing amongst the companies that we engage with and, and our customers, et cetera.
24:36: And it, it really is because even though all of those things lay out nicely on your plan and your planning system and you’ll get to the plan of the page that ties them together.
24:45: Once a plan is created and launched, it rarely survives contact with the enemy, right?
24:51: It seems like we’re in a period of continuous pivoting continuous disruption, right?
24:57: If you just think about the last couple of years, we all have plenty of examples of where we had to go back to the plan and shift strategies.
25:04: One of the problems that happens is once that plan launches and things change is suddenly you get this notion of plan drift, right?
25:12: And the lack of any system of record that shows where you are against the plan, the objectives, it ties to the downstream activities and the performance of that plan creates what we refer to as the fog of marketing.
25:24: It gets really hard to answer these simple questions that are up here on the slide which come from a variety of different areas of the business.
25:34: If you think about it, while you may have your strategy and your objective established and your finance team has their system of record for financial costs.
25:42: And accounting and purchasing systems.
25:45: You may be using work management systems.
25:48: You know, it might be a work fraud or a or a or something else.
25:52: You have a lot of these systems that contribute to the plan, but there is no centralized system that captures the inputs and outputs from these across the organization.
26:02: What exists in that murky middle ground is this essentially freeware, right.
26:08: Most plans today are articulated in powerpoint on slides, right?
26:15: They’re trotted out with much fanfare at the beginning of the year, they used to present fire up the team, et cetera.
26:20: And then they’re put onto the shelf and you know, or a virtual shelf subd drive somewhere on, on sharepoint and rarely accessed again or multiple versions of those plan begin to, to happen.
26:33: The actual work that gets done often is communicated about in, in, in in Slack or, or, or, or email.
26:41: and the actual dollars that that fund the plan are frequently tracked in spreadsheets, even at the most sophisticated, large well recognized organizations spreadsheets abound and every version of that spreadsheet creates gaps in collaboration and communication and understanding it creates errors, version control issues, eventually get to a point where nobody really can answer the question.
27:08: Do we have enough money to fund the plan?
27:12: And how much of that, how much of that money is left right now?
27:17: So then what, what challenges come with that?
27:20: Well, number one is, of course, we talked about visibility right at, at any given time, people across the organization don’t have a single common view of what the plan is and what the resources are behind that plan.
27:33: The lack of view creates doubt, right?
27:36: And, and it creates gaps, credibility gaps, right.
27:39: That’s how can marketing be viewed as a good steward for corporate resources if they don’t exactly know how much money is in the budget and how that money is being used at any given time and what the ro I or impact is for that dollar with the lack of visibility comes this challenge around velocity.
27:56: How can you move with speed to market to capture market opportunities, right?
28:00: Or to gain competitive share or wallet share quickly?
28:04: If there isn’t a single system of record, if people aren’t on the same page, if you don’t have the resources aligned and today in this market speed wins, could be the most important decisive factor in capturing market shares.
28:16: How quickly you can get your offer to the right audience at the right time.
28:21: And if that plan needs to change which they all do and your original plan is not fed by any performance data at all, how can you effectively pivot, how do you know where to pivot?
28:33: You know what is your heads up display or your early warning system to suggest that the plan that you so carefully articulated is going down the wrong path headed in the wrong direction that creates a lack of agility, right?
28:46: Where people can’t pivot as quickly as they want.
28:49: That is what we call the fog of marketing and it’s around this lack of a true system of record.
28:59: All right, thanks Jim.
29:00: So, what I’m gonna do now is to show you how you can take the information and all the aspects of the components.
29:06: You need to build a plan, how they all fit together into that process.
29:11: Go to the next slide here.
29:12: So what we’ve done is taken all the different information and broken it into three categories, strategy.
29:19: So what the company is trying to accomplish in the direction, the organization’s strategy, marketing strategy, what we know about the products that we have to sell and the audience that we’re selling to and then what we understand about the revenue picture, you know, the, what we’re trying to accomplish from a revenue perspective and how that breaks down across different segments as we get into more detailed planning.
29:42: And then we’re gonna feed it into different phases of the planning process to produce an overall marketing plan.
29:48: So the next slide we get into putting the strategy, the product and audience information and the revenue plan into the business review and alignment section.
30:00: Go ahead and click forward, Jim.
30:04: I think you need to get it one more time because there’s a build here.
30:06: There you go.
30:07: All right.
30:07: So in the first phase of the planning process around business review and alignment, the information we need.
30:13: There is what the overall growth objectives for the organization.
30:16: How do we prioritize those?
30:18: Do we have any major new offerings?
30:20: Big deal launches that are gonna be happening this year that are gonna change the the overall scope and scale of the plan as we, as we understand it and what sort of priorities across the different segments, maybe we’re going into a new route to market or perhaps a geographic expansion.
30:39: These kinds of things are the kinds of information that you need to, to have together in your initial phase of the marketing plan as well as you know, the overall revenue target.
30:49: So these are the core sets of numbers that you’re starting towards and this is what you’re gonna be measured against.
30:53: So you’ve got a big set of objectives here and as you get into setting your goals, you’re gonna be looking back at these objectives to make sure that you’re on track next like place.
31:04: So the next big step in this process is to go through and develop a prioritization of all the things that marketing can do.
31:12: Literally any planning process that you go through in a marketing organization, you’re gonna come up with a list of, of things that you could do this longer than you have the resources and the time to be able to do.
31:23: So you have to prioritize and the things that you have to factor in?
31:27: Are, are there any strategic initiatives, like maybe there’s a brand initiative or a customer initiative?
31:32: Do you have any new product launches that you have to support?
31:35: Is there some sort of competitive situation maybe in one of the segments or maybe in a geography that you have to do something special to support?
31:45: And then as you begin to get to this part of the planning process, you should begin to break down the revenue by all the different segments and all the different routes to market so that you understand where the revenue is coming from and how you’re gonna support it from a marketing perspective.
32:01: And then the next step is to set the marketing goals.
32:05: So here, what you’re doing is saying now that I know what all the priorities are and all the big picture objectives that I have, how do I go back and align that to the business objectives?
32:14: So take the big picture, business objectives and then set metrics that you’re trying to achieve that will be able to articulate whether you’re there or not.
32:24: Now, what we recommend is that you set metrics that what are what we call impact oriented metrics.
32:30: These are essentially bottom line metrics.
32:33: So looking at things like revenue or contribution to to a pipeline, these kinds of dollar oriented metrics that you might find in the, the 10-K of an annual report that some of the objectives that you might have in your marketing plan could be around reputation or maybe more customer retention and you can build metrics around those.
32:56: It might not be like retention is usually related to dollars, but sometimes the reputation metrics are more about brand position, you know, brand strength and awareness, perception, preference kinds of metrics, but each of those could be defined and established as a strategic objectives and then that’s what marketing is working towards.
33:13: So at this point, you’ve got a good picture of what you’re trying to accomplish when you finish this phase and then you go into the developing the the key actions, the campaign plans that you’re gonna operate with.
33:22: And then the final thing you want to do is you build out the plan is to identify the, the risks and dependencies.
33:29: And you know, the easy one to always pick on is, you know, do I have the budget to support all of this?
33:33: And, and of course, that’s important, but it’s not the only thing.
33:36: So there’s, there’s other things that you need to identify that that might prevent you from achieving your objective or might enable you to achieve your objective.
33:46: So perhaps you need to put some infrastructure in place, it could be that, you know, you’re going into a market where it’s more of a transactional relationship with your buyers and you have to do e-commerce.
33:54: So might have to build out some e-commerce infrastructure or, or bring on a partner that can support that for you.
34:00: And that’s a dependency on your ability to be able to complete your plan.
34:05: I mentioned, you know, the products that you’re trying to launch, they need to be available.
34:08: Certainly that’s a risk.
34:10: And, you know, anybody that’s been in a business where there’s, you know, sometimes products don’t come in on time.
34:15: You know, what I’m talking about is, you know, you can gear up an entire marketing organization to do something.
34:20: And then if the products aren’t ready, it can become a real challenge.
34:22: So you have to understand what those risks are.
34:24: And then as they become more and more real, you can make adjustments to it.
34:29: And then finally, from the revenue plan perspective, understanding the sales organization, what they’re trying to accomplish.
34:33: Sorry that, sorry about that, Jim, go ahead and no worries.
34:37: So, so what comes out of all of this?
34:39: Well, the, we have this, this template, we call a marketing plan on a page and this is, you know, just a really useful, easy to fill out an easy to understand template for representing an entire marketing plan.
34:52: And you can see that the steps of the plan on a page template align directly to the marketing planning process.
34:58: And if you dig deeper into the marketing planning process, you’ll find that for each of those phases, we have a series of, you know, worksheets or tools to help you figure out what the ultimate output of that particular phase is.
35:11: And then you can drop it into the marketing plan on a page.
35:15: And so the output of each of those phases is one of these cells in the marketing plan on a page.
35:21: And then what I’m gonna show you now is an example of one where we filled it in to give you an idea of the kinds of information we go in there.
35:29: So we’ve got a blank version of it here and I’m gonna walk you through the top row of one example and then I’ll show you the whole thing filled in.
35:36: So go ahead and hit the build there.
35:38: So in this particular business segment, we’ve got a 10% segment growth and we’re trying to achieve a certain dollar amount of revenue.
35:48: In this particular case, it turns out that this is all gonna be created by retaining existing customers and renewing them and then growing Upsell and cross sell revenue.
35:57: So there’s no acquisition revenue in this particular segment that we’re looking at.
36:02: So we’re defining the, the approach, strategies, retention and growth.
36:05: Now factoring in all of the different priorities that might be important.
36:09: So, in here, you can see things like, well, we’ve got some brand activities that we have to support.
36:15: We’ve got an infrastructure, a digital marketing environment that has to be put in place.
36:19: We’ve got an annual event, event that we have to support, that’s on top of all the other revenue oriented activities that are going on.
36:26: So we’re factoring on all all those marketing priorities and at this point, we can begin to define marketing goals.
36:32: And so for this particular area, well, we’re looking at a retention rate that we’re gonna be measuring and we’re also looking at a certain dollar amount of Upsell and cross sell pipeline.
36:42: We’ve even broken it out into what’s sourced and what’s influenced so that it’s very clear what marketing is trying to do.
36:48: And with numbers like this, you can then see whether marketing is achieving its objectives or not and go through the intellectual process of figuring out whether 100 and $35 million is the right number at the beginning of the planning process.
37:00: And then as you work through it, you will be able to see if you’re actually measuring up and if you’re not, then figure out what it is you have to do to make adjustments to achieve it.
37:08: Then the key actions is about activating or creating a campaign or extending an existing campaign for, you know, to support.
37:17:In this case, we’re gonna have to build a new customer retention campaign.
37:21: And we’re also gonna take the this one campaign called Protect the Tech Connect.
37:26: We’re gonna extend that into enterprise Upsell and cross sell.
37:29: So it changed to the campaign, but that’s the key action that we’re taking.
37:33: And then there’s some dependencies and risks in here that we want to identify for this particular segment is, you know, we need the infrastructure to be able to support the, the, the environment that we’re putting in place and, and need to upskill the team a little bit of A BM to be able to do some of the customer retention activities.
37:49: So that’s the plan for that whole row.
37:51: One more click will build out the whole plan.
37:53: And you can see how an entire organization, this actually represents a $750 million company who got their entire marketing plan on one page.
38:03: So let’s go to the next slide and talk about how we can cascade this plan across the organization.
38:07: So now you’ve got this big picture plan, there’s lots of different perspectives that different parts of the organization want to have around that plan.
38:16: So the nice thing is you’ve got this one page document, you can share it with your CEO your peers, but your campaigns team, well, maybe there’s a couple of campaigns and they need to understand their part of the job.
38:27: So you can break that, that plan into campaign one and two or 12, three.
38:32: If you’re dealing with product, business unit leaders, you might need to break that plan on a page into one for each of the business units so that they can understand how the marketing initiatives are working with their product portfolios, you might be going to different geographies.
38:49: So maybe there’s a US and an a version of it and you might have some channels that you have to deal with.
38:54: So you might have direct and indirect as another version of the plan.
38:57: So you can cascade it and break it into these different forms so that the audiences that care about the marketing plans from sort of where they sit in the organization can operate with different views of it.
39:08: And ideally it all rolls back up into the master plan.
39:13: Next slide, please.
39:16: And then one of the really important aspects of managing a marketing plan as you go through time is to be able to understand where you are.
39:23: And the quarterly business review has always been you know, something to either dread or master.
39:29: And you know, the dread version of the QBR is, you know, two hours of just talking and puffing about what’s going on, but sort of avoiding all the important questions, the mastery of it is to really focus on the business objectives.
39:42: Look at that plant on a page.
39:44: What are you trying to accomplish from a business objective perspective?
39:47: Where do you stand in achieving your goals as defined by the metrics and that middle column of the plant on a page?
39:53: And then the rest of it becomes well, what are we gonna do about it?
39:57: Why did it happen and what are we gonna do about it?
39:59: Where are we doing well and where are we doing poorly?
40:02: And what sort of needs do you have to be able to either get back on plan or take advantage of the things that are going really well that maybe even do better.
40:11: So a very focused approach to a AQBR, you can do, you can cover something like this in a relatively short period of time and you can really use it through a platform.
40:22: So this is where a technology platform can help with the review process and the review conversations.
40:31: All right, over to you to the next slide.
40:35: Thanks Craig.
40:37: So I think that what we’ve gone through and address a lot of what I call plan anxiety at the the beginning of this presentation, right?
40:43: And certainly that issue of like, OK, what is the framework?
40:45: What is the best practice?
40:47: What is the system you use to do effective planning?
40:49: So great, great detail.
40:52: This is just three examples of customers that we work with that have done a great job to transform their planning process, each of them in very different ways.
41:01: And there are different types of organizations.
41:03: I won’t go through all three of them.
41:05: I will tell you that we have pretty comprehensive case studies and customer stories on our website.
41:10: So you can look it up.
41:11: I think the first one is pretty interesting sap just because SAP is the p infrastructure for many, many, many large enterprise organizations.
41:21: And yet even at SAP, they had a significant planning challenge, right?
41:26: that the lack of a system and the silos that I mentioned really slowed the planning process such that the planning process could start in any year in the Q three time frame.
41:42: And the plan itself wouldn’t be complete and final until well into the next year that the plan actually governed.
41:50: In this case, it was, was until May that the plan was actually complete.
41:54: That kind of provided instructions and guidance for a time period of which five months have already gone by.
42:01: So you can imagine just how stifling that is as an organization, you’re talking about thousands of marketers at any given point, hundreds of people are involved in the planning time.
42:11: Now, since moving to the system of record, right, adopting some of these best practices, they’d be allowed to cut the planning time in half and it provides much greater agility.
42:21: So when two years ago, SAP needed to suddenly change plans and jump into the cloud computing space for a segment that didn’t typically sell to, they were able to shift really quickly shift their funding and ensure they could get the teams on page so they could execute that in less than 45 days.
42:40: That is kind of unheard of agility in the SAP world.
42:43: Now, they’ve really been able to accomplish amazing things.
42:46: And all of this came from a presentation that I actually heard given to at a conference last year, which was really, really inspiring.
42:53: I would encourage you to check out some of these examples and more, they are both best practices and establishing that framework and the system and the common language and nomenclature, as well as, you know, deploying software and best practices around that.
43:06: It really is transformational change, but I will not carry on too much with this.
43:13: And we’ll just jump right to, I think the, the, the part was most interesting, which is some of the questions we might have gotten from the audience during the course of the presentation.
43:23: So before I do that, I just say Craig, thank you very much.
43:25: I appreciate.
43:25: It’s, there’s great learnings here.
43:27: I know it comes with, you’ve talked with a lot of marketers and have established some great best practices.
43:34: So thank you.
43:35: Thanks Gent.
43:37: I am going to turn it over to.
43:39: I don’t know if you have a question queued up from today.
43:43: I think we have time for probably one or two questions.
43:46: One came in from Matt.
43:48: How do you fold in marking initiatives that would be considered enterprise wide and not tied to a single business unit?
43:57: Craig, did you want to take this one?
43:59: You know, I think the planning process really comprehends all scales of the of the initiatives.
44:08: kind of, to some degree, it depends on where you are in the organization.
44:11: One of the things that I find is that I’m not always dealing with the CMO of the big enterprise and from there so it could be a head of a bu and, you know, they’re focused on the initiatives that are respon that they’re responsible for in their, in their bu or maybe in their geography.
44:28: But when we are dealing with the, the CMO at a top level, then generally, what happens is they’ve got their corporate initiatives that they’re trying to, to plan for and then they’ve got to roll up all the other initiatives that fall underneath them.
44:39: If they’re, if they fall out of the, of the B US, then that’s, that’s, you know, then you end up with sort of bu aligned planning initiatives.
44:49: Sometimes when you adopt a campaign architecture, you’ll find that the campaigns are focused on segments or audiences that might have needs that cut across business units.
45:03: And so a bu aligned planning effort isn’t always the best idea in that kind of situation because you might have buyers that want to buy, you know, two products from Bu one and three products from BU two.
45:14: And so if you’re gonna build campaigns around them, you need to find a another organizing principle rather than just the physical structure of the organization to organize your campaigns.
45:25: I could say Matt that when we work with companies to help them build their planning and their campaign architectures, trying to play out the different shapes of that hierarchy is one of the more challenging aspects of building it.
45:40: And it’s, you know, it’s where we spend a lot of time, you know, so I don’t, I, I guess they, the high level answer that I can give you is that it’s quite possible to do that.
45:50: It’s, you know, exactly what you want to do.
45:52: It depends on where you’re starting, you know, what level in the organization you’re actually starting.
45:56: But, you know, getting to what that campaign architecture looks like, is it aligned around customers and their needs or is it aligned aligned around how the company is organized?
46:05: You know, sometimes some organizations, it makes sense to align around the way you’re structured, but in many cases it doesn’t.
46:12: And I think that that’s what falls out of the planning process is to try to put together the audience framework in the most appropriate way.
46:21: And by the way, I’d be happy to, to have a deeper conversation with you about it.
46:24: If you’ve got something specific in mind that you’re working with, very good, is there another question we could squeeze in or should we move right to, I’ll just give a quick reminder that for those of you who joined late, like right after the Q and A session and again, everything is recorded and will be distributed to you But right after that, if you’re interested in sticking around what a seeing what a marketing system of record looks like.
46:48: The marketing software, planning software, please, please do and we’ll, we’re gonna spend 15 minutes walking through that.
46:55: Is there another question that we have time to address?
46:58: Tale?
46:59: No, I think we should get on to the live demo portion.
47:04: Awesome.
47:04: We will do that.
47:05: So, Craig, thank you very much for your, your expertise on the matter.
47:10: We are now going to turn it over to Upttempo, Senior Vice President of Global Solutions Engineering, Bruce Bryan.
47:20: And Bruce is gonna give everyone a quick overview of what planning software looks like.
47:25: But before we do that, because on the market, I can’t help, I would also encourage you to register for our marketing plan and crash course, you can find that on our home page.
47:34: It is a whole whack load of content around best practices and planning from practitioners and peers.
47:42: So might be worth checking out as well.
47:44: Bruce, I will turn it over to you.
47:49: All right, thanks Jim.
47:50: And thanks Craig.
47:51: That was a fantastic in insights and information to share with all of us that’s really, really helpful.
47:59: What I’m going to do is we’re gonna jump right in.
48:03: I’m sure that you have seen enough of a power point at this point.
48:09: So, I’m gonna do everything that I can to make sure that you’re seeing software at this point going forward.
48:18: So where I wanted to start and I really want to focus on the, the kind of the journey that Craig took us through in that B to B marketing planning process.
48:27: So if you think about that plan on a page and those business objectives and the marketing approach and so forth, we, we start with a strategy section of Uptempo.
48:39: And in here is where I can really record my plan on a page so I can put my business objectives and my marketing approach.
48:45: At this highest level, I can cascade those into my marketing priorities and goals in the form of ors with specific capabilities to record those.
48:57: As an example, when I open that up, I can have places for each key result in there, I can record status updates in there.
49:05: So this enables me to have both the higher level and the detailed level within the same panel so that I can create that two level approach at a time.
49:15: And then I can finish off with my key actions or my marketing team level objectives when you want to see how these are connected together.
49:23: All I have to do is connect the click on the connections, that’ll detail them out and it’ll show me that, that B to B global B to B sales revenue marketing priority is addressing both of these business objectives and it is supported by these key actions.
49:41: So regardless of which direction I go, when I look at those partnerships, well, that’s gonna cascade back up to four of my marketing priorities in support of three of my business objectives.
49:53: So it’s real easy to kind of get that plan on a page properly documented in an environment where we can keep it updated with statuses and so forth.
50:02: I can even see at the the key actions level.
50:05: Now what elements of my plan and my budget are are being supported by this.
50:09: So I know we have to go fast.
50:11: So I just kind of give you some highlights as we go.
50:14: So the the next place that I want to take us is if you need to articulate a strategic plan, but one of the advanced capabilities that we’re offering now in our planning side of the house is that we can house multiple and different planning hierarchies at the same time.
50:33: So in this case, I’ve got a strategic plan and I collect different pieces of information at each level of my strategic plan through my strategic initiatives down to my campaigns.
50:45: And I can highlight all of that in the go to market calendar where I can see what’s gonna be happening.
50:49: And when and I need to apologize, I gotta move the, the sharing bar out of my way there we go.
50:59: All right.
51:00: So once we and, and any item in my strategic plan, as you can see, I can capture the details of it here.
51:08: And in this case, I’m looking for target customer segments and things like that at the plan level.
51:14: I wanna, I wanna record a SWAT swat analysis and down here at the strategic program level, I wanna start requesting Capex and Opex budgets and those types of things.
51:25: Now, that’s one view of my plan.
51:29: Another view of my plan might might be the more detailed view where I’ve got everything laid out now to execute against.
51:39: So I might have a channel marketing plan, a media plan, A B to B plan and A B to C plan.
51:44: Our demo company is both B to B and B to C.
51:48: So we have to have all of these different planning elements in place when I open up one of those planning elements, I can see all of the details from a campaign program activity level point of view and you can articulate those levels to be whatever you need and also collect again whatever data you need to collect at these different levels.
52:10: So at a campaign level, I might just have objectives and themes running through at a program level.
52:17: I might have a representation of my offerings a nod to the program family that we’re part of.
52:24: And then when I get down to the tactic level.
52:26: This is where it gets really interesting because I can have different tactic types.
52:30: This one is content.
52:32: So for content, I can pick up different pieces of information than I would for a webinar or an event or an email nurture.
52:40: So we want to make it easy for marketers to only enter what they have to enter.
52:45: So we’ve got a number of different templates and configurable hierarchy that can be built to support whatever you need to go to market.
52:55: Now, once I’m in 11 of these plan elements, and I’m gonna pick a specific one that I know.
53:03: I’ve got some good detail on.
53:05: So this is gonna be filled in with whatever custom attributes I decide I need to collect for this type of activity.
53:15: But this is also where if you think of the, the the budget as my source of funds, the plan is gonna dictate my use of funds.
53:24: So I’m gonna have a budget tab where I’m actually connecting out to a marketing budget and I can see which of the budget cost, budget elements.
53:34: I’m consuming to get to my my total.
53:37: Now, if I need to do some more budget work issue purchases and those types of things, I can simply click on that And that will open up my investment tab and it’ll bring me right to the budget.
53:50: I’m supposed to be in to the element that I that I’m working from from there.
53:54: I can request apr raise a purchase requisition.
53:58: I can fill in any details around the investment, the accounting details, all of those pieces of information are stored on the budget so I can relate and, and be part of that world back where I left off.
54:13: I can also explore the impact of this particular item.
54:18: I can identify the number of in this case inquiries that it’s gonna drive.
54:23: I have a funnel assumptions that are associated with this.
54:29: So I can see my detailed funnel my, my number of days, my deal size and my conversion rates throughout so that I can calculate that if I do generate 15,377 inquiries, I should be able to produce 5.6 million in, in revenue off of this.
54:48: I’ve got it distributed monthly.
54:50: I can edit that distribution.
54:52: I can cross it into multiple years.
54:54: We also understand the fact that marketing plans span years while marketing budgets are confined to individual years.
55:02: So an element of my marketing plan can consume budgets in multiple years, which is really helpful for things like events where I gotta pay for the sponsorship in 2023 and the event is actually in 2024.
55:15: I know that that’s something that everybody’s experienced.
55:18: We’re also the element of time comes into play along with those conversions.
55:24: So I can see on the purple here.
55:27: I’m looking at the number of planned inquiries as this thing rolls out.
55:31: And then as those inquiries manifest themselves as revenue, we can see later on in time how the revenue bar starts to pick up, until, until they pretty much converge at the end where I’ve gotten all of the revenue, I’m gonna get out of those inquiries and we’ve got those as, as two separate bars on here.
55:52: Now, in addition to the impact, we’re also able to support production work flows.
55:58: And that’s where I’ve got the the detailed insights about my production kit itself.
56:05: And this is gonna throw me in there.
56:15: It’ll bring me right to it.
56:18: I wasn’t connected to job manager, but here we are and this is gonna pull up this specific job.
56:25: This is where I can have my briefings, my approvals, my production flow.
56:30: I can pull in the information that I’ve inherited from the plan itself.
56:34: I can get into any details.
56:37: I can pull in the creative, I can add assets from my media library.
56:43: And also understand where we are in terms of any discussion points on this job keeping track of all of the work that’s being done to, to, to bring this plan to life.
56:58: Finally, I wanted to take an alternate view.
57:00: As Craig said, it doesn’t always fit the initial structure that we’ve created.
57:05: So I have a go to market structure that I’ve put in place for campaigns and programs and so forth and where we’re gonna end up on this is that I, I’ve got a list of tactics.
57:15: I cut out from a view all the other pieces of it.
57:19: And what I’m gonna do instead is say, well, I don’t want to look at it from that point of view.
57:25: I want to come down to the tactic level and look at it from a customer journey stage point of view.
57:30: So when I apply that, now I’ve got and I can filter these these out.
57:36: I’ve got my different customer journey stages.
57:38: When I open up any one of those, I can see all of the tactics that are designed to impact that particular stage.
57:45: And I could have done that grouping by just about anything that you can imagine including program family or down at the activation level, ad layouts if I’m just looking at media and those types of things, campaign themes, objectives.
58:00: So pivot the plan around whatever makes sense for you to see all those levels of details.
58:09: And then finally, like we talked about, I can, I can attach to a specific piece of the budget.
58:15: I can also accommodate all of that non program spend that head count spend in additional budget categories, I can the out of program campaign spend can all be articulated through the budget so that I can capture the level of detail on costs that I need to from a budget perspective, which in the case of an event goes deeper than the level at which I’m gonna bring in performance and on the activity side of the house and the marketing planning side of the house, I can set that up to capture a level of detail where I want to collect performance.
58:53: So by having a this split hierarchy between the budget and the plan, I’m able to really mimic the way your business operates, I can go deeper on either side as it makes sense.
59:06: And, and hopefully in a very short amount of time, I’ve gotten you excited enough to want to explore this further, but just wanted to give you some highlights as to how a system of record for marketing can, can support and mimic the pieces that Craig talked about from a plan on a page and a budget allocation process as to how we can work all of that together.
59:30: So, Jim, that’s about as fast as I’ve ever gone through something like this.
59:33: And I think that I’m open to additional Q and A or, or chat at this point.
59:42: Bruce.
59:42: That was great.
59:43: Thank you.
59:44: Definitely a challenge or so an enterprise marketing planning system in 15 minutes or less is a lot involved.
59:51: Obviously, we talk about planned spending work coming together, but there’s a lot more pieces to the puzzle than that under the cover.
59:58: So thank you.
59:59: So it was great.
1:00:00: For those of you that stuck around, I really appreciate you spending some time to get a look at the Uptempo platform if you have questions about it because we need to wrap up today’s call.
1:00:11: If you have questions about it, I would encourage you to visit our website, reach out to us, contact us or just hit request a demo and we can actually answer your specific questions and go deeper in the meantime, I just wanna again.
1:00:24: Thank you.
1:00:24: Thank you, Craig.
1:00:25: Appreciate it.
1:00:26: We will be sending out the recording of today’s presentation to all the registrants and attendees.
1:00:32: I wish you a great rest of your day, rest of your week and fantastic planning season.
1:00:39: Thank you.
Skip the stress of planning season with our free marketing planning crash course