With host Darrell Alfonso
0:07Hello and welcome to Uptempo’s Planning series of webinars and videos.
0:13My name is Jim Williams.
0:14I’m the CMO of Uptempo and I am delighted to be talking today on this special webinar called Plan To Profit Conquering the annual marketing budget.
0:26I am joined by Jaime Garza from SolarWinds
0:31Jaime went to say hello, hello, how are you, Jim and everyone?
0:36I’m very good.
0:38We will jump into Jaime and his role at SolarWinds and we’ll get right to planning and budgeting and how that’s done.
0:45But a quick overview.
0:47This video today is part of a series that Uptempo has been running about business of planning and we’ve talked to a number of different practitioners at different types of companies in a range of industries and markets and find that the planning process, the marketing planning process can of course vary from company to company.
1:08This series is an in depth look at how different people approach it.
1:12the steps they take the challenges they face and how they overcome those challenges.
1:17I’m I’m delighted to be talking with Amy today from SolarWinds to get into that before we begin.
1:24Tell you a little bit about a Uptempo and why we’re doing this series.
1:27We are a planning software solution for enterprise marketing team.
1:31We help marketers plan better spend smarter and execute with confidence by integrating all of their plans onto a unified platform enough about us.
1:42Let’s just jump right into it.
1:44I’m gonna talk for a second just to set up this conversation, jaime about some of the planning problems that we hear over and over again when we talk to marketers like yourself, especially ones that very large global enterprise firms.
2:01And it really comes down to this massive imbalance between the incredible Martech stack that’s built up over the last 10 to 15 years that governs how marketers and marketing operations, professionals activate their campaigns and execute and measure those campaigns versus the utter lack of any system or process that actually governs the plans, the plans that kind of guide those different campaigns that you’re trying to get into marketing.
2:34What we typically find is what I’ve heard recently from from a prospect we’re talking to where they bemoan the fact that they’re running a global enterprise marketing plan off a 200 page powerpoint document.
2:52And when the CEO comes to this CMO and asks, what are we doing right now, what’s going into market and what are the results of that?
3:00And how much are we spending on that?
3:02Pay off.
3:04And so a lot of work is done in spreadsheets, pivot tables, powerpoints, version control issues, lots of slack messages, meetings, late night conversations in order to get to the answer about what are we doing right now, why are we doing it and how much we’re spending on it?
3:23And of course, that creates a number of challenges for marketing teams.
3:27First.
3:27There’s no, there’s no planned visibility.
3:29So these widely disparate distributed teams have a hard time understanding how the thing they’re doing the campaign, they’re running ladders up the corporate goals and objectives.
3:39There’s no centralized marketing calendar.
3:41So when you get questions from stakeholders about what’s going into market right now, really difficult to answer that because budgets are brought off of multiple spreadsheets, no one can answer exactly what’s been spent, what’s committed.
3:56And that leads of course to over or underspending or market saturation.
4:01Lack of trust with finance teams, et cetera.
4:04It makes it really difficult to measure Roy back to the original plan and it increase.
4:09It introduces all types of efficiency challenges which slows marketing execution.
4:15And as we know in this market speed wins.
4:18So those are the problems that we encounter all the time.
4:22And so I am excited to jump right into a conversation with you, Jaime about what you’ve done to tackle those challenges.
4:30So why don’t we start off with?
4:31Tell me a little bit about you and your role at SolarWinds and maybe a little about SolarWiind.
4:38Sure.
4:38Yeah.
4:39Thanks for that, Jim and I think, you know, a lot of good points there of, you know, kind of the, the planning process, right?
4:47And it can be difficult at times, especially if you’re new to it or a new organization.
4:52So, yeah, I lead marketing operations at Silver Winds.
4:56My remits you know, what I kind of explained to people is one is obviously everything around budget management, which is very applicable to, you know, and we’ll focus the discussion here today on that.
5:07I also have a small team that leads all our program management around strategic initiatives throughout marketing.
5:15And then another team that does a lot of the more tactical work around campaign operations, you know, sales force campaigns, webcast, et cetera on those things there.
5:25So I’ve been here almost two years and SolarWinds, a lot of people will initially, if you’re not familiar with the company will think it’s an energy company or something like that or renewable energy.
5:34It’s not it’s a, we’re actually a it services management company working in networking observ ability.
5:43So, you know, corporations, small, medium large enterprises have these large data technology stacks.
5:51our services and products help kind of monitor those applications, the servers, the databases, etcetera on those things.
5:59There.
5:59been, they’ve been around for 25 years on the stuff there.
6:04So, yeah, that’s a little bit about me.
6:06and about the company there.
6:08And part of my role there as my remit there too is also leading the marketing leadership team and the entire marketing department through the annual planning process.
6:18And a large part of that is the budget planning there, right?
6:20So our team is pretty large, you know, for an organization.
6:25We’re about 200 people globally spread through, you know, primarily in the Americas.
6:32We have people in the, in the media and we have people and A PJ as well in Asia across there, right?
6:38So, coordinating people across all those time zones geographically.
6:45and our marketing leadership team is really broken down.
6:49Just to give you a kind of a, a view into it is we have people that are click down from the CMO we have people that are reading the category or kind of like the product marketing, right?
7:01So they’re, they’re representing the strategy, the messaging, et cetera, then we have leaders at the regional level, right?
7:07So America’s and me and a PJ, they lead a lot of they’re activating more locally in the, in the regions, right?
7:14So they could look different for events, channel, et cetera.
7:19Outside of those leaders there, we have a lot of kind of the shared services that go across all these things.
7:24So things like that are very common in marketing departments, demand generation web.
7:29We have a, a corporate communications that leads up pr brand web as well on there.
7:36So you can see just going overview the complexity as soon as you get into the size of the team, the size of the leadership team there.
7:44you know what it takes to kind of lead the planning process there and get all those inputs for the budget, it can prove complex, right?
7:51That you don’t really have a an approach or a plan or structure to to kind of tackle that on good.
7:57Yeah, so a pretty familiar structure in a large organization, you’ve got, you know, again, geographically distributed and people focused on different regions or product lines, it it becomes a matrix organization which as you said can make the planning process challenging.
8:13So tell us how do you, how do you approach it?
8:15How does SolarWinds go about planning?
8:17Yeah, we’ve gotten better holistically at the SolarWinds level, right?
8:23So we always, you kind of think of the business, you have this stuff that is you’re in the current year or the current quarter and you’re executing on that separate of that, we have an operating system within SolarWinds, right?
8:35And we really break it down into trimesters, right?
8:38So four months in, in duration, trimester one, which we’re at least currently right now in, in February, it’s really focused around everything around people, right.
8:50So you’re thinking around, you know, people assessments, annual reviews, or or designs, etcetera, right?
8:57So that takes us through trimester one, the next two trimester are really where we’re kind of feed into the planning cycle trimester two, we start focusing on like strategy three years out, right?
9:09Potentially saying, hey, what are we looking like?
9:11What are we trying to achieve in the next three years from the product level, maybe even the regional level.
9:17And then there was get kind of push down and into kind of the c suite of, you know, the CMO will be taking a look at that like, hey, from a marketing standpoint, what does it look like for marking in the next three years?
9:29And the product leader and et cetera will look at that.
9:31So that takes us through trimester two and then trimester three is really where we get into the actual process of planning, right?
9:38So the last trimester three starting around September is when we’ll start really digging into the actual plan anyway.
9:45So we’re looking at everything from, you know, getting the initial guidance from the top of saying, hey, what are some of our revenue targets or booking targets?
9:56potentially, how much budget do we have to work with the following year?
10:02And then we’ll go through that detailed process of like say, hey, we’ll decompose that thing of saying, hey, we have X amount of dollars, you know, where are these things gonna go in there.
10:10So that’s at a high level, in essence how we tackle planning process and then all that boils itself back up into, you know, the CEO the executive staff will review these plans, you know, hopefully by the end of trimester three with approval.
10:25So everyone has clear direction.
10:26Ok.
10:27Here’s our priorities, here’s our OKRS, here’s what’s being funded and we go into execution.
10:33So we just started that, we just started executing on 2024.
10:37So yeah, that makes sense.
10:39I’m just curious about that is you, are you always dealing with a three year time frame or by the time you get to trimester three, you, you shrunk the time frame to just the next year based on the three year.
10:50Yeah, good question.
10:52Yeah, in trimester two, it’s a little bit longer focus to your point about three years.
10:57Trimester one, it is more one year focus, right?
10:59So we’re, we’re, we’re kind of funneling down right now that we kind of have a three year kind of vision or strategy of where we want to get in trimester three.
11:08It’s really about the one year view of really getting more granular of what do we want to achieve in the next year.
11:14You know, everything from a product standpoint revenue, et cetera.
11:17Yeah, you talk about executives, you know, this kind of, it’s almost a yo yo effect of three years and then it comes back down to the sea levels and start to have that conversation, then it goes back up and you said, ok, tell me about the guidance you get from leadership through that process around those corporate objectives.
11:34Yeah.
11:35So yeah, coming out of as we begin the kind of the planning process, you know, some of the things we’ll get is initial targets at like revenue, right, per product potentially by region as well.
11:48So we’ll be able to, at that point be able to assess like how are we performing in the current year?
11:54What is it gonna look like potentially in the following year?
11:57So that’s one of the things that we’ll be looking for is kind of guidance from FPN A, right?
12:01So thinking about stakeholders that I work with or marketing works with finance is one of the big ones there, right?
12:07So they’ll be coming down and saying, hey, we think, you know, we’re gonna try to achieve this revenue or this many amount of new bookings.
12:17They also may come down and say, hey, here’s your potential, you know, marketing budget, right?
12:22Like if you have X amount of dollars in this current year, here’s what you could potentially plan to have for next year on those things there.
12:31Additionally, since we’re, since they have just come out of the three year kind of strategy and they’re trying to keep the company focused, they will also come out of saying, hey, here’s some, you know, maybe not from finance, but it usually will come either from the CEO the executive staff from some of the strategy team as well.
12:49Saying, hey, to get us to this three year vision, here’s the areas that we want to grow in, right?
12:56Maybe you want to grow a certain product or a bundle of products or solutions and say, hey, this is our focus, this is what we think will drive the future and the bigger problems we’re looking to solve to in comparison.
13:09You also may get guidance and say, hey, we want to, to pull back in certain areas, right?
13:14Maybe they’re, you know, more mature, they’re not aligned with the corporate strategy anymore.
13:19And they’re saying, hey, let’s pull back from these things, but we don’t want to see, we don’t want to have, you know, a lot of resources or investments in those areas, potentially we’re gonna pull back from those.
13:29So that’s another area that I look out for, of guidance of saying, hey, we’re gonna prove here on those things here.
13:35And then thirdly sometimes you’ll have we’ll get guidance on any kind of special projects, right?
13:40So maybe kind of, you know, potentially big bets or things where they’re not kind of proven and they, we’re gonna kind of test into them over the next 1 to 3 years on those things there.
13:52You know, as an example that maybe the company may think, hey, let’s go do some investment into A I, I know it’s very hot topic right now and they say, hey, let’s set some, some funds and a project and some resources for that.
14:05So we can explore like how does A I fit within our, you know, company and organization just to give you an example of those things there.
14:12But again, a company could have different type of special projects and you know, your your senior leadership and executives when they go review your plan and your budget, we say, hey, show me where we we’re funding this special project or this initiative on those things there.
14:27Yeah, so that’s kind of you know, a summary of what, what some of the guidance that comes out, that makes sense.
14:33That makes sense.
14:34What so when you, you get that guidance, you get those top down targets good.
14:39So now you know what you’re aiming for before you go to construct, say your budget, are you considering performance metrics or measurements?
14:50And what do you consider about prior years, performance to help inform the setting of budget versus, you know, special projects and all these other all the other guns you get?
15:01Yeah.
15:02One of the things, one of the first things we’ll do is across the board.
15:06So like within marketing is we kind of start looking back at the current year or the previous year, like how do we perform?
15:12Right?
15:13How are things performing in market?
15:15whether you know events, right?
15:17And we could look at events, you know, by, by region as well.
15:20We could say, how did these events, you know, in America or new do?
15:24Right?
15:25And we’re also gonna be looking at and this, you know, down to like, hey, this specific event performed very well makes sense.
15:32Let let’s lean in there further versus, you know, event b where it’s like, hey, we didn’t quite get the results on there.
15:38So we’re looking at kind of those metrics of saying, hey, how did we perform within our channels, you know, so advanced channel paid media as well on those things there to say, hey, does it make sense to keep doing these things?
15:52Right.
15:53Do we wanna keep investing further increased investments or do we wanna decrease investments within those things there?
16:01Other metrics, you were looking at kind of our investments in some of our, what we call like fixed costs or shared services technology stack, like what is our spend there?
16:12It’s a, it’s a good kind of benchmark and metric that we kind of try to keep an eye on those who will be looking like, you know, is it growing, you know, is it growing higher or faster than like other areas are growing?
16:24Potentially, you may wanna have you identify that, then you would say, hey, let’s potentially try to address that, right?
16:30Because that could be taking money dollars off that you could invest into other like marketing demand generation activities on those there too.
16:40What else would it say?
16:42We’re looking at also kind of like, how do we want to report out on this?
16:45Right.
16:46Making sure that you know, the structure is there for us to kind of say, hey, because it’s gonna be an iteration as we do the budgeting in the planning cycle, right?
16:55To say, hey, how do we wanna, what kind of needs do we have here?
16:59We wanna see investments by product, we wanna see investments by region as well on those things, there’s being able to kind of look on those things there and those are some of the metrics we’ll look at too like what are our investments in America’s yield?
17:11What are our investments in a mi a yield?
17:13And then we take a different lens and a different cut and we’ll say, hey, what are our investments in product A yield and product B yield?
17:21So we can kind of also say because those are very common views that, you know, senior leaders will want to look at the business through saying, hey, show me how much we’re investing by region, show me how much we’re investing by product.
17:33Show me how much we’re getting out of it.
17:35So it’s good to understand what they’re looking for, how they view the business.
17:39So it informs you and how you tackle your budgeting and planning process.
17:44Yeah, I can imagine delivering all those kind of tailored perspectives on the budget can be very challenging if you’re operating in spreadsheets.
17:53but you are not, which we’ll talk about in a second.
17:55So how do you then structure your budget to enable that type of view, that type of report?
18:02Yeah, that’s a, that’s a good point.
18:04Yeah, we’re not sheets is, is kind of I know a lot of people use it.
18:08but when you have such a large team that always kind of speaking and it is you have lots of people in their hands in the budget and on different parts of the budget version control becomes an issue, being able to kind of give you different views of the of the budget becomes extremely difficult, right?
18:25And then becomes this huge manual exercise.
18:28Whoever owns that to say, hey, this is what I think it is versus a tool, you know, like temple or something like that is, you know, if you, once you set it up correctly, you can generate those views pretty quickly on those things.
18:41So at SolarWinds, you know, the way we, the way that I’ve kind of approached it with the leadership is kind of in, in three big buckets, right?
18:50One is the people cost, right?
18:52So if you’re managing budgeting or leading budgeting for marketing, that’s one of the lens we’re looking at, right.
18:58We have everyone that’s part of the team, full time employees.
19:01And we look at like, hey, how much is this gonna potentially, you know, what are the cost going into the next year?
19:07Right?
19:08An FP A again, will be one of your key stakeholders there because they, you have to consider potential bonuses, merit increases, any kind of attrition, et cetera.
19:17And if you’re in growth mode, are you’re gonna be adding new head count, et cetera.
19:21But again, you won’t necessarily have all the information, but you will have input from them and say, hey, use this as a number on those things based on head count, et cetera.
19:31So that’s 11 layer of the budget.
19:33The next one is broken down into programs and it’s broken down into 22 subsections there and we really look at it.
19:41So everything outside of people we consider program spin and then from there, we break it down into fixed versus variable, right?
19:49So fixed costs, we kind of consider as things as you know, contracts that you have, like let’s say like a Metto or sales force or other technology platforms, right?
20:00Where you, you have a contract maybe one year, three years, et cetera, and you’re kind of locked into those things there.
20:06You also have contractors that are potentially augmenting your teams or agencies that are supporting the marketing organization and those usually come via contract as well.
20:16So those are a lot of fixed costs that it would not be quick or easy to kind of say, hey, just stop doing this.
20:23You, you kind of have a commitment and obligation to spend those money.
20:26So those are kind of the fixed costs.
20:28And we want to look at those because we want to say, hey, like we don’t have too much room to kind of pivot there.
20:33You do, but you probably need a longer lead time to really understand the renewal process.
20:37And adjusting those spends on there and then separate is everything in variable, right?
20:43Where really you have more leeway and say, hey, I can quickly move dollars from this channel to channel B.
20:51So those are very traditional what a lot of marketers are used to, right?
20:54So everything digital spin like pay display, syndication affiliates.
21:00We also consider events spin variable.
21:04in channel we work at seller winds, we, we work a lot with a lot of channel partners globally.
21:11But that we do consider that variable as well.
21:13And then we have some special incentive programs too that are they’re paid up based on like partner performance or something like that, but we still consider that variable.
21:23So once we have a view of those, then we know like how much or can we kind of shift dollars, right?
21:29So the people cost is the people cost and the fixed cost is in essence, a bit, the fixed cost, you can make plans for those and then the variable cost really becomes where sometimes a lot of the marketers in the co will want to focus and say, hey, this is what’s gonna generate us leads, this is what’s gonna feed the funnel and the pipeline.
21:47Where’s our, where’s our biggest investments?
21:50You know, what makes sense?
21:51Right.
21:51And does it tie you into that guidance?
21:53We got, you know, from higher up rate, where do we want to grow, making sure that we’re pruning in certain areas and funding special projects?
22:02I mean, do you you keep a target in mind for fixed versus variable or people versus programs?
22:12We, that’s a that’s a great question, right?
22:14Is there is benchmarks and we we do do benchmarks.
22:18So one of the lenses we look at is people versus program.
22:21So program including fixed and variable and we look at the split on those things there, right?
22:27We say how much is going towards people and how much is going towards variable and depending on the size of your organization, you could have different benchmarks, right?
22:36Like a Microsoft and sales force that are very large organizations that split would be way different than like something that SolarWinds versus maybe a small business or something like that.
22:46So we do look at that on an annual basis to see where we’re we’re trending, you know, on that, making sure that you know, we’re not, you know, overly heavy weight into one area or the other.
23:00And I mentioned the other one once within program spin, we do look at like, say, how much is our fixed costs specifically around like technology platforms, subscriptions and those type of things as well?
23:13Interesting.
23:15So I have one other question on budget as well if you permit me, because you, you mentioned the idea of like in campaign spend versus out of campaigns, then like the, you know, services, shared services, mark my tech et cetera or even Demandgen.
23:35Sometimes he is like, if you think of Demandgen can be a shared service, et cetera or content could be, do you try to get as much of your spend, especially variable spend into specific campaigns or motions go to market motions or do you just kind of view that as it goes across the various campaigns?
23:56Yeah, that’s, that’s a good question.
23:57I think that’s an area that we’re getting better at of really being very intentional, right?
24:02And I think part of that only happens when you can measure the outcome of specific activities, right?
24:08So whether we have event and we say, hey, well, how many people attended who actually turned into a lead and who did we convert?
24:16So that’s an area that we’ve been focused on, you know, that Uptempo has been helping us with, of like, how do we match?
24:22Because there’s a couple of things that you need, right?
24:24You need to be able to match the budget and how much did we think we were going to spend and how much did we actually spend?
24:29And then we need to match that into the campaign, right?
24:32So usually those campaigns for most people is gonna be in sales force and then from there you need to be able to.
24:37So now that you have the budgeting costs, then we start looking at like the actual campaign metrics and performance, how many people attended, how many people turned into a lead and how many did we can?
24:47So I’m giving you just one example there as an advance.
24:51But so we’ll do that across multiple kind of campaigns, whether they be paid, syndication, displayed channels as well on those things there.
25:00You know, we’re getting better of like being able to tie those things and then report out on those and then to your point that does kind of inform, ok, maybe we shouldn’t be spending so much in X channel, right?
25:12Because based on like how we think it perform, it maybe doesn’t make sense unless we change something, right?
25:19And then there’s other areas where we say, hey, you know what that really did that really, we’ve got a lot of benefit and you know, ro I out of those things, is there more head room in there?
25:28Like we build more, put more dollars in there like we continue that return on that investment there.
25:34So yes, it does kind of inform those things there.
25:38Well, you, you mentioned this kind of in, in, in your answer to that last question about you said you alluded to, we’re getting better, we’re all getting better, right?
25:47It’s always a journey.
25:49But you said we’re getting better with with your use of up Uptempo, which brings me of course to, you know, how, how are you using up Uptempo today?
25:59And how is it helping to improve your planning or budgeting process?
26:04Yeah, so yeah, this is we just started our third year in Uptempo.
26:11So one of the things that we were, we were talking about earlier on like when you have a large team, like spreadsheets becomes very compli complicated to manage those things, right?
26:19Somebody downloads it makes an update that doesn’t go out to the entire team.
26:24And then with the last thing you want to do is have different numbers where you know, somebody is saying I have this and then the like this, you can already see the conversation that you would have.
26:33So one it helps there, right?
26:36Like to me my source of truth, right?
26:38is out a Uptempo on this stuff here, right?
26:41But what’s in there is truth, right?
26:44And so we work off that the other one that’s been very helpful.
26:48I talked about like structure and also reporting, right?
26:52Like we want to know, you know, where is our stem going, right?
26:55So the the ability to kind of tag it, right?
26:59And say, hey, in the metadata in the details and say, hey, all right, this event a that is in America’s, all right.
27:05Well, one we know it’s supporting America’s region, right?
27:08Because I know I’m gonna get asked that question two is was it in, in service to a specific product?
27:15Right?
27:16Maybe it was an event in America in North America and it was, you know, specifically for like one of our database products as an example, then I know that specifically, ok, this $100,000 went there, right?
27:30And so that’s very helpful, right?
27:31Because one again, like, as I mentioned, leadership looks at it that way too, right?
27:35We want to know like what are we investing in this kind of by region and by product?
27:40So that’s very helpful as well.
27:42And then there’s even a layer down from there, right?
27:47Potentially, we could say like, how do, where are we spending specifically to like subscriptions or how much am I spending in contractors?
27:55So the ability to get even more granular and then so it enables like if somebody comes asking me, you know, my FP A name and says, hey, how much are we spending on contractors or maybe my hr person wants to know that I don’t have to go through this huge, you know, five hour one day drill like let me, let me pull the line from this sheet and then this sheet over here, like I’m just able to really kind of straightforward, like just make sure my filtering the logic is right?
28:21And then, so that’s a hugely benefit.
28:24And then the next thing that we’re working on with with you all on that Uptempo is what I mentioned earlier of not getting into the next phase of maturity of like our budgeting map into campaigns specifically in salesforce, right?
28:36Because we we we’re being intention of like we want to measure outcome and return on investment in essence, right, in the very basic.
28:45So that ability and that integration say, hey, this spin is going here to campaign A and this spin is going to campaign B, right?
28:53So that’s kind of our big goal on that stuff there.
28:56So we make, I said, I’m sure a lot of people do.
28:58We want to make data informed decisions on this stuff here to say, hey, what is the data telling us, what’s the best kind of way to lean forward on that?
29:06And it makes sense.
29:07So many marketers talk about the ro i of their programs and yet there’s really no understanding of the eye at all because it’s lost in some.
29:15What they’re really talking about is, you know, revenue outcomes, pipeline build or leads whatever the cost of those things.
29:24So that’s good.
29:26Yeah, I think that’s a, it’s a good point.
29:28I, I would agree with that.
29:29I think it’s,, especially so one if you’re in sheets, it’s gonna be a manual process.
29:34If you try to connect the budget into a campaign and it becomes, you know, intense a bit on do, trying to do it that way and, and then you open yourself up to error because if something changes you, it’s hard to say.
29:47did you update sales force or not?
29:49So that becomes problematic.
29:51Yeah.
29:51So I think if you really and I know a lot of marketing leaders see the most, you know, as we go in the industries and they’re very focused on like the return on that investment and CEO and rightfully so, right, if you want to make sure you know what we’re spending is having a good outcome on the last question on this because you mentioned so many times in your conversation about budget, budget management, budget reporting.
30:18How would you characterize a relationship between marketing and finance and how’s that changed since you started using te?
30:26Yeah.
30:26So yeah, when you think of, you know, anyone that has a similar kind of responsibility of managing a budget for marketing or for any team, right?
30:34One of your key stakeholders is finance.
30:37So usually FPN A it’s been good, right?
30:41you know, being able to work with them, one is you need to have a good relationship with them.
30:47one is they’re gonna ask questions and rightfully so like where do we, where is the dollars going and etcetera?
30:54And then there’s also, you know, things you need from them, right?
30:58Whether it’s forecast modeling, being able to present a business case to them in case you are asking for additional investment or dollars from, from finance, right?
31:07When you have a good relationship with them, it’s beneficial to everybody on those things.
31:12So they’re one of my key stakeholders at SolarWinds.
31:15The other ones are accounts payable accounts receivable as well.
31:18They’re key stakeholders where you’re executing and reconciling budgets as well.
31:24Those are, you know, kind of the landscape within, at least within the budgeting aspect.
31:30That makes sense.
31:31All right.
31:32Well, listen, this has been, I’ve taken 30 minutes of your time based on everything we just talked about.
31:38You’re obviously a busy guy.
31:39So I just want to thank you.
31:40I really appreciate it, Jaime.
31:41I learned a lot of SolarWinds and what you’re trying to do otherwise.
31:46Thank you homie and have a wonderful day.
31:49Alright, thanks.
31:52Now for a more wider scope in terms of solution demo of the Uptempo platform and well, subject of the day, we are focusing indeed on plan and spend and we’re actually for dramatic purposes, we’ll start our presentation with the spent portion.
32:10And without further ado, let’s head over into the live demo.
32:14So here I am locked into the system already from the get go.
32:21I am presented with my personal favorite dashboard and that is a top down versus bottom our budget planning dashboard.
32:27So what I see is our investment target have been 60 7.4 million against as I have planned a certain amount of budget, I’m 92% complete.
32:35I know where I’m good.
32:37I know where I I’m supposed to be.
32:40Yeah, filling out a little bit more metadata, et cetera.
32:42So we have these heuristics in the system to guide you accordingly and then going down there, I have a dashboard for investment mix by objective by customer journey by segment C activity type persona product.
32:55Ultimately, which metadata, which segmentation, which custom attribute, which which taxonomy you’re going for.
33:02This is completely up to you.
33:04This not only goes for such a dashboard as we’re looking at it here, any kind of dashboards, be they standard or be they offer custom dashboards that we can provide you with.
33:13Now, we do have a chicken and an egg problem because well, it’s great to have such reports for decision making.
33:20But before you have the data to report on, you have to get some work done.
33:24So let’s take a step back here and have a look at how that is done.
33:28So very typically early on in the planning phase, we have some business objectives provided by the business.
33:35So business could be like, hey, please be so kind.
33:37Marketing, please increase annual revenue by 10%.
33:39That would be great.
33:40And so marketing says say no more, we expand the market penetration in South America.
33:45Have these marketing priorities set up with measurable tangible OKRS.
33:50And already here we can visualize we have these synergistic synergistic effects going on with aligning marketing to the business, but it goes forward, we trickle it down to key actions for marketing teams.
34:03Those would then be assigned to the individual investment and individual activities for the end to end strategy map to the financial execution if you will.
34:12So let’s have a look at that.
34:14So we go to the menu and into the budgets.
34:17This is where our fictitious company.
34:20So they’re doing sustainable technology, they have budgeted into various segments.
34:27So we have agencies, product marketing, marketing operations, channel marketing, different subcategories.
34:32There is field marketing with different regional budget buckets, et cetera.
34:37And then we have our North American go investment plan here as well.
34:41We will get to that in a minute.
34:43But before we do that, let’s open the details panel because this is where the magic happens in terms of top down budgeting.
34:50So you can freely distribute a budget over time for the various investment plans.
34:55You can also request transfers in between those plans here as well with a according approval workflow.
35:01But for now, let’s go into one such investment plan.
35:04And this is kind of the the payload of the investment plan where what looks like a campaign plan is just reminiscent of one.
35:13It is actually an investment plan.
35:14We are in the span chapter.
35:15After all, every line item reflects an individual investment portion that we’re planning out.
35:21So currently we’re looking at the planned budget, we can showcase these head up displays.
35:26So this is great for our zero budgeting, top down versus bottom up.
35:30How are we ranking against that?
35:32Here is our strategic and objective alignment.
35:36Again, all of those line items, they are either contributing or not contributing to a strategic incentive that has been given to us.
35:45Now, we can change the few here.
35:48So maybe we would like to have an aggregate over the quarters or maybe we would like to have a more in depth look into, into the actual spending.
35:56So down the road, there will be invoices, that’s the actual down the road, there will be purchase orders, our committed budget.
36:03But even before that, what we can do is we can forecast our spending.
36:07That’s actually a pretty powerful tool because what we can do essentially is we can say, you know, what not only have we planned to spend 40,000, we are indeed forecasting that 37.5000 are going to be spent even before we have contractually committed it via purchase orders.
36:26And therefore we are removing the frictions between marketing and other departments and and controlling and finance.
36:32It’s great for a cruel management.
36:34Please don’t take away that budget for us.
36:37So after forecasting, how are we getting to town when it comes to committing the budget, initiating purchase requisitions?
36:44You actually can do this right from within your system of record of marketing of Uptempo.
36:49If you will opening the details panel here, we notice we have these fully customizable tabs worth of budget general ledgers, cost centers, et cetera, et cetera.
36:59What finance cares for investment details, spend type, spend, type, detail, supplier, supplier, type, et cetera.
37:08All the metadata that is relevant for the reporting that we also had started our journey with today.
37:13But the beauty here is that we have these infamous action buttons.
37:17And so right from within the system, we can initiate a purchase requisition so we can kick this off.
37:23We have this intake form, everything what you see here is fully customizable.
37:28Maybe you don’t even want to have that intake form but you can have it.
37:31So let’s say I would like to raise a full purchase order bring in some very creative description here of mine.
37:38And then down here we have individual line items for our purchase requisition.
37:43So let’s say we go for 50,000 for a specific cost center marking operations, we can add another line item.
37:51I bring in another value 30,000 for good measure.
37:55And then this goes straight to the office of the CMO.
37:58So what we can do is now we can submit this and notice before I do this here in the background, we have a number and that is actually the line item id, which is a very crucial number because we sent this number along with that purchase requisition to the third party system in your back office for procurement.
38:15Because down the road, that back office system will according to approval will issue the purchase order so we can bring that back that purchase order and reconcile it with our planned budget line item.
38:28And the same would apply then down the road once goods received, once the invoice has been expensed, we roll back that invoice back into our system for us as a marketer in our system of record for marketing to have the end to end tracking of our financial journey if you will from planning over forecast purchase orders and the actuals.
38:49So this is great.
38:49I’m looking at this.
38:50This is the North American field marketing spent management plan if you will.
38:56But maybe my boss she wants to have a rather high level overview.
39:00She is the the global manager for field marketing on Solas.
39:05And so she wants to have a, a roll up view of that over the whole globe so she can have that what have we planned globally, what have we committed globally, et cetera and she can also leverage different views.
39:19So maybe she wants to have a more aggregated view on.
39:23OK.
39:24What is 00 budgeting plan versus actual purchase order versus actual et cetera?
39:28Where are we looking at in that regard?
39:32So, so much for spent and let’s have a brief recap here.
39:36We have just seen the top down provided budget against which we have planned and bottom up all the rich details and and metadata and taxonomy on that level informs then all the reports that we have had a look at at the beginning.
39:52And yeah, we have the forecasting also that can be reported on and everything rolls up nicely for management views, even without going to the reports, get these reports, they are at your disposal.
40:04Nonetheless, we have had a look at how we can align the corporate strategy to those investments.
40:11And we have recognized that we can from within the the system, we can kick off procurement automatically without actually having to go to a separate system.
40:23However, meanwhile, we have just had a look at the spend management and the planning of budget.
40:31We have not yet planned for the actual go to market all our campaigns and activities.
40:36So let’s have a look at that as well.
40:39So going back to the system, we have a dedicated area for that with all the timelines and gunshots that you would expect.
40:47So what we are looking at here right now is our go to market calendar with all the timelines.
40:53And yeah, we are looking at today, we have currently going on the 2023 channel marketing plan.
41:00So what is this?
41:01Let, let’s have a look, let’s digest this piece by piece.
41:03So I open this and in here, I see this element is actually of type, well, plan that makes sense.
41:11And so what we have down here and these are even mandatory.
41:15We have the plan here and the plan type I go a level deeper here in the rabbit hole.
41:19And what we then are presented with is a campaign.
41:23Now, this campaign has campaign objective, campaign theme.
41:26OK?
41:26That makes sense.
41:27Go a little deeper and we will stop here in a second program has program family and represented offering the point here being that we are context to where it only ever present.
41:38The asks for the taxonomy and the metadata that’s relevant for your task at hand.
41:42So we capture that where it is relevant and don’t bother you with that where it is not relevant.
41:48The other thing is, well, we are looking at a program that is sitting underneath the campaign might maybe this is vastly different for you.
41:56Maybe for you, it is a campaign and program the other way around.
42:00Maybe you have a, a level in between, maybe you have a layer for channels, maybe you have a layer for for instrument, et cetera.
42:07However, you see fit, we have cut you covered because there is a nesting rules engine in place that gives you kind of guide rails.
42:15So you have a structured marketing planning.
42:17We can even accommodate differences in different departments and different markets for different audiences, et cetera.
42:24So everybody can plan according to their needs and yet with the metadata on the lowest level, the payload of the plan, if you will think tactics, the actual activities, content production runs where we capture all the metadata that we then also can run reports on.
42:41We kind of can go a highest denominator kind of an approach so that we can compare apples and oranges between different marketing plans if you will.
42:51So this is what we can do.
42:54We can of course, then also leverage the metadata having a look at for instance, campaign objectives.
42:59So understanding that from a different angle, pivot the whole hierarchy, understanding OK, great.
43:04which campaigns are actually going for demand creation, which campaigns are actually going for reputation and so on.
43:13So having different perspectives utilizing all the metadata, but all those campaigns and activities, ultimately, we have to budget for them.
43:23we’ve managed to spend already.
43:25So how does that look?
43:26Like it’s a simple exercise of going to budget and then understanding that we can associate those activity line items with multiple spend line items in the spent hierarchy.
43:39Because this is the beauty of the system where we have two hierarchies.
43:42Yeah, we can basically double multiple tip dip into different budget buckets, leveraging multiple budget sources, but we can also distribute our spend to various activities when it comes to splitting, having kind of efficiencies in that regard.
44:02Why are we doing this though?
44:03What we can do with the system?
44:05We can actually forecast already during the planning phase, the performance that we’re going for.
44:11So what we can do here and let’s talk this in a kind of a generic way.
44:16We can actually project top of the funnel performance overall, go to market.
44:22So purple here.
44:24So purple here has kind of the the top of the funnel performance impact that we are going for.
44:30We are planning to produce to hit the market with if you will and over the time this performance will be generated and then we have this delay after which we have the revenue impact for the business.
44:42So how do we get there?
44:44Well, we have underneath the hood, we have a funnel projection going on.
44:50What we’re looking at right now is A B to B funnel.
44:53It is completely configurable.
44:55It can be A B to C funnel, we can look at a demand waterfall, we can look at an elite waterfall, we can look at a above the line below the line.
45:02It is ultimately completely up to you how to set this up.
45:05The key piece here is that we have these parameters, conversion rates between those individual stages.
45:11We have the velocity between those individual stages.
45:15And according to the average deal size, it translates to the revenue contribution to the business and what’s important here, we’re looking at the planning of things.
45:26So we will have to fact check this against the actual performance measure.
45:30So we will, we will handle that in a minute.
45:32But this is already an important piece because it allows us to assess whether our plan is having integrity.
45:39And what we mean by that is figuring out whether heaven forbid if we are actually successful with the execution of our planned plan.
45:48we are not hitting our targets, so maybe we should pivot on the spot and of course, correct before we achieve our goals, that are not set up properly for us in terms of the marketing execution.
46:00Now, there is one more thing that I would like to show you live and that is, first of all right, now, we can just go in here and plan in an agile manner according to my user rights and role.
46:10That is so simply why I track and drop, I can create those elements and, and, and, and, and go out there.
46:16But maybe I would like to have things handled in a more kind of orchestrated way.
46:22What we can do is we can have everything be planned out and laid out in a workflow based manner.
46:28So all those elements can be linked to workflows, not only for the planning on a on a campaign and program level, but also for like work and and and collaborative execution level down the road.
46:39We will have a quick look at that in at the end of the presentation.
46:43So associated with our activity, which is in this case, a strategic plan, we have this this job which is currently sitting in final review.
46:51We have all the metadata soon back and forth.
46:54We have our collaboration here on the right side.
46:56And what I want to show you here is that this suspiciously streamlined looking workflow here in this red visualization up here, this is actually a potentially rather complex workflow and I will show you later on an even more complex example, but there is this revision loop going on with re entry points, there could be parallel gateways, we could have decision points within that.
47:21Then we actually hide away from the end user with the complex with the concept of simplified views.
47:29that is and this is not only reminiscent in in these background visualizations, it also shows in my personal favorite view in the system, which is the Kanban board.
47:40So here in the Kanban board for all kinds of workflows that is we have here an example for an activity brief.
47:46We have an example for some approval and planning.
47:48This is what we we’re just talking about.
47:52There could be price and promotions, activity, commercial activity planning that is production runs content creation.
48:00We will discuss this briefly in the next chapter, et cetera.
48:04So with this, let’s jump back to the slides.
48:07Let’s have a quick recap here.
48:09We have just discussed the activity calendar, how it can be sliced and diced by all different kinds of perspectives.
48:15We have seen the funnel projection, understanding the performance contribution early on in the planning phase, assessing whether we are having integrity in our planning.
48:23And then there is of course, the need to fact check this against the actuals in the market.
48:29So not only are we having the planned return of invest but then also integrated, we have the actual return of invest, we can compare this and understand whether we are on the right track or not.
48:40What we can also do is we can integrate into marketing attribution systems.
48:44What is nice here is that this is also something that we’re having on our road map to support you with native marketing attribution modeling right within our system as well.
48:54And last but not least, we have discussed that we have these these can ban views on any types of workflows again, potentially very complex workflows with decision, gateways, parallel workflow steps, et cetera.
49:10These are also used in the work site which is not of today’s presentations focus and yet a couple of slides just to briefly discuss this.
49:20So what a temple also has in stock for you is work management, concentration processes, capacity management.
49:27Where OK, we utilize the workflow engine.
49:30In this case for a concentration piece have different workflows driving it underneath the hood again, hiding away the complexity, we leverage these intake forms for the collaborative aspects of content creation, rejecting assets, approving assets, having reviews and annotations going on with side by side comparison thing, videos, documents, images, et cetera.
49:53And last but not least it is then released into the asset library of a temple or then synchronized to your existing enterprise digital asset management.
50:02We support both now supporting both takes us to my last slide in this presentation and that is there are numerous integration use cases and we will tackle them with integration of Uptempo fusion framework.
50:18So here the idea is around our around our solutions plan, spend and work.
50:25We started our journey with spend today.
50:28We would integrate your back office systems for P procurement, also spend reconciliation when it comes to planning, hitting your data lake.
50:38kicking off marketing automation or kicking off a sales campaign, but then also taking back the performance metrics accordingly.
50:46We can have work managed in our system releasing assets to your digital asset management or leveraging assets from your digital asset management.
50:54Or if you say, you know what we we appreciate plan and spend, but we have something going on for work already in our existing project and work management tools.
51:02We can integrate your existing work management just as well.
51:06This is what I wanted to present you all today.
51:10and how we can help you with the a temple platform.
51:14And yeah, thank you.
51:15Thank you for your time.