As a B2B marketing executive you understand the importance for setting goals and an associated budget for every quarter. The CEO has sales targets. To meet those targets, the CMO must build a bridge between marketing leads and closed deals. In a series of videos, Full Circle Insights CEO Bonnie Crater shows us how to simply create a marketing budget, set quarterly goals towards it, and calibrate over time, all on a plain whiteboard.
Developing the Marketing Budget
To start the process, start from the bottom of the funnel (i.e., your sales targets). With a sales target and a few assumptions drawn from last year’s marketing results and your intuition for this year, you can work backwards to set marketing targets and budgets.
Companies at different growth stages and scale will require varying levels of execution support to hit revenue targets, especially from the Sales team. Once you determine the end-of-year goal and the annual budget, the next step is to set quarterly goals for the year. You may need to collaborate with Sales to establish a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that has consistency throughout the whole lead lifecycle.
Click on this video snippet to see Bonnie walk through a simple example step-by-step on a whiteboard.
Setting Marketing Goals
The annual budget is set and you just found out what the sales targets are and how the percentage of leads will be split between Sales and Marketing. The Service Level Agreement is in place as well. What’s next? It’s time to determine how many marketing sourced leads your team with have to execute every quarter. The lead count is determined by the amount of marketing sourced deals your department must close multiplied by the conversion rate. It’s important to leave room in your budget so you can account for circumstances that happen outside of the marketing plans.
Click on this video snack to see how to develop efficient goals that fuel your pipeline.
Re-Prioritizing Your Budget
Unplanned circumstances may have occurred and now it is time to re-prioritize the budget towards the marketing activities that yield the largest impact on revenue. The conversion rates and velocity will enable you to make the right choices when it comes to marketing data and marketing campaigns. There are no excuses for lack of measurement when it comes to marketing. According to Dan Taylor, “If you aren’t measuring then you aren’t marketing.”
Click here to learn how you can re-prioritize your budget to meet the targets for next quarter.
The modern world of B2B marketing encourages executives to continue to think outside the box, innovate (even more than before) and also sit into the revenue responsibility chair. Fortunately, there are solutions to help executives measure accuracy, visibility, and impact on revenue.
