#197: Strategy | How to Build a Marketing Plan and Get It Approved for 2025 with Rowan Tonkin, CMO at Planful

In today's challenging business landscape, marketers face the daunting task of not only crafting an efficient marketing plan, but implementing it quickly, proving its value, and continuously adapting the plan on the fly. The ever-changing macroeconomic environment adds an extra layer of complexity, making success even harder to achieve.

In this episode, Rowan Tonkin, CMO at Planful, and Dave Gerhardt, Founder of Exit Five, lead you through the essential steps to building your plan, getting it approved, and unlocking the full potential of your marketing efforts.

They cover:

• Tips to build a powerful marketing plan that aligns with your business objectives.
• Strategies to gain plan approval from executives and board members
• Best practices and practical approaches to flawlessly execute your marketing plan, turning ideas into measurable results.
• Insights into the advantages of scenario planning and how it can prepare your marketing team to adapt to the ever-changing economic landscape.

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Dave Gerhardt [00:00:12]:

All right, so this is one of our monthly ish. Once or twice a month we do these Exit Five live sessions where a little bit different than the podcast. We bring in a subject matter expert to go deep on a particular topic. We do things like SEO strategy review, email teardowns, and basically we've done. We've been doing these live sessions webinars for two years now and this topic is consistently the most popular one. We try to do it around this time of year when everybody gets into planning. And we have Rowan Tonkin.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:43]:

He's the CMO at Planful. They're an incredible company in the space and he gives away so much knowledge about how to create a marketing plan, how to build a budget, most importantly how to sell it to the CEO and cfo. This was one of the best sessions we did and I'm excited to have him back. So. Hey, man, good to see you. How are we doing? I'm doing great. As we have questions like this is going to be a little bit interactive. So as you have questions, put them in the Q&A.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:07]:

Because if you put them in the Q&A, then I can sort them by upvotes later and we'll get to them. Be active in the chat. The best part about these sessions is that it's not just Rowan's not just going to drone on like, I want you in the chat helping each other out. Everybody else's marketers here. So talk about what you've done, how you've done it, what you've learned, and then last bit of housekeeping. Yes, this is going to be recorded. We have one rule with all the Exit Five live sessions, that if you ask if it's going to be recorded, you have to do a one mile run followed by 100 burpees and send us video evidence. Otherwise, we're going to have a great session.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:40]:

Plenty of time for your Q&A at the end. So put them in, get active in the chat, and I'm going to turn it over to Rowan, who is going to blow your mind.

Rowan Tonkin [00:01:49]:

How's that? Well, let's see how we go. We are probably going to have some technical difficulties. I think we need the slides coming up. There we go. No more technical difficulties.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:02]:

There we go. All right, everyone. Everyone go home.

Rowan Tonkin [00:02:07]:

Thanks, Dave, for the introduction. Rowan Tonkin. I'm the CMO here at Planful. Planful is a financial performance management company and one of the areas that we help companies with is their marketing planning and marketing performance. I've been CMO here for about five years and prior to that I spent a lot of time in the marketing planning space at a company called Anaplan and then also at a company called Infor. So I've been consulting, advising, implementing this type of technology my whole career in B2B, B2C. So hopefully I can answer all of your various questions today.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:42]:

Why do you think this topic is so popular? I think it tells me something about marketers and this, but I'm curious to hear your point of view on that.

Rowan Tonkin [00:02:52]:

Well, I think it, because it only happens once a year, it's so important to get right because it creates guardrails and structures for you that effectively get imposed on you for a full year. Like if you don't get the budget now, you're like, oh man, how is this going to impact my whole period of time? I also think coming back, you know, we don't get taught this. You know, you kind of get handed the reins as a marketing leader and it's like, hey, now you're in charge of the whole plan. And you're like, who's going to teach me how this works? And then finally, marketers don't have great relationships with their finance counterparts so often we need to learn from them. And that's something we'll talk about today.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:36]:

Quick personal story. The first time I ever had to do this, we had basically I joined, we had like eight, eight months of like good organic growth, all from inbound. Didn't really know where it came from. And then the CEO and the CFO asked me to build a marketing plan, build a budget for the first time. And I was like, I will just, I would need like 100 grand. And then we're going to figure out the rest as we go. Like we can just, you know, pull from the money whenever. And they were like, that's not how it works.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:01]:

I was like, well, what does it matter? Like, what does it matter? We don't have anything real yet. Let me just, you know, draw from it when we need it and then I'll justify the expense later. And I remember specifically, like we had grown entirely through organic. And so I was on this, like, organic marketing is the only way paid marketing sucks. And then they were like, they showed me the plan and how much we had to grow and I was like, oh, we're going to have to spend on paid. And so they were like, you know, I need you to come up with an estimate for how much we need to spend on paid. And I was like, eh, how about 200 grand. And they're like, okay, show me the plan.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:28]:

You have to base this on real assumptions. And, man, I. I think, like, getting my butt kicked the first time trying to do this was the reality check that I needed. And I think something like this, you know, for me, coming up in my career, it was like going to HubSpot blog and typing, like, you know, marketing, budget planning. And I think your thing is really useful. And so last thing, and I'll shut up before we get into this. I think. I think in a world of, like, there's so much advice, I like to just find one or two people to learn from.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:52]:

And so, like, if you're here and you're like, hey, I want to learn how to build a budget. I want to learn how to build a plan. Just copy Rowan's template. That's the whole point of this, is like, every one of us is building on some. I still use a budget template that Mike Volpe, who is a CMO at HubSpot, my former boss, like, gave to me 10 years ago. I still use that. So you got to find your own, and I think you'll get it from Rowan here today.

Rowan Tonkin [00:05:11]:

Yeah. Let's go. All right, so we're going to start. We're going to demystify a little bit of what planning actually is, because it's not just saying, hey, I'm just let me draw down 100k when I need it and I'll justify it afterwards. Right. It's a much bigger process. Planning doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens from CFO board investors.

Rowan Tonkin [00:05:34]:

Everyone is really concerned about the financial plan of your company. It's become a even more important topic now. We've gone through the SaaS recession and all those growth times, and frankly, today, you know, an hour ago, the Fed just dropped interest rates. And so that's going to have an impact on how your business thinks about next year. A really important part of this is to think about who cares about the planning process. And often people think that finance is the enemy, and they think that primarily because they're keeping score generally all year. Right. How much is marketing spending? Are they spending too much? Like, hey, tell me what the ROI of this thing is.

Rowan Tonkin [00:06:16]:

That's only because they're coming at this from a perspective of being an investor. They're thinking about this in terms of, well, what dollars do I put in to, what do I get out? And so they're ultimately really driven as investors in the business, and they're trying to create that fiscal responsibility to make sure that your company has enough Runway for the next two years before the next funding round. They're trying to make sure that they can build a sustainable business. They've got those skills. We are generally the optimists. We're like trying to say, hey, well, we don't need 24 months of Runway because we're going to do it in 12. And so they've got to curb us, right? They've got to hold us back and make sure that we're doing things in the right way. They also have to manage our cash flow, too, right? They've got to think about, how do I pay all of these employees? If marketing goes to a massive event and just burns $100,000 on the Dreamforce booth, then I'm not going to be able to pay someone next week, right? So we got to think about that perspective now as an investor, investors look like us, right? When in marketing, we're looking for predictability.

Rowan Tonkin [00:07:23]:

We want to know that paid is going to drive X amount. We want to know that, hey, when we do a webinar like we're on today, I mean, live session, that there's a playbook around that. And typically we're looking for conversion rates and this is what's going to happen and so forth. Investors have those same playbooks just like us, but they're different. And we as marketers don't know them. I'm not much into the NFL, but it's giving the offensive line the defensive playbook like they're going to just be a little confused because we haven't seen those patterns. We don't understand them. And so when we think about the playbooks that finance have, they're typically looking something like this, hey, the VC world has determined that sales and marketing spend should be this as a percentage of your operating expenses or sales and marketing spend should be this as a percentage of your company revenue or marketing spend should be less than 10% of company revenue and marketing spend should be divided up between programs and people costs in this type of way.

Rowan Tonkin [00:08:25]:

And so when you think about what are those things, they're typically the rules of the play. And we as marketers don't generally know the rules to play by. These are the guardrails that we're really looking for. And so when you're doing your annual plan, go and find out this information from your finance team. What are the guardrails that you're actually trying to plan within?

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:52]:

This is so helpful. Like, this is why I love this session from you is like, I think people don't like hearing this sometimes, but a lot of times, so many of the things we're trying to do go back to these, like, very simple first principles. And, like, I'll see questions all the time in Exit Five. But marketers, myself included, we love benchmarks. And so we want to know, like, hey, how does your company, you know, figure out the marketing budget? I don't know. There's a lot of nuance to that. And this slide is a good example. And the only way you can really find out is to understand the CEO and the cfo.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:20]:

There's kind of always going to be both of those roles, right? What is the plan for the business and where does marketing fit? And then how are they going to measure spend? Because it's different at every stage of a company. I've been at early stage startup that was bootstrapped with no money. The way we came up with budget there was much different than a company that raised $60 million. And so I think this slide right here, this is the one that I'd be screenshotting to start. And if I don't have this answer, to make it an action item to like, let's go back to the CEO and push. Let's manage up. Let's push them and say, like, hey, what lane are we going to play? I love how you have this.

Rowan Tonkin [00:09:51]:

Yeah. And I see in the chat some people asking about, well, what about customer acquisition cost? That is exactly one of those rules. Right. Your company may be looking at this from a CAC to LTV perspective. They may just be looking at a CAC ratio. There's lots of these rules. Each company is different in how they care and consider about those rules. But there's also an overarching rule which is we should be getting more efficient over time.

Rowan Tonkin [00:10:18]:

There's an expectation, Dave, you were just talking about when you're a startup, that you're going to be pretty inefficient because you've got to build everything. It's kind of like that, investing in SEO early because eventually you get all the compound growth over the long term. You've got to spend the money now to build the brand, to build the awareness. But eventually, as this company grows and the brand awareness increases, you should get more efficient. And so every year those rules are going to change. Maybe the rule is the same, but the ratio inside the rule is going to change. Right. Like maybe last year you were on a rule which was, okay, we can't be more than 15% of revenue.

Rowan Tonkin [00:10:56]:

Well, this year they're like oh, you need to get down to 13%, because we're looking to do something on this type of ratio, rule of 40 ratio or something like that. So really think about that. Go and spend time with your financial planner in your business, the FP&A. If you don't have one, spend time with your CFO or your accounting lead. These are so, so important to learn these. Now, if you're like, I want to learn more about this just on my own time, there's some really great resources out there. So Ray Reich and the team at Benchmarket, I know they're talking about this right now. Ray just posted a couple of posts in the last two days.

Rowan Tonkin [00:11:33]:

There's Ben Murray, the SaaS CFO. He has some amazing courses and newsletters around learning the business of SaaS and all the financial metrics. Dave Kellogg, amazing guy, writes some fantastically detailed blogs on all of this. I know he's written a couple recently. Go read his CJ Gustafson at Mostly Metrics. Just a newsletter that you can elevate your financial IQ every day. And then, Dave, you said benchmarks, right? There's a ton of benchmarks out there. Insight Partners do a really good one.

Rowan Tonkin [00:12:04]:

And then obviously the big firms, they do all these kind of benchmarking all the time. I know Forrester just released a study recently. They're helpful, but they don't always apply to your business. And that's why it's really important to go back to your cfo, your finance team, and say, well, what's going on with us? Because, you know, PE is very different to venture capital to. Very different to angel funding.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:26]:

Right.

Rowan Tonkin [00:12:26]:

You're all in different stages.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:28]:

I just want to thank you for. This is how you do a good job speaking in public to others. Rowan hasn't. He's just helping. This is a perfect example. These are all resources he didn't just give you. Here's. Here's 10 blog posts that we wrote at Planful.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:44]:

And I'm saying that because we've had people do that and we get blasted for it. And I'm like, man, we gotta get. We gotta get tighter on the. On the speakers and the content. And this is a great example of that. Everybody's in here like, yeah, there we go. This. You just gave me Dave Kellogg as the goat.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:57]:

Thank you for sharing these ideas. Like, this is. This is awesome. And I just want to say thank you.

Rowan Tonkin [00:13:01]:

Yeah, no problem. And I think Kelsey might be in the chat. She might actually send out some of these links to these places as well. And we will put links to our stuff because we are in marketing and we do have our own stuff that'll come at the end. All right, so the other big frame guys, when you're thinking about planning, is what are the key important metrics of your business? And when we talk about metrics, a lot of the time, you know, you hear all this terminology about vanity metrics, right? Like on LinkedIn, everyone's complaining, oh, measure yourself on vanity metrics. Measure yourself on these things. I think it's really important to actually classify the metrics of your business. So most companies have three types of metrics in their business.

Rowan Tonkin [00:13:45]:

The first one is operational. And I always say to my team, this is what we only should ever be talking about amongst ourselves and maybe our SDR team. Nobody else in the business gives a shit. They just don't. They care about the commercial metrics and the financial metrics.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:01]:

Can you please, like, let's rewind and say that again because we've all done it. We've all done the, like, marketing presentation, marketing update to the whole company that has 50 slides. And it's like, we love that stuff, but nobody else cares. And you just end up losing them. You know, 20 minutes of your presentation, half your team around the company is zoned out thinking about something else. This is a huge part of internal marketing, is understanding what metrics matter to the business, that you make them pay attention.

Rowan Tonkin [00:14:29]:

And yes, we will send out the slides. For the folks asking about the slides.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:32]:

That'S a hundred burpees. That's 100 burpees in a mile. And Mr. Speaker, don't you think that I didn't mark down your slip up earlier?

Rowan Tonkin [00:14:41]:

Yeah. All right, I'll do my mile. So this is really important because you're going to need to build your plan with all of these metrics in mind, Right? Like these operational drivers, they drive how you build your plan. Because that's how we do a bottoms up plan. We build our plan based on assumptions and we really spend our time going, okay, well, what do I need from my conversion rate assumptions? Are they going to change? Right? Like, last year in 2023 was a very weird year from conversion rates for most people's sales funnels compared to 2022. Did you plan that way? Did you plan conservatively or aggressively? Right. So really important to use these as your business drivers, and that will then output into commercial metrics and goals that you can manage the team on whether the monthly, quarterly, weekly. Also really important to understand seasonality.

Rowan Tonkin [00:15:32]:

Like our business, my business, we have A week to week pipeline seasonality model. That's pretty predictive. Therefore we know, okay, we should close create this amount of pipeline this week. All of that is then into the financial metrics which your finance team should really be caring about. And this is the number one thing that you should care about. Frankly, I think it's the most important part. But we know less about it, right? It's bookings, it's revenue, it's ARR. It's like your gross margin, net revenue retention rates.

Rowan Tonkin [00:16:04]:

Now a lot of people putting really important value on free cash flow, right? Because that's ultimately the end reason why all the SaaS products are valued so highly is because they generate tons of cash for the investors over time. So think about these metrics and we're going to jump into, okay, well how do I use them to go and build my plan? So there's two parts to this presentation, really. There's okay, you got to go and build your plan and then you got to go and present it and get it approved. Right? How do you do those two things? So when you're thinking about building your plan, you want to use those operational drivers with the guardrails in mind. So the guardrails help you really constrain your thinking, which actually makes it a little bit easier because you're like, well, sure, maybe the operational drivers tell me that I need a $10 million budget. Maybe the guardrail is only going to give you a $5 million budget. So how are you going to fit within those constraints? How are you going to have that conversation with finance to make sure when you present your plan, it actually might get approved. Right? Because you don't want to be building your plan spitting out a number that says, hey, I need $10 million in marketing budget.

Rowan Tonkin [00:17:14]:

You go and present it. And they're like, well, the guardrails have you the only. We're ever going to get five. So why now your plan's under threat. So really important to think about it from that way. Next up, your whole plan can't just be based on your marketing goals. The number of times I've seen plans that are just, oh, we need to go and do X. Okay, well what company goal is that related to? Oh, there is no company goal about that thing.

Rowan Tonkin [00:17:41]:

So why does anyone, your CEO, your cfo, your CRO, why do they even care? They only care about the company goals. Those company goals. Like if you're working in an OKR system, often marketing wants to plan a little earlier and we don't have the company goals. Yet start being the leader and drive those because we're the ones that know the market, know what products should be coming out, we know where we should be at and go to the CEO and say, hey, I've started some of the company goals for the year, I'm going to translate that into my marketing goals. But I know sales are so focused on Q4 right now, I don't want to distract them, but I'm thinking ahead because that's what we need to do in our market. Hey, are you agreeing with some of these companies?

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:24]:

I feel like this is where most of this stuff will go haywire and it's a little bit harder because like we're not always in control. I love the idea of like being a leader and leading the company, but in my limited experience and from talking to lots of other CMOs who've come up now, it is hard because the company goals only. I've been in an organization where like we thought we had company goals, but like the VP of partnerships had slightly different company goals because the incentives were different, right? And then the VP of product slightly kind of wanted to do this thing. And so like the importance of whatever the leadership team is, whatever the management team is, all the cross functional leaders, before you can go operate any part of the business, you have to come together and define these three to five company goals. This is where everything goes haywire. Like the tactics are just one thing, but if we don't have a clear direction because you need the product strategy so sales and marketing can't have some goal about a new product and then the product team is actually like, no, that's not even on the roadmap for this half of the year. There's so much there that I think dictates a lot of how successful we can be with marketing.

Rowan Tonkin [00:19:25]:

A thousand percent. And this is where actually it really comes down to being that great negotiator amongst your team to say amongst your executive leadership team or as a marketer. Even if you're in a marketing leadership team and you're going back to your cmo, there's going to be people trying to do competing things. And this is like if you don't hash it all out, your plan is doomed to fail from day one. So this is the most important part of actually building your marketing plan, right? Your budget and everything else will flow, the resources will flow because this defines really what the company's trying to achieve. And they might have some financial metrics associated with this and everyone has different ways of getting to these goals. But really, really important that you actually go through this process. And this might happen at some leadership off site or some big planning function that, you know, the CEO holds.

Rowan Tonkin [00:20:19]:

Really important to do this though. All right, now you have those. You're going to go and build your plan. So you can build your plan in a couple of different ways. Some people like a tops down approach, right? And that might be where I as the CMO say, hey, demand gen, you get this amount of budget. Hey, field marketing, you get this amount. Hey, AR people, you get this amount. PR people, you get this amount.

Rowan Tonkin [00:20:41]:

Other people like a bottoms up approach, hey, go tell me all your ideas. And then they'll be like, way too much and we don't have enough money and then we'll cut it back. There's different planning approaches for different types of company. Really important that you just select one. I have a tops down and bottoms up, I give guardrails.

Dave Gerhardt [00:21:00]:

I was going to ask you, like, if you had to pick one, obviously like at a much later stage company, this would be a different. But let's just play towards the middle, like, you got to pick one. A slice of cheese pizza is kind of never going to be the wrong choice, right?

Rowan Tonkin [00:21:14]:

What would you do?

Dave Gerhardt [00:21:15]:

Would you tell people to do both like top down and bottom up?

Rowan Tonkin [00:21:18]:

I do top, tops down guardrails. Because otherwise your team are just sitting there with a limitless mind and they're like, I don't know, like, is he going to give me $100,000 or $500,000? So if you can give them a range that says, hey, your budget should be within like 2 to $300,000, then they're going to come up with some strategies and it's like, but I want to hear some like crazy ideas from you too, right? You got to have that culture. So give top down guardrails to your team and then go and let them build a bottoms up plan. And then as a group again, marketing leadership team can get together and say, all right, well, these are all the goals that all of these things build up upon. Right? That's the other thing is you've already set your goals. Okay, well, you know, we've got this new product coming. We want to be known for this new thing. So now you've got field marketing going to an event about that thing.

Rowan Tonkin [00:22:11]:

You got PR talking about that thing. You've got analyst relations, you know, working with a new AR firm about that thing. Right? So you've got to make sure that all of those campaigns and plans relate to those goals.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:23]:

Beautiful. And then, and then you, then you do the exercise of you did the bottoms up and you're like still so far off in every different area and you just got to make some stuff up.

Rowan Tonkin [00:22:33]:

You're like, how are you?

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:35]:

Wait, they want me to do what? They want us to grow. How much? And with what?

Rowan Tonkin [00:22:39]:

I think those times are a little bit over now, Dave.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:42]:

Yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right. 10% is fantastic.

Rowan Tonkin [00:22:47]:

Now we're going to do it profitably, so that's even harder. But this is then where you've got to go and build some assumptions, right? So you go and build up that bottoms up plan. But now you need to say, okay, well, what are my conversion rate assumptions? Like if I need X amount of pipeline, how many leads or qualified accounts or MQLs, like whatever your operational metrics are, how many of these do you need to go and get? And at what cost? So go and build those funnels. Many companies have multiple funnels, like a mid market funnel and an enterprise funnel, or they have a PLG motion and a sales motion. Right? Use those funnels to build up your plan and say, okay, here's what we're doing. Then the next step, identify your risks and dependencies and do it now. Because if you can communicate those people understand that your plan will change, then you've got to box out your demand gen budget because that's quite fluid throughout the year, you know, especially with display advertising and things, things going on from there. Create your overall budget with your segments.

Rowan Tonkin [00:23:47]:

Hey, it's September 18th. I've already committed a whole bunch of spend the next year. I've already re signed trade shows. I've already negotiated with vendors that are already going through. And then finally assign team owners. Right? Don't just leave the plan as, oh, it's the CMOS plan. Assign people ownership of those goals, those initiatives, and do it early so that you can get those things driven through. All right, questions in the chat.

Rowan Tonkin [00:24:12]:

Where are they?

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:12]:

You want to do them now? You want to take a break now?

Rowan Tonkin [00:24:15]:

Yeah, why not?

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:16]:

I feel like Kelsey will have a good answer to this one. Or a link could be jumping ahead. Do you have a proven budget tracking template to use? We don't have a fully dedicated finance team and I have to run point on this.

Rowan Tonkin [00:24:29]:

Yeah. So key things that you need to look at in. Yes, we do have templates. We also sell software that helps people do this. That's the big disclaimer here. Templates are super important. If you don't have a finance team, make sure that you have your budget amount for your each category. It's basically a big pivot table.

Rowan Tonkin [00:24:48]:

Make sure you have your budget for each category. Then you have your planned amounts, committed amounts, and then your actual spending. In the book the next cmo, we talk about cash based accounting versus accrual based accounting. Never think about cash. That's finance and accounting's job always. So don't think about when vendor payments are coming. That's not important to you as a marketer unless your finance team are late. But it's really important that you run on an accrual based accounting methodology.

Rowan Tonkin [00:25:15]:

So like all your expenses for an event should happen in that time period.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:20]:

Beautiful. Let's go to this one. Just became acting CMO and inherited the 2024 budget. Trying to make room for actual campaign budget. But we spend a lot on technology. What would you recommend to make room to spend more on the actual GTM strategy?

Rowan Tonkin [00:25:35]:

We're going to have to cut some of that tech.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:38]:

Cut tech.

Rowan Tonkin [00:25:40]:

I've done that a few times. Yeah, you're going to have to look at consolidating the tech costs. I would go and look at. Generally people are spending on multiple things. They got stuff running on credit cards. Go and look and cut the tech. Like if it's not serving a purpose that's part of your goals, cut it. What's it doing there? Right.

Rowan Tonkin [00:25:58]:

You can free up so much money of like annualized expense just by cutting some of the tech. I would spend time focusing on what's working and what's not. You can always cut digital spend as well. It's quite variable, especially if it's not working. Trim.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:13]:

That's like being house poor. You spend all your money on a house. You can't do anything now. And it's like you could spend all your money on tech stuff and you can't really do it. Let's see what we can do with type form and Google Docs or something. Yeah, anyway, but support the SaaS companies that we work with at Exit Five. But cut everything else. All right, let's do this one.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:34]:

How do we change the narrative? How do we change the narrative of marketing, often being seen as a revenue spender versus a revenue accelerator, as we should be.

Rowan Tonkin [00:26:44]:

Let me.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:44]:

Can I give you a. I will listen to. Do you ever listen to Kip and Kieran's Marketing against the Grain podcast? Kip's the CMO at HubSpot. So they had this guy on and he's the CMO at Wix and he's like been CMO of a public, you know, multi billion dollar public company for like 15 years. He's a really long tenure there. And he says one thing we did company wise, is we don't call it marketing spend, we call it marketing investment. And I don't want people to roll their eyes and think that's corny. Like, I actually think that to me was like, oh, my gosh, yes, this would change the way that I talk to the CFO and the rest of the company about this money.

Dave Gerhardt [00:27:19]:

Like, not everything in marketing that we do is like dollar in, you know, instant dollar in, two dollars out. It's not all direct response. But, hey, if we make this investment in here now, you know, if we redo the kitchen, if we do some work on the house, like, you know, you got to build that story. And I. I just thought that was a great line. And the thing made me think of that.

Rowan Tonkin [00:27:35]:

Yeah. And I would say the other areas of doing that is making sure that you combine those. It's again, stop talking about the operational metrics which people don't care about, and then talk about things. Spend, a pipeline ratio. Hey, like this spend turns into this amount of pipeline. And we know that that's the way that our business works. And do you have a. I've.

Dave Gerhardt [00:27:56]:

I've seen people talk about ratios that they like. Do you have one that you're. That you got to aim for on spend to pipe?

Rowan Tonkin [00:28:01]:

Yeah, Yeah, I definitely have to aim for one. They're different for each product and each region, but at a blended level. For every dollar of pipe that. That we create, I've got 12 cents to spend. So marketers look at it often in a different way. Like, hey, for every dollar of marketing investment, I get $12 of pipeline. Finance people are like, oh, it cost me 12 cents to get some pipeline. Right.

Rowan Tonkin [00:28:25]:

It's a different way of looking at it, but yes. And there's plenty of bench. Again, go look at some of those resources. I said there's plenty of benchmarks out there, but work with your finance team on what they are.

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:35]:

All right. You do have more good stuff in your deck. Do you want to do some more slides?

Rowan Tonkin [00:28:38]:

Yeah, let's go. So I think this is also really important. This is not as big of a slide, but when you're going and identifying the risks and dependencies of your plan, everything's a bit of a risk. Right. And there's lots of dependencies in marketing. Everything's a risk because you're testing and experimenting, and often you're scaling to places you've never scaled before. Go and identify what's highly dependent and high risk and tell the rest of the business that you're going to monitor these things really, really closely. And then if something changes, you're going to have to change your plan.

Rowan Tonkin [00:29:12]:

The low and low, like low dependency, low risk, it has less impact on your plan overall. But if you've got like a massive investment, like a big product launch that's highly dependent on product hiring a whole bunch of engineers and highly dependent on like this market opening up, it's a big risk. And so you've got to communicate that early. And it's a really great way to get your plan approved because then you're having the discussion about, well, what if that doesn't happen? What would we do differently? And then you can get into that scenario planning of saying, well, if that doesn't happen, then I'd move some of this to more predictable revenue. And then I might give you back 50 grand or something like that. Again, you got to think like a business owner here. Test your assumptions, right? So we're talking about cost per pipeline here. I just put a basic model together.

Rowan Tonkin [00:30:00]:

Coming back to let's give some free resources. You can go to this funnel builder, funnel builder.planful.com and go and build your funnel, right? And it's going to tell you how much budget you need. There's a link in the back of the deck as we get through. But you can then set your assumptions and say, well, per MQL, I want to spend maybe $400 or per opportunity, I want to spend 500, you know, or $1,000 or cost per pipeline needs to be this. And then it'll say, well, based on the target revenue that you've been given, you're going to need a $500,000 budget or this amount of budget, right? So this can help you build those assumptions, test your conversion rate assumptions. You've got to then look and say, okay, well what if that changes? Well, if that changes, I might have to do something different. Go and build scenarios. If you're good at spreadsheets, you can build it in a spreadsheet.

Rowan Tonkin [00:30:50]:

We got a free tool here to help you all go and do it yourself. Very good tool to go and just quickly leverage. Now comes the fun part, right? You've built your plan, you've got it all mapped out, and now you have to spread some money out so there's some guardrails even within your program. Spend, right? Like the, you know, let's say we've got a $10 million budget. There's some guardrails you should be imposing on.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:13]:

This is so useful. Just the frame of having the visual of this. I'm just even thinking about like our budget at exit 5. Like to have the place to like layer this over. This is mentally, I love this visual.

Rowan Tonkin [00:31:25]:

So the person who said, oh, we got too much investment in infrastructure, well, that means you can't have strategic and productive productive spend. So you're going to have to cut and that might take time unfortunately. So you're going to have to cut and then that's where you can find that excess money. Look at it by goal, whether that might be a market goal, a product goal, an initiative goal. You want to think about having more of your strategic and productive or attributable spend. You know, you want 55 to 75% of that like at work on your key goals. Then you're going to have non strategic and experiments, some people call the experiments the CMO slush fund. You need to have that because then if they work, then you're going to move them into the strategic and productive section of your budget.

Rowan Tonkin [00:32:09]:

You are going to have non strategic spend. You're going to have legal fees that might go towards branding. You might have other things that just need to get done, like learning and development for your team. It's not strategic spend, but you do it anyway, right? You need to capture it, make sure more of your budget is in the productive section.

Dave Gerhardt [00:32:28]:

Get a last minute message from the CEO. Why don't we have stickers? We've got some strategic spend.

Rowan Tonkin [00:32:38]:

Stickers are strategic, I'll tell you.

Dave Gerhardt [00:32:40]:

No, they are. So Chris and Charlie in the chat said, what are some examples? I think you gave them to say, what, what's an example of non strategic spend? What's an example of non strategic spends? You said any type of. Maybe there's some kind of fees or.

Rowan Tonkin [00:32:51]:

Just expenses or legal fees, branding fees. Sometimes you get some of those things. You might have, for example, some agency costs, things like that. It's like it's non productive spend. It's like not going into the market, but you need to spend it anyway. It could be print costs, shipping costs. Right? Like shipping is definitely non strategic spend. So there's lots of different types of that and you'll find it in there.

Rowan Tonkin [00:33:16]:

You can never attribute any results to it, but it is there in your budget and when you run the numbers through every transaction, there's a bunch of them there, then they add up. So allocate your budget out like that and so for those people that were asking about spreadsheet templates, think about, okay, well how do I do this classification in that area, Aaron? Definitely not less than 10% on people. This is like your programs budget. Typically finance will allocate a programs budget and then a headcount budget. And they do have guardrails for that, like 80, 20 or 65. 35 is probably the most common in SaaS. But this is just your program spend. But inside programs, you do spend money on agencies too, or contractors and other things.

Rowan Tonkin [00:34:01]:

So now you're going to have to go get your plan approved, right? So you want to demonstrate the value of that plan. So don't just talk about all the things you're going to do. Talk about the results of those things. Show the results in relationship to those company, those marketing goals because they're tied back to company goals that everyone agreed we're going to do. Right? Come back, coming back to the way we talk about metrics, communicate that value in financial or commercial terms, not marketing terms, not, oh, I'm going to go get this many MQLs say I'm going to go get this amount of pipeline and that's going to convert at 14% to have bookings like this this quarter. Context matters, right? Like this is a really big opportunity when you're doing your marketing planning to put those risks and dependencies and give people the context of what you're trying to do. Tell the truth. This is really important.

Rowan Tonkin [00:34:51]:

If it's an experiment, say an experiment, right? It's okay. And then tell the whole truth. Hey, I've put a lot of money behind this experiment.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:00]:

I think Dave, Dave Kellogg. Like I had him on the podcast a while back. Go find that episode. If you haven't listened to it, go to search for Exit Five podcast Dave Kellogg. But he had, he had a line. Maybe you know him better and you remember, but it's like the job of the marketing leaders to tell, tell the whole unfiltered truth. Like present the unbiased facts, present the unbiased truth. And man, part of this is I think a maturity thing.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:23]:

Like it's, it's hard to stand up there and kind of get. Feel like you're going to get beat up sometimes. But over time you learn that the obstacle is the way the truth will set you free. Right. It's just going to help.

Rowan Tonkin [00:35:33]:

Yeah. It's also really important because otherwise, like marketers are great storytellers. Right. And so you get being known as, oh well, they're just doing their marketing Jedi tricks on me right now. And because we're good storytellers, we can sell a plan, then we get caught out later. So it's really important to tell the whole truth when you're doing this. Don't be a preachy about it. Try and teach, try and educate.

Rowan Tonkin [00:35:58]:

Right? Like, because then someone might educate you, right? Your finance team might educate you on some of these earlier upfront guardrails. Hey, someone asked me the question just here. Why is it 65 programs spend, 35 people spend? Well, that's because if you sign up for 100% people spend. That's recurring cost. That is the business can't flex. Right. They want to have a lot of flex within the marketing budget. Because if something you know was fully 100% committed for three years straight, which employees are, then you don't have any flex in the system.

Rowan Tonkin [00:36:33]:

You can't turn things off, you can't pivot them around. And so that's why some of those rules exist is to help you get through that process. So what does the communicating and financial terms look like? All right, this is going to generate 2 million in incremental pipeline. We expecting that to convert into 450k of incremental revenue based on historical conversion rates versus hey, my newsletter got 14 and a half percent click through rate and we created 4000 MQLs. Which one do you think your CFO cares about more? They care about incremental revenue, they care about incremental pipeline, they care about these types of investments. And one of those things is something that you can talk to your team about. Does a CFO even know if a 14 and a half percent click through rate is good or bad? What was the goal like? They don't know, they don't care.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:28]:

Right. It's just, well, we have a 40% open rate. Who cares?

Rowan Tonkin [00:37:34]:

All right, focusing on buying groups. I agree. I mean we use, in part of our business, we use MQLs. We also use qualified accounts as well. It depends on your business. Some businesses don't have buying groups because you just need to sell to this one person. And if you can sell to that one person, then the deal gets done. So it really depends on your business.

Rowan Tonkin [00:37:57]:

I do think bigger enterprises, obviously the buying group is getting more complex. You should evaluate. Are you looking at that? But that's a measurement conversation. All right, so now you want to look at your plan in a goal based way. So this is a drive growth goal. You can see how much value we're trying to create from all the campaigns that relate to that goal. We can see how much current and plan spend is going towards that goal and then we can see the different parts of the funnel that are giving us different ROI metrics. Right.

Rowan Tonkin [00:38:32]:

So cost per outcome is a term that we use a lot. An outcome might be an MQL or it might be a qualified account, or it might be revenue. How much did each of those things turn into? And it's really important to measure each different part of that funnel because then you can start creating forecasts around, hey, well if we boost MQLS by this, what's it going to cost me? Like the cost per each outcome is something that's really important and they help you coming back to investment versus spending. They help you justify further investment in marketing with your CFO because they can see it in the way that they think and they care about it. Alrighty. So a few of our tools that can help you. I showed the Funnel Builder earlier. Go to funnel builder.planful.com that's going to be a way of calculating the cost of your marketing budget.

Rowan Tonkin [00:39:23]:

Plug in a bunch of numbers. It's very straightforward. Good tool tips through there. Super helpful tool. I use it all the time in terms of scenario analysis. Like oh, how much would it cost if like conversion rates dropped? And then you can use that to kind of talk to your CFO and say, well, if our conversion rates drop by 2%, I'm going to need to spend x more money. Is that something we care about? Well, the answer is yes. We also have written the book on how to operationalize your marketing organization.

Rowan Tonkin [00:39:52]:

Not just Planning for any first time CMOs or any, any leader that wants to get better at marketing. This is the book written by Peter Mahoney and Scott Todoro. I know Peter was at Drive last week. Fantastic experience. Cmo. And those guys spent so much time writing this book. It's the problem.

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:12]:

Yeah, I'm ashamed to have written a book about marketing in the same vein at this. This is, I have it over here. I think if I was still a CMO this would be. I always was like I wish somebody had like a playbook. Like this is literally playbooks formulas. I have it book, you know, bookmarked and dog eared. It's an awesome resource. So thank you for calling that out.

Rowan Tonkin [00:40:32]:

I also use it like in my team to give to new hires to talk about like how do you do accounting principles for marketing? How do you do this? Give it to new hires. Also I gave one to my new finance team and I said this is what we care about.

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:47]:

Read it love that I just asked those questions to chatgpt. I don't read any books anymore.

Rowan Tonkin [00:40:54]:

I don't believe that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:55]:

No, just kidding.

Rowan Tonkin [00:40:56]:

All right, and then we obviously have a product that can help you do all of this. We built a little micro site from the Exit Five place. So go to planful.com exit5 and you'll find all of these resources here and available to you. All right, time for more questions.

Dave Gerhardt [00:41:11]:

Oh, yeah, let's go. There is a bazillion in here and I'm going to. We'll try to rip through them.

Rowan Tonkin [00:41:17]:

Okay.

Dave Gerhardt [00:41:17]:

Any lessons you've learned on how to get leaders who aren't marketing. Marketing savvy to care about the operational metrics and how they ladder up to financial metrics?

Rowan Tonkin [00:41:25]:

Just keep asking them. This is something Peter taught me. To what end? All right, so you got an email and it's converting at, you know, 10%. To what end? Okay, well, that, that means people. More people in the database. Okay. To what end? Just keep asking them. Why is that important? What's important about that? What next? Okay, then how does it ladder up? And eventually it all ladders up to revenue.

Rowan Tonkin [00:41:47]:

But it's really hard to say, hey, my newsletter that I've been tasked with running generates this amount of revenue. Like, it's hard to do that. But if you build all the stages along the path, they can get there. Right. And then they'll understand the impact of their work.

Dave Gerhardt [00:42:02]:

All right, next one. Danielle, I'm just going to go down this list and we'll just do rapid fire. So I'm just. We'll just do each one of these. The next one is from. Is from Chris. How do you bake in hiring into your marketing plan?

Rowan Tonkin [00:42:13]:

That's a great question. You can do it in a few different ways in terms of capacity modeling. So the hardest part about this is a lot of European companies do this actually, by the way, is they go and build all their campaigns and all the things inside of a campaign. And then not only just do they have the costs of how much that thing is going to cost, they then have all the effort and they're like, oh, do we have capacity to do this? It's like a. Basically a classic labor project plan. The other way that I see people do that is they t shirt size campaigns, right? Oh, how much creative services will I need? How much product marketing will I need? And you know, how much of other things will I need? And then you can get to a point where you're using like an agile framework to say, hey, we have enough capacity to run four extra large campaigns in creative services and this. Right. I'm sure Dave didn't believe he had the resources to do drive last week, only three months ago.

Rowan Tonkin [00:43:08]:

And he's like, shit, how are we going to get all this done? You kind of find a way half the time. But ruthless prioritization once you get into the plan.

Dave Gerhardt [00:43:15]:

Yeah, it's tricky because often it's like if you have more, you get lazy if you have. I often find like constraint can be good sometimes. The other thing I was going to just say about this is I've worked with a couple CFOs that don't necessarily care from a spend standpoint. They just want to know the dollar amount of spend. And so let's say that's a million dollars of marketing spend. I've had the flexibility to do it. You can use that spend on people or tools and programs. And so like, oftentimes it's been like, I roughly think we're going to hire five people this year that might go to eight.

Dave Gerhardt [00:43:49]:

We're not going to ask for more money. If that goes to eight, that's just going to come from somewhere else. Right. I think they oftentimes just kind of want broad strokes.

Rowan Tonkin [00:43:56]:

Yeah. I would say, Dave, that's probably changed in the last couple of years a little bit with the path profitability requirements. And frankly, like no CFO wants to lay off people anymore. So they do give bigger guardrails on programs versus people now because they generally want us marketers to be a little more leveraging consultants and advisors and contractors and things like that because it gives them the flexibility with the shifting macroeconomics that that's what they're looking for.

Dave Gerhardt [00:44:25]:

Interesting verse. This could lead to over hiring. There's just a fear of getting back into that state. I guess that's a good thing. I guess. I think more guardrails is good, right?

Rowan Tonkin [00:44:35]:

Yeah, exactly.

Dave Gerhardt [00:44:36]:

All right, let's go to this one. Danielle, loved your point on finance partners acting like investors. In your experience, what's the best case you've seen made for investment in more creative brand experimental activity.

Rowan Tonkin [00:44:48]:

Again, tie it back to goals. For example, you're trying to enter a new market. You don't have any brand awareness. Well, okay, how are we going to do that? All right, well, we've seen this play before. We've done pr, we've done X. Right. Okay. We want to try a new experiment and this is how we're going to measure it.

Rowan Tonkin [00:45:03]:

Are you willing to make that investment? This is what it would look like if it succeeds. This is what it looked like if fail. But it's a company goal for us to go and get more coverage and awareness in a new market. That could be like a new segment. Oh, you know, companies in 10,000 employees or greater. Or it could be in a new territory. All right. We've never been to Europe before.

Rowan Tonkin [00:45:22]:

We need to invest in brand awareness there. So very much just focus on the goals, focus on what could go wrong, what could go right, and then they'll generally kind of give you a bucket of investment to manage that discreetly.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:35]:

Let's go to this question from Rachel. This is a good one. How do you suggest balancing marketing spend in a smaller organization that historically drives business through word of mouth and hasn't had formal marketing? So this is a great one. A lot of people have gone through this, right. Like how we've never really spent on marketing. How do I come up with a plan and benchmarks? Like, if we've never done any of this before and we don't have any data.

Rowan Tonkin [00:45:58]:

Yeah. Kind of coming back to what we just talked about there. And like investing in brand. Right. It's hard to know. Again, I think that's my first recommendation. Sit down with finance and say, okay, like, we need to do this because relying on word of mouth is only getting us so far so fast. We need to make an investment.

Rowan Tonkin [00:46:17]:

Let's model some assumptions together and put some guardrails into saying, okay, well, we expect these results by this date. If that works, then we might step down to plan, step up that investment, treat it like an experiment, and work with your finance team to put guardrails around that experiment. So it's like, well, if it's going well, let's keep investing in it. If it's not going well, then let's pull back and start looking at a different experiment. So very much build a methodical plan around it. Talk to finance about what that is, what that experiment looks like. How would you measure it? What are the key indicators? What are leading indicators of. Of that working and make sure that, you know, like, how will you measure it? Right.

Rowan Tonkin [00:46:59]:

It might just be as basic as some utms on a sponsored post or something, but you can still measure that and you can still give really good indicators to finance. So I would sit down, collaborate with them, create guardrails, and treat it like an experiment.

Dave Gerhardt [00:47:14]:

Good work on that answer, Danielle. If you scroll down a little bit, or there's this one. What about cac? What about basing on CAC all these methods are guessing. I'm assuming that's related to the budget one. Have you ever. Do you have a marketing budget based on cac?

Rowan Tonkin [00:47:29]:

You can. One of the challenges, though, is you are not responsible as a CMO for all elements of cac. Right. Does an SDR team roll into you? What about sales? So there's different components inside CAC that make it a really good operating metric, but not a very good planning metric. That's why typically CFOs will use it and they'll try and measure it. They'll use it as a guardrail and to stress test a plan. But it's not really a driver of a plan because there's so many parts to that machine that it's hard to really kind of say, hey, we need to invest in this method. Right.

Rowan Tonkin [00:48:06]:

So it's not really a driver based approach.

Dave Gerhardt [00:48:09]:

We were just in our internal slack talking with Kelsey and Danielle. We're just like, you can always tell the measure of a good session by how many specific questions are in the Q&A right now. Like, we wouldn't get to these if we had another hour. Yeah. So I'm, I'm just gonna. I'm gonna stop us here and just take a minute to say thank you. Obviously, your team put a bunch of really useful things. I think obviously they're from a company that can help you do this, but I think this is a perfect example of what great marketing is, is to lead with education, knowledge, value.

Dave Gerhardt [00:48:39]:

And then if you want help on this stuff, you're gonna reach out to Ronan Planful. But I got a bunch of these things in here. I'm gonna make Dan go take that budgeting tool, that planning tool that you sent in there. We're gonna use that. So look for us in your CRM later.

Rowan Tonkin [00:48:52]:

Yeah, sorry.

Dave Gerhardt [00:48:52]:

But. But this is great. Super helpful. I think you had some really, like, just notice how simple everything is. Like when you boil it down. I loved your exercise with Peter on like, keep going with finance and your business partners. Thank you for doing this. Thanks for making it simple, easy to follow, and like rooting this in the basics and fundamentals of what it takes to be a great B2B marketing leader.

Dave Gerhardt [00:49:12]:

Because you didn't talk about this in the beginning. This is a session about planning. But all these things, this is the difference between thinking like an individual contributor and marketer to being a marketing leader. And this is a great example of what that takes and what that looks like. So thank you, Rowan.

Rowan Tonkin [00:49:25]:

Yeah, thanks, Dave. Appreciate it. Thanks everyone. Really appreciate you taking the time to Upskill. Happy to help.

Dave Gerhardt [00:49:30]:

All right, Enjoy. Hey, look for Rowan at Dreamforce. Go give him a fist bump if you see him there, and we'll talk to you later. All right?

Rowan Tonkin [00:49:37]:

Yeah. Thanks, Dave. Cheers.

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