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Hello and welcome to the Exit Five Weekly Newsletter - read by 25,000 B2B marketing professionals around the world. Exit Five is a membership site designed to help you build a successful career in B2B marketing. Join 5,000 other members at exitfive.com.

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☑️ A Gut Check for Your Marketing Budget

It’s that time of year again – budgeting season. If you’re running any kind of paid channels, we’ve found a must have resource for you.

The team at Compound Growth Marketing built this helpful (and free!!) calculator to help you compare your budget to what the average SaaS company would spend based on your revenue growth goals.

You can:

• Enter your growth targets for 2025
• Enter in your average deal size
• Build out funnel economics by customer segment, funnel, and channel
• Understand unit economics to see how much you can spend on upper funnel metrics like MQL/A's

Get your calculator here.

💰 How to Build a Marketing Plan and Get It Approved for 2025

The annual planning process definitely falls into one of those “they don’t teach you this in school” parts of the B2B marketing job.

So if you’re overwhelmed right now… take a deep breath, grab a fresh cup of coffee (or tea, if you’re feeling jittery), and keep reading.

We put together a step-by-step guide on how to structure, present, and win approval for your marketing plan based on a recent Exit Five Live session with Rowan Tonkin, CMO at Planful.

Here’s what you need to know:

1. Know your Guardrails

Having “guardrails” simplifies your planning process. If you know your constraints up front, you’ll be able to build a realistic plan.

Before you do anything, get together with your finance team to understand what they’re looking at:

• Key Ratios: Learn your company’s benchmarks, like marketing spend as a percentage of revenue or CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). Have a deep understanding of what they value here, and what “good” looks like.
  
  
• Financial Priorities: Ask what metrics (e.g., pipeline ROI) the CFO cares about most.

💡Bonus tip: Think like an investor. Frame marketing as an investment, not just an expense.

2. Define Metrics That Matter

Every B2B marketer has been told to be more “data driven” at one point in their career. You know metrics matter… but they don’t all carry the same weight.

Know the difference between:

• Internal Metrics: Use operational metrics (like conversion rates) for team optimization.
  
  
• Executive Metrics: Focus on financial and commercial metrics (pipeline, revenue, ROI) for leadership discussions.

💡Bonus tip: Avoid leading presentations with “vanity” metrics (impressions, open rates, clicks) unless clearly tied to business outcomes.

3. Show How Marketing Contributes to Company Goals

The number one cause of failed plans? Lack of alignment.

Here’s how to nip that in the bud:

• Get on the Same Page: Get in a room with sales, product, and finance early to align on shared company goals.
  
  
• Be Proactive: If goals aren’t defined yet, start the conversation and propose marketing’s contribution.

💡Bonus tip: Follow Rowan’s advice here – “If your marketing goals aren’t tied to company goals, leadership won’t care.”

4. Choose Your Planning Approach

There are two primary methods to create your plan:

• Top-Down: Leadership assigns high-level budgets for each function.
• Bottom-Up: Teams submit detailed requests, which leadership adjusts.

💡Bonus tip: Rowan recommends using a hybrid model—set top-down budget ranges and let teams build their plans within those constraints.

5. Be Prepared to Make Tradeoffs

Budgeting is a game of prioritization:

• Risk Analysis: Highlight high-risk, high-dependency initiatives early.
  
  
• Scenario Planning: Show what shifts if certain conditions change (e.g., reduced pipeline efficiency).
  
  
• Iterate: Based on feedback from leadership, make updates to your plans.

💡Bonus tip: Frame experiments (like brand campaigns) as opportunities with clear outcomes—both upside potential and fallback plans.

6. Structure Your Budget Visually

Break your spend into three categories:

1. Strategic & Productive (55-75%): Programs tied directly to revenue-driving goals.
2. Non-Strategic: Fixed costs like legal fees and basic tools.
3. Experimental (10-20%): Flex funds for testing new ideas.

💡Bonus tip: Show leadership how your allocations map to company goals and leave room for experiments.

7. Communicate Like a Leader

Present your plan in terms executives value:

• Simplify: Replace marketing jargon with financial terms. For example, instead of “We’ll increase MQLs by 30%,” say, “This will generate $450k in incremental revenue.”
  
  
• Own the Risks: Acknowledge areas of uncertainty and outline any strategies you'll take to mitigate them.

💡Bonus tip: Follow Rowan’s Golden Rule –  “Tell the truth. Marketing leaders build credibility by being upfront.”

8. Get Buy-In

Approval isn’t about flashy slides; it’s about alignment:

• Reinforce Goals: Show how your plan supports the company’s top priorities.
• Show Value: Highlight outcomes over activities, like incremental revenue or pipeline impact.

💡Bonus tip: Lead with education—help leadership understand why your plan positions the business for success.

A marketing plan is more than a fancy slide deck or endless spreadsheets to show you’ve crunched the numbers. It’s a huge opportunity to show your vision for marketing and demonstrate how and why your strategy will drive the business forward.

When in doubt, go back to basics—company goals, clear metrics, and proactive communication win every time.

P.S. Here’s Rowan’s full presentation if you want to go a bit deeper on this topic.

What stage of planning are you in right now? Are you done or just getting started?

Just reply to this email – I read (and cherish) every one :)

📺 UPCOMING EVENTS

🎤 Exit Five LIVE | Building a Marketing Operating System: How to Organize Campaigns, Align Your Team, and Deliver Results

Marketers are expected to be masters of strategy, creative, and execution.

But who’s teaching us to manage the endless moving parts of a campaign? With tighter budgets, higher expectations, and a mountain of competing priorities, it’s easy to feel stuck in campaign chaos.

We often talk about the tactics: SEO, ABM, email, content.

But for this session we're going to talk about the behind the scenes of B2B marketing. We're going to talk about the marketing operating system – specifically:

• how to organize your 2025 campaigns;
• align your team; and
• stay laser-focused on what matters most

Join us with the team at Tenon to see how top marketers are using work management tactics to simplify the complexity, free up time for high-value work, and boost team performance—all while showing your boss the real impact of marketing.

Join us live

🏢 OPEN ROLES

Who's Hiring Right Now?

HOT JOB OF THE WEEK: Paramark is hiring a Head of Marketing to be their founding marketer. This is a dream role, working along side CEO Pranav Piyush – a former marketing VP who just gets it. You’ll market to CMOs and CFOs and have full freedom to shape and execute your strategy with plenty of support from the founders.

Interested? Apply here.

Other open roles on the Exit Five job board this week:

• Trovata is hiring a Senior Content Marketing Manager
• RightMetric is hiring a Founding Marketer
• Wynter is looking for marketing leaders to participate in their research
• SpeedWork is hiring a Senior LinkedIn Ads Specialist
• Dragon360 is hiring a Advertising & Media Strategist
• AROYA is hiring a Performance Marketing Manager
• Rhapsody is hiring a Content Marketing Manager
• Peak Support is hiring a Head of Marketing ($140k-$185k)
• PDQ is hiring a Senior Customer Marketing Specialist

See All Open Roles >>

Have an open role and want to make sure the best B2B marketing talent sees it?

Just reply to this email and we'll send over more info on how you can post it on our job board + get it in front of 25k+ marketers.

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