Marketing planning at large companies can feel like a never-ending grind, with misalignment across teams, endless cycles of disconnected spreadsheets, and time wasted on tasks that don’t drive meaningful outcomes.

At Workday, Evan Mager and his team turned that around with a bold overhaul to their annual planning approach. They created a strategic, data-driven process that aligns marketing with business priorities. During Gartner Marketing Symposium, Evan shared the planning reinvention that cemented marketing’s reputation as a function that drives the business, and mapped out his ambition for what comes next. 

Transcript

Marketing annual planning is a thing that a lot of us care about and struggle with.

So I hope that my half an hour today gives a little bit of insight and maybe take some lessons away to take back to wherever you’re from.

My name is Evan Mager. I’m Vice President of Marketing Strategy and Operations at Workday.

I am part of the marketing leadership team. I report directly to the CMO and I’ve been there for about 3 years and you’ll hear more about my history in a second.

We really are going to get into today my experience rebuilding our planning motion and you’re also going to hear a little bit more about my ambition for this year because we made a lot of progress last year, but the job isn’t done yet.

It’s worth it to know a little bit about me before we get started.

I’m a proud husband and father.

I think what’s most important for you to understand about me when I think about sort of my role is that I am a failed engineer.

I have a mechanical engineering degree.

I work for an engineering company for a year and I was bad at it, but I think that makes me a good marketer and a good strategist. I am comfortable with data and structured thought and frameworks, but I’m also not afraid to take intuitive leaps. Look for creat.

Solutions which is great for marketing and strategy.

It’s not so good in my case for when I was building appliances that could explode.

So I’m a better marketer than I was an engineer.

My background is both at agencies and in House.

I think that gives me.

A broad range of experiences to bring to my role.

And I think it’s important when you’re hearing from a leader to know what their values are. And these are my values and the one that’s most relevant today is optimism because I came at this problem and felt intractable.

It felt like we were never going to make planning better, and in fact we there was a way forward. We were able to to figure it out.

When I think when I look back and even at the time when we were thinking about reimagining planning, there were 3 words that actually became our mantra, transparency, alignment and accountability.

We needed all marketing leaders to be able to see what the others were planning and spending.

We needed something, some motion that was going to make sure we’re all moving in the right direction and we needed a way to hold each other accountable to our commitments and that’s what we built because the pain was this. And this is not going to be a surpr.

To any of you.

Our annual planning process was reactive.

Siloed, it was tactical, right?

And that’s that’s not new.

I’m sure a lot of you live with that every day.

It kind of felt like this.

Right. We had spreadsheets everywhere, every ML team member had their own budget and their sub had their own spreadsheet.

There were sub spreadsheets coming out of that. We had spreadsheets for different plans around the world, different events and and because of that, not that we were literally trying to keep secrets from one another, but it was really easy not to keep everybody as well informed as we.

Should have.

And at times it did feel a little bit like we were holding each other at a distance, but more than anything else, it felt like we were always behind.

It felt like we were always playing catch up with Workday corporate with our sales teams and we were really tired of that.

And so, you know, when I talk about this, I guess I like to pose this question.

What is your annual planning process for? Like what would the what would the animated gifts be for you and are you happy with it?

And really, this was where the pain got most acute.

And I bet you get these questions all the time.

These are so simple, right?

They should be so easy to ask, right?

How much are we spending in a country in an industry, in a segment across all of marketing, right?

Or what activities do we have planned in Q1?

This should be super simple, but because of all the pains I just talked about, this took embarrassingly long to answer.

And finally, our CMO had enough because she was getting these questions from the CEO, the sales teams, other functions.

We’re asking them ourselves.

We weren’t even sure.

And so it was almost exactly a year ago. I think it was this week, a year ago, I sat down with my amazing head of strategy, analytics and planning and we began to map out what planning would look like.

And we started with design principles.

What are the things we know we need to do to make this better to solve those pains, to make it easier to answer those questions?

It started with the first one unify all of our plans and do a single plan, particularly around budget, but also with an ambition towards activities and campaigns.

The next one really, the next two are probably the most transformative principles that we used.

And you know, if you don’t take anything away, maybe, maybe take these.

We rationalize our spending around the world.

And by that I mean for the first time we took a look at all the money, every single dollar being spent from the marketing budget where it was being spent, and we categorized it brand to demand to events.

And of course, we had things that didn’t fit in that, but especially as we looked at each individual country, we realized we didn’t know the ratio of what was being spent in those three areas. And that rationalization first was to understand what were we spending then we worked.

With companies like Gartner and our STANFORDS and benchmarks, what should we be spending in that balance?

And then we made strong recommendations when we went into planning to our CMO to say this is how we’re going to move money around. So that rationalize rationalization and budget more than anything else.

Had the biggest impact on the way we are spending money today.

The other transformative principle was that we assumed zero budget.

Now you’ve seen all the data this week. Most marketing budgets are flat, but at the time we didn’t know what we were going to get.

But it didn’t matter because the year before we had spent so much time going back and forth.

Well, this is how much I have.

How much more can I get?

Everybody was playing that game. It was.

We were spending so many cycles on it, so we told every MLT leader, including myself, that if you want to do something new, you got to deprioritize something else. And that includes things that are corporate priorities.

Right there are mandates, but still we got to figure out how to make it work with a zero budget and that includes head count as well and that was hard, but it really brought a lot of clarity to every conversation because nobody thought they were going to get.

Anything else?

We all agreed to spend more time together earlier in the year too, and I’ll show you some milestones in a minute.

We got really tight with corporate planning, with sales planning, what we call the enterprise planning team as well as revenue operations planning and this is really important. Those those colleagues of mine are not here this week, but we could not have had the success that we had without.

A really strong corporate planning motion.

They built a framework that then we were able to build on top of and actually we were able to influence as our planning motion went along.

And then we had to prepare for Uptempo.

So full disclosure, Uptempo invited me to speak today.

Very grateful for them. This opportunity. I love talking about this stuff. You see, their T-shirts here today. The same day that we kicked off planning, planning, planning if you will was the same day I got the go ahead for my CMO to invest in Uptempo so up.

Is a marketing budget and activities planning tool.

We currently have stood up the spending portion of it, the budget planning we’re currently in, the we’re implementing the activities.

Portion called plan, but we knew any planning we did would ultimately have to dovetail really nicely into our Uptempo instance.

Couldn’t live with redundant work redoing work, so we had to make sure the data frameworks and the way we were thinking about it. We’re going to work with our new single source of truth.

So these are our principles.

The other thing that I found people really want to know is like literally, how did you schedule your time, Evan?

So these are the major milestones and I’m not going to talk about each one in great detail.

You guys have the slides, but I think what’s most important to understand is the approach we took was really intense time together.

And then the MLT went away and did their homework.

And then we got back together and then we went away again. And that sort of like gathering and then going away for our homework. That was really effective because it gave us time to share and talk and debate.

But then it also gave us time to think and think about what are the implications for what we agreed to.

To my own function to the way I’m going to spend my own money and deploy my own headcount.

So that that was sort of the structure of it in each of those moments had specific deliverables and templates that I’ll show you in a second.

The other piece that was really crucial in this may sound obvious, but I think we’ve all tried to plan or or or coordinate something across marketing without CMO support and it never really goes that well.

So we made sure that our CMO was aligned and happy the whole way through and this started.

Gosh, this move would have been in July so well before the 1st. Sit down with MLT and this is really important. We showed her every every ratio.

We plan to present every recommendation, even every template, because we had to make sure if it her mental model of how she thought about the budget.

So it’s easy for her to support, easy for her to ask questions, easy for her to judge. If she liked what we were delivering to her.

So and I will tell you that happy new CEO is CMO was was was super important when we need a little bit nudging for some of my peers.

And then lastly, I keep talking about other planning teams at Workday, but this is really important.

We stayed really close to enterprise planning and sales planning because we could, you know, I could come out of some of these sessions and sit down with my, with my peers, my counterparts and say, hey, here’s what we’re having gaps or here’s what our plans are right now.

And they could share back to me and I could say we’re not planning for that.

We didn’t know about that.

So that ongoing connection.

With other functions was really important to making sure there are no surprises. When we got to the end.

So this and you’ll see if you do download the slides. I literally have sort of months of the year when we did this, we started in August.

And our year starts February 1st. So we started well in advance.

The other piece that a lot of people ask me about is literally what did your templates look like? And this will give you a little bit more understanding of what we did in those sessions and what the homework looked like.

Importantly, every artifact, every deliverable that the marketing leadership team had, and I focus on the marketing leadership team.

But of course we were pulling in our teams as well to contribute over time.

Everything we created built on the previous one, so we started that first workshop by identifying our marketing imperatives.

What are the bodies of work that we have to deliver within those? We had priority programs, programs that were more important than others that we would prioritize, budget and people if we had to. If push came to shove.

With those imperatives on top of that, I could build my own areas of focus for strategy and operations.

The chief creative officer could do the same.

The head of comms could do the same.

From that we could then build further to what we call our plan on a page.

So that plan on a page is the same areas of focus, but now with detailed programs under it, the things that matter most to my team as we come into this year. And again this was where I’m committing to fund those things. And if I have to be.

Deprioritize other things I will.

And then lastly, we got to literally the line by line planning of, OK.

This is the last round of homework and this is where we give people the most time because this is where they had to sit down with every single budget owner and program owner to say, OK, given these given this plan on a page, what are you going to?

Do line by line.

A couple really important things about this one and I’m quoting my my head of Strategy Analytics and planning was the power of repetition. Every time we got back together to share was a chance for us to remind our peers of where we’re investing and where we weren’t invest.

Where we had gaps, so by the end of the cycle, every member of the marketing leadership team could repeat where each of our peers had gaps that they couldn’t find.

And the other piece, of course, is that they do build on each other.

So there’s wasted work, but there’s also this sort of logical.

Through line that goes through all the work, which is, these are our imperatives, and this is the line by line list of what we’re going to do.

So we had great outcomes.

I say 2004.

Really, this is sort of the end of January of this year. First and foremost, we were a driver in annual planning.

We were no longer a passenger. In fact, we were able.

We were so far ahead we were able to influence the corporate motion and the sales motion, the sales team even stole some of our templates.

So we’ll take that as a as a good sign.

We dramatically increased our credibility among other functions and especially our executive committee.

Historically, marketing did not have a great reputation for a rigorous disciplined planning motion or the way we manage our budget.

Through the year, that totally changed.

It gave us a chance to coordinate our investments. Probably more important to coordinate our omissions.

We were able to say nobody is investing in this area of work because as many tough decisions that we’ve made, we just can’t fund it at the scale that Workday is asking.

And those coordinated omissions and that rigor led us to probably the one quantitative measure I can share with you, which is that we got more money.

So we were able to go back to the CFO and say we’ve done all the hard work.

And we still have this gap and he was able to help us out with an incremental 7 figures that we weren’t going to get otherwise.

My finance team was very happy for that, but also for our rigor across the board. And then you know, more than anything else to go back to where I started. I do think we increased and I say this not just my own impression, but what I heard from.

My peers, many of whom have been at Workday for a long time, we increase the transparency, the alignment, the accountability of the way that we plan. So we could all see what we were doing.

We’re all moving in the same direction.

And we were able to hold each other accountable.

Based on what we’ve committed to.

So it’s a good start.

But there’s still work to be done, and So what I wanted to do with you is also share my ambition for this year.

So this is a little bit of work in progress.

It’s not quite as pithy, so if you have any suggestions but what I want to do this year.

I want my planning to truly be unified and I’ll tell you more about what that means in a second.

I want it to be complete as well.

And I wanted to be forward thinking because the reality is that our marketing plans are still disconnected. And by that I mean we have all of our budgets in a single source of truth. That’s a tempo.

We have all of our strategic plans on a page in a single document that we can share and we can all refer to.

I can literally go look at the North America plan. I was doing it this morning.

I don’t know what they’re planning, but our tactical plans are still all over the place.

And so once.

Once Uptempo was like we can actually get all of our tactical plans in there as well. So we will have a they will no longer be disconnected.

But that’s where we are right now.

Our plans currently emphasize budget, and I had a finance leader call me out and say, you know, Evan, you guys are managing your budget great, but you’re happy to throw as many marketers as it takes at a problem. And have you thought about the opportunity cost for people?

Time. So we’re going to take a look at that and then we’re not thinking big enough. We’re thinking year to year. We’re not thinking three years out.

Workday has a three-year LRP.

Why doesn’t marketing so sometimes it still feels like this.

There are fewer balls to juggle, but we’re still juggling a little bit, especially when it gets to our tactical plans.

But we’re going to change that.

It does feel like we’re all about the money right now and we need to be really thoughtful about how we are using our work mates because we are not going to get a lot of head count growth this year.

And lastly, it does feel like, as Homer says, we might be living like there’s no tomorrow.

That’s exactly true, but we are living year to year and we all do it.

But again, the company has a three-year plan.

Marketing should do.

Now, as I think about the design principles for this year, a lot of the ones that I showed before are going to stay the same. All right, we’ll still assume zero growth.

Need to reprioritize.

We’ll still get together early, but I think there are a few new ones that are worth thinking about.

We’re going to have a single source of truth for all of our plans, from our budgets to our strategic plans, all the way down to our tactical. What are we doing in each country?

What are we doing each quarter and so on?

We’re going to focus on personnel, not just not just program budgets.

And I’ll tell you a little bit more about what I have in mind there. And I’ve actually got a lot.

I’ve heard some great things this week.

Hear from Gartner about how we might do that.

I’m really excited about how do we start to put some frameworks around personnel as well.

We’re gonna build a long range plan for marketing.

That’s something that our finance team is super excited to do, and I’m gonna bring in more benchmarks from Gartner.

You know, we we had some pretty basic ones last year that were really transformative. But I think we can go even further.

For example, I want to really get into category benchmarks.

I want to start looking like sub category by sub category within marketing.

How are we spending our money? As Christy Ferguson has said in her sessions, benchmarks are not best practices, but they certainly give us a great reference point, and we’re going to look at those reference points, especially as we need to start making tough decisions about do we red.

Do we have to move money around?

I also want to look at staffing benchmarks.

Again, not to utterly make change without thinking it through, but get a good understanding of how are some of our peers in our industry who are our size.

You know what’s the shape and composition of their marketing team, especially when we think about offshoring or outsourcing to agencies, especially as we think about AI, we need to be more thoughtful about this, especially in the countries too, as we’re as we’re pushed to do more in the.

Countries with smaller teams.

You know, we might look at ratios like our head count to our ACBACBS like revenue.

For us, you know, what is our? What is our headcount to revenue goals in the countries?

What is our head count to program budgets? We might even look at things like how many marketers are there compared to how many sales people there are.

These are things we’re going to consider looking at to help us understand the picture and do our staffing models make sense.

I’m super excited to look at areas of opportunity.

What are some things that either we deliberately tabled last year or what has changed this year that we need to seriously consider investing in as a marketing team?

And this is where my strategy team really gets to shine.

They get to dig in, pull from Gartner, pull from other sources and really have a strong point of view about hey, you know what?

We’re not doing enough to reduce churn as a marketing team.

Here’s what that might look like.

So I really want to look for some new opportunities and how our strategy team really be a driving force, not a reactive force.

And then tactical performance, we’ve come a long way in being able to say these are how our campaigns are performing. These are how our events are performing our website and that’s really something if anybody wants to talk afterwards, I’m happy to talk about just tactical performance management, ’cause.

That is also been really transformative.

For us this year, but we’re going to bring some of that insight in to push teams to think differently about their tactical mix from the beginning really early on.

And then this one in blue, you can tell this is always a row for folks outside of marketing our sales team and our product team have put a lot of effort into understanding. Where is it best to sell our Sku’s.

You can imagine that employment law and corporate finance laws a little bit different around the world.

So we can’t sell every SKU in every country.

But sometimes we act like we can.

And so with this tool, we can also say actually in a in a country like France, we’re going to focus on our core HCM product, our human Capital Management tools, because our finance tools aren’t quite as well suited for France. We’re going to be able to focus more.

On messaging our tactics, all the stuff we do with that sellability matrix.

The other thing I want to do is get our systems connected and we’re doing that right now.

So you hear me? Keep talking about Uptempo.

It is going to be a centralized.

It’s not the only tool we rely on, but we’re going to connect all of the tools that we do rely on.

So Salesforce of course is how we run our sales teams or we’re already plugging into that Workday.

Of course, we use our own tools to manage our budgets from planning in there, plugging in there. We’re also going to look at Marketo, making sure that we’re plugged in well there and then we use Snowflake for all of our performance data.

So we’re plugging that in.

We’re gonna bring that in because hopefully what we wanna get to and this is, you know, in the title of this session today, we do need to get to ROI.

So by Q3, early Q4, I’ll be able to connect our spending to our activities. And then as we start to bring in performance data, then we can also say, OK and this is how this is how it performed. So making better use of my data red.

Redundant tasks and simplifying.

And connecting things all the way through.

That’s my ambition for this year.

So I hope.

Here’s what I hope happens.

I hope that I’m back.

I get invited back next year to stand up on the stage and I have a good story for you again and these these are these are my. These are my hopes for for, for what I can talk about. I I am very hopeful and more than hopeful I.

Optimistic that we will be able to talk about more insightful, more data-driven decisions being made in marketing and it doesn’t have to be super complex. But for all the sort of all the benchmarks, I want to bring and all the things I want to look at, I.

Think will be better informed than we’ve ever been.

In particular.

Really robust guidance. I think as a strategy and operations team, we have earned the right to not just say here’s how we’re spending but say here’s how we should be spending. And so we plan to come to our CMO and our leadership team and say look based on.

These ratios based on these benchmarks based on some best practices, we recommend moving money around, whether it’s around the world or between our major program mix, brand demand and events.

I do not have one plan from strategy all the way down through tactics. I want to have one place to go.

I want a mindset of planning for 2028, not just planning for next year in an era of very small head count growth.

We’ve got to have a Longview so that we’re taking advantage of every change in the team if we have to build a function, if we have to go into a new market. So and my finance partner is pushing this really hard too, and I agree with them, we.

Need to have a long term mindset.

I’m really hoping for more global consistency.

You know, different regions operate different ways out of necessity, but I think we can be more consistent about the way that we would plan the way that we report the way we manage our money.

And I really hope I can come back in a year time and have a great story to tell about ROI reporting.

So that’s my ambition.

Here’s what I want to do.

I have a few minutes left.

And so I want to say thank you. But then I have a bonus slide that I want to share with all of you.

So first, thank you.

Appreciate it. But I want to share a bonus slide with you about strategy and operations leadership, because I hope a lot of you in the crowd are in the strategy and operations function or you rely on strategy and operations and you know, as I’ve been spending more time.

With this Community, whether it’s people who manage planning or project management or martech.

I’m really inspired by what I’m hearing from others about how marketing strategy and operations in the last few years has started to.

Take more of a leadership role in marketing, whether it’s on the leadership team or just across the function overall.

And So what I’d like to share with you, it’s all right, is a slide that I share with my team. Every quarterly town hall that we have.

And it’s my vision for marketing strategy and operations.

And again, I hope there’s something that you find here that you can take back to your teams and talk about.

Well, here’s what leadership means for marketing OPS or marketing strategy.

My vision for my team, and they’re probably sick of me talking about it, but that’s OK. We’re gonna keep talking about it, is that they are the indispensable leaders of the way that marketing works.

And let me tell you what I mean by that indispensable means.

Other teams are inviting us in.

They are asking our opinion.

They’re asking us to be in the room.

By leaders, I don’t mean org chart.

I mean setting the tone, solving problems, bringing people together and you know, for me, you know, setting the tone is about optimism.

And then when I talk about the way marketing works, I mean like we’re an operations team.

So yes, it’s a tactical let’s get this project done.

But for me, when I talk about what marketing works, it’s about like major processes around the world.

It’s about strategic trade-offs.

It’s about tough conversations.

It’s about new ways of working that for me is really being a leader in the way that marketing works. And you know, it’s easy to put a nice pithy headline up here. But my team often asked, what does that mean?

Well, these seven bullet points in blue are what I mean.

We’re spending a lot of time focusing on communication. Strat OPS teams aren’t always great about communication. They’re often more comfortable sitting in the background.

And so I’m really getting my team to work on the way they communicate up and across what we say East to West, but also diagonally to other leaders and other functions. And we’re making a lot of progress there.

I’m asking my stratops folks to own their expertise.

Like a lot of you, I’m sure they are experts in their field, whether it’s automation or AI or tech or analytics or planning or whatever.

And I don’t know, they’re always comfortable sitting at a table and saying no, no, no, this is the right thing to do.

And I know it because I’ve done it for 20 years.

For 10 years or even five years if they know their craft.

I want them to bring in the outside more and actually that’s one of the reasons that I’m here this week is that I’ve been asking my team bring in the experts, bring in Gartner to come talk about process or about benchmarks.

Look to your network.

Who do you note interesting things?

Look at other companies.

What are they doing?

Talk to our agencies. I’m sure agencies have tons of experience, but I realized that I wasn’t doing that enough either.

So that’s why I made two days to come here and bringing the outside for myself and and and bring insights back to my team.

More than anything else, I want my team to be the team that proactively disrupts any strategy and operations can not be a team.

That is just reacting and I will tell you this literally keeps me awake at night because I never want to be the team that some other function comes to us and says, hey, why are we still doing it this way? Like you know, there’s a better way like.

Have you have, you know, have you seen this AI tool? I never want to be that Strat OPS team.

So we talk a lot about how do we proactively disrupt our self to move marketing forward.

And then, of course, all these, I expect them to have a strong point of view building on all these points. I want them to problem solve across the organization. I think strategy and operations can be the team that pulls people together across Workday, not just across marketing to.

Solve tough problems and I want them to relentlessly bring big ideas because some of these ideas don’t stick.

And you can bring a lot to the table, but it doesn’t always get traction.

So more than anything, I want them to constantly be bringing ideas for innovation and better ways of working.

To make marketing a better place.

So I hope there’s some insight, some inspiration here for you too.

About how strategy, how marketing strategy and operations can be real leaders in the marketing function, especially in light of everything we’ve talked about this week.

So with that, I will say thank you.