CMO Uptempo
SVP Global Solutions Engineering Uptempo
Executive VP and Co-founder Inverta
Overcome the imposter syndrome that many marketing leaders feel when it comes to marketing planning.
Marketing leaders at the world’s biggest brands confess: their planning process is a chaotic mess at best, and an outright disaster at worst. Why? Enterprise marketing planning is complex, with millions of dollars at stake and competing demands from budget owners, product lines, regions, and external agencies.
This puts marketing leaders on the hot seat:
We’ve cut out the noise to focus on seven critical steps to marketing planning.
0:06: For those of you just joining the Uptempo webinar from intent to impact.
0:12: Thank you for taking some time out of your day today to learn about a marketing planning blueprint.
0:18: My name is Jim Williams.
0:19: I am the CMO at Uptempo and usually I say, we will wait a few minutes to get started.
0:27: But seeing as we have so much to cover so much good stuff for everyone on the call, I think we’re gonna go ahead and jump right into it.
0:36: So a couple of things, I am going to introduce our stellar panel of the hosts in just a minute.
0:46: But before I do that, of course, I’m always reminded to go through the housekeeping items, you know, the standard thing you have to do on every webinar.
0:55: So if you’re joining today, and you have a whole bunch of colleagues that are super interested in this topic but could not join, have no fear.
1:04: Of course, we’re gonna record it.
1:05: We’re gonna send out the recording to everyone right after our webinar today.
1:09: We will be doing Q&A as most webinars have and I can’t find the Q&A feature in this interface.
1:15: So just use the chat function, you can chat at any time during the course of the webinar, we will address those questions at the end to answer them to the best of our ability.
1:27: But please go ahead and use it, just fire it in as they come up.
1:31: And so with that, I’m gonna go ahead and get started first.
1:36: A little bit about Uptempo, the host of today’s webinar.
1:40: If you are not familiar with us.
1:43: Uptempo is marketing planning software.
1:44: We help enterprise marketing teams plan, better spend smarter and execute with confidence.
1:50: And we do that with an integrated campaign planning and financial management platform.
1:57: We call it a single system of record for marketers.
2:01: So we’re gonna talk a lot about planning concepts and frameworks.
2:06: And at the end of the day, you may be wondering, well, how do I manage all this?
2:09: Well, quick answer to that is on a platform for plan and spent enough of my commercial.
2:14: I’m gonna go ahead and get started and let’s do that by introducing my fellow hosts on today’s webinar.
2:22: I’ll start with Kathy because Kathy actually is from Inverta and not from Uptempo.
2:29: I’ve been working with Kathy a long time.
2:31: I highly value her expertise.
2:33: She is at a company called Inverta which does a lot in the area of marketing strategy and execution specifically today’s topic.
2:43: It’s important to know that Inverta has successfully implemented comprehensive planning frameworks at hundreds of organizations, small organizations, large organizations, tech organizations, other verticals all the way to globally distributed enterprises.
2:59: So she is a ver verified expert when it comes to campaign planning.
3:05: We’re gonna hear a lot of that expertise on today’s call.
3:08: And of course, I’m joined by Bruce Brien, who is our SVP of global solutions engineering at Uptempo.
3:15: Bruce does many things and he does many things really well.
3:18: But most importantly, he spent five years at serious decisions at CTO and he was doing that when he was there, he was implementing planning, best practices and frameworks and developing the legendary serious decisions, hands on workshops for clients which later of course became part of the forester decisions offering.
3:39: So a lot of expertise I am surrounded by people that are eminently smarter than I am and I’m looking forward to today’s conversation again.
3:49: Go ahead and fire in your questions as we go, but I’ll just jump right into it.
3:55: Why are we talking about marketing planning?
3:58: Well, frankly, it’s because as sad as it may be marketers kind of suck at planning.
4:05: And this is for a variety of reasons.
4:06 I’m not saying all marketers, some people are excellent at this, but as a whole, marketers aren’t great at planning and there’s so many reasons for that.
4:15: Well, for one, there’s really no formal training you always got a degree in marketing.
4:19: There isn’t a lot of time spent on the planning process and you kind of learn it as you go.
4:25: And when you do learn it, you’ve gotten pretty far in your career.
4:28: You know, you get involved in planning when you’re managing teams and budgets have some scope of authority.
4:33: And at that point, that’s when you figure out what is the best way to plan.
4:37: It’s a highly visible exercise which turns into a high pressure exercise.
4:42: You’re not just planning for your team or your function, but what you plan is gonna be visible to the executive team and perhaps even the board and perhaps you’ll be even asked to present that plan to stakeholders across your organization.
4:55: There’s a lot of pressure, it’s deadline driven, it can start as early as nine months out from when your plan goes into effect.
5:02: For many of us.
5:03: It’s more like four or five months, but it’s deadline driven.
5:05: There’s multiple stakeholders that cross business functions in the enterprise, potentially millions of dollars at stake, right?
5:13: You’re gonna invest a lot behind this plan.
5:15: So you got to justify it and it tends to be a bit of a gut feel exercise.
5:20: Sure, your plan is informed by past performance, what’s worked and what hasn’t worked.
5:25: But a lot of it is best guess at what’s gonna work for this particular year’s strategic objectives.
5:34: And of course, I always love this.
5:37: quote.
5:38: But if you’re familiar with the legendary Mike Tyson, he has a quote that says everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.
5:45: And that is somewhat sad reality for marketers.
5:48: You know, that this plan that you’re meticulously putting together and presenting, it’s probably gonna change pretty quickly, right?
5:55: We live in a world of almost constant pivots and so you gotta prepare to be prepared to change that plan when the time comes because it’ll come soon.
6:06: So in order to help marketers navigate this complex planning process, we have boiled it down to seven key steps that we’re gonna outline for you today.
6:16: These seven steps are gonna be outlined in depth in our forthcoming blueprint for marketing planning, which will be available.
6:24: I like to say in July, but Thao on my team says August is more realistic and so everybody on this call be will be receiving the marketing planning blueprint.
6:34: So these are the steps we’re gonna go through everything from aligning the business goals to setting your strategy to defining your campaigns, planning them, fitting the budget into those plans.
6:46: How do you execute, what do you need to keep in mind when executing your campaigns and how to better measure your campaign ROI so you can optimize over the course of the forthcoming year.
6:57 These are the seven steps that I am excited to go through.
7:00 And so to start that, I am going to hand off to Bruce to talk about.
7:05 Step one and two.
7:07 Thanks Jim.
7:09 So, yeah, this is this is an exciting section of the presentation here.
7:14 Today, we get to talk about the very high level and strategic pieces.
7:19 And in step one, we’re gonna be really focused on alignment to business goals.
7:24 And in step two, we’re gonna talk about how marketing will set their goals.
7:28 Now, we’re gonna kind of handle both of these together in terms of the slide structure in the presentation.
7:35 But let’s go ahead and start thinking about that.
7:39 When we think about marketing planning, one of the things we really have to be cognizant of this idea of this annual marketing planning, that’s actually in the middle of the overall flow of what we’re talking about.
7:58 And that’s where we get that one year kind of fiscal year horizon standpoint.
8:02 We’re aligning the budget.
8:04 That’s the thing we think of as the marketing plan, but wrapped around that, We’ve got our at the highest level, our business plan, our corporate strategy typically a 3 to 5 year horizon.
8:20 and this is the focus of the business and we need that insight to inform our plan.
8:27 But there’s another step that has to happen in between getting that corporate strategy and then putting together the annual marketing plan.
8:35 And that is the revenue planning we need to get co ordinated and aligned with sales as to how they’re gonna go to market, how they intend to fulfill their obligations because the marketing plan needs to support that.
8:47 So if we have the business strategy and we have the business plans and we can coordinate that with sales and do the revenue planning, that’s where we can begin to put together this focus on the annual marketing marketing plan from there.
9:04 We begin to cascade down into the tactical side of planning and that’s where we get into campaign planning, which is typically messaging driven in that within my annual marketing plan.
9:17 I’m going to have a series of campaigns or themes or messages that I wanna drive through.
9:22 This is typically defining the purpose behind the plan.
9:27 So we get those campaign plans in place, then we get into the objectives within the theme within the plan.
9:34 What are we trying to accomplish?
9:35 And we call that program planning.
9:37 That’s typically now we’re getting down into monthly to quarterly.
9:41 I might hold budget and reserve and phase it into the quarter as I, I get closer as my objectives change.
9:47 And I want to hone in on things so that we start to get really granular at that point.
9:53 And then we’ll, we’ll close out with a tactic calendar at some point.
9:57 The the bottoms up has to meet the top down.
10:00 And we have to understand quite specifically what tactics we’re gonna execute in market.
10:05 What does that look like from a calendar perspective?
10:07 And that’s what we actually execute on.
10:10 That’s what we’re gonna build the content for.
10:12 That’s what we’re gonna build and, and activate that content against and, and that’s where the, the execution hits the road and that’s where we’ll start to think about a measurement.
10:23 But when we think of marketing planning, it can’t be just thinking about the campaign planning or the annual marketing plan in the middle.
10:31 It has to cascade out in both directions, it has to be informed.
10:35 And if we think about it in that type of cadence, it’s happening all year long.
10:39 It’s not an event, it’s not a single event that happens one week during the year, it happens all throughout the year.
10:45 And in fact, some of it happens simultaneously, your program and tactic planning is gonna be happening for the current year while your corporate strategy and annual revenue planning are happening for the next year.
10:57 So this not only is it sequential but it’s also overlapping.
11:01 There’s a lot a lot to think about in that regard, but I want to take us in a slightly different direction now.
11:10 And that is how do we prioritize the different aspects of our plan?
11:16 How do we figure out where to allocate budgets and where to allocate what are our priorities?
11:23 How do we, how do we pull that together?
11:26 Well, when you look at growth that can be impacted by marketing.
11:30 It really comes in four flavours.
11:33 We could focus truly and exclusively on productivity and that is becoming more efficient within a specific area.
11:46 The next area we might look at is offers where we might be launching new products or services bringing new products to market.
11:55 Speaking of markets, that’s actually the third way that we can impact growth, we can enter or expand into and open up new markets.
12:05 This could be verticals in, in a B2B space or it could be new demographics or new geographies from a B2C point of view.
12:16 We think about our last pillar.
12:17We’re talking, thinking about buyers at this point.
12:20 We could be targeting new buying centers or individual personas.
12:24 And that may be how we wanna grow.
12:26 Now, I don’t wanna confuse anybody.
12:30 We’re certainly not saying that you pick one of these and that’s the one that you go focus on.
12:35 What we’re saying is one of these will be the primary and that’s the one that will drive how we think about the others.
12:42 You need to think about all four of these when you think about your growth.
12:47 But the way we wanna look at this is if I put a different item at the top of the pyramid, for each of these different scenarios, there’s not only four different pillars, there’s four different ways to think about it.
13:02 And if I put productivity at the top, I start asking myself questions like how can we be more productive across our buyers markets and offers?
13:10 So now when I think about buyers markets and offers, I think about them in terms of how do I get more productive?
13:16 And if I move across to offers, I’m thinking about how do I open new markets or approach new buyers and be be more productive with our new offers.
13:26 So I look at markets from the standpoint of offers and working our way around the slide and we get down to the bottom right there.
13:34 We put buyers at as the focal point, how do we adapt our offers?
13:39 How do we approach new markets and be more productive while approaching these new buyers that we believe we can have an impact on?
13:47 And then finally, with markets, if we put markets at the top, how do we adapt our offers and approach new buyers and be more productive while we’re opening new markets?
13:58 So if the focus is markets, think about it from that perspective, that’s gonna really help you in terms of setting priorities and determining what percentage of the budget that you want to be able to allocate to each of these focal points based on what the overall priorities of the business are.
14:17 And if you’ve been informed by the corporate strategy, you should be in a position to do that language matters.
14:29 And we’re gonna get into this again a little bit later when we talk about measurement, but your taxonomy matters.
14:35 When you’re talking about global organizations and large scale planning efforts, you gotta get everybody on the same page.
14:42 So we’ve got to understand what we mean by a campaign hierarchy.
14:46 The definition of that being how we organize and link and relate and nest different aspects of our campaign planning Underneath each other.
14:57 By definition, a campaign is usually the theme based on a business need or an audience need that we’re trying to focus on.
15:07 It’s represented by a buying group.
15:10 who, when when we transact, we’re typically focusing on that group of e either individuals in a B2C space or an actual committee that is going to make a decision in a B2B environment.
15:25 Typically, campaigns run for 12 months or more depending on your buying cycles.
15:33 And they get broken out into what we call programs and programs belong to program, families.
15:40 Program families are programs that are related by their objective demand generation would be a program family and each of my demand gen programs would nest within that family.
15:53 awareness would be another program, family reputation as part of that as well.
15:59 And then we might get into things like sales enablement, customer engagement, et cetera as different types of program families.
16:05 But they’re really focused around the objective.
16:07 What am I trying to accomplish?
16:09 And then finally, the tactics are what are gonna build those out.
16:14 When we think back to that program level, once more, we really want to focus that objective on the outcome that we’re trying to achieve.
16:24 So think about that as you then go to and we’ll go to the next slide here is think about the complexity that you might need to drive into your hierarchies in order to fully flush out your landscape.
16:37 Now, this is just an example of a more robust one where we might get into country marketing and divisions and breaking things out from that perspective down to individual brands and products, you might be much more of an offer focused or a product focused organization where you go straight to from a business unit to product group down to the, the campaigns and programs whichever way you do it, anything that doesn’t fit your hierarchy should become available to you from a segmentation standpoint.
17:10 So the fact that I make my hierarchy product focused does not mean that I can’t tag everything that I need to, to a region so that I can see things from that pivoted point of view.
17:23 The other thing that we want to take note is it is a hierarchy so we should inherit properties.
17:28 So I should know in our case, in the middle of the slide there, we’ve got Austria and Germany.
17:33 Anything that I nest under Germany should be affiliated with Germany.
17:37 Anything I nest under Austria would be affiliated with Austria.
17:41 I don’t have to repeat my segmentation at the deeper levels of the hierarchy.
17:45 I can make use of having it at these higher levels.
17:49 So when we think about setting up our segmentation, you want to segment at the highest level that gets you the granularity that you’re looking for because that means you have the least amount of work or data entry to support it.
18:03 So if we do, in fact, nest things under a country hierarchy, putting that as high up as I can make sense because everything underneath it is gonna belong to that.
18:12 Unfortunately, there will be a number of things that we do need to collect at the lowest level, which means we need to collect it every time.
18:19 And that can, that can it takes some time to do that.
18:26 All right.
18:27 So now I get to pass the baton, but I’ll be back later over to Kathy who’s gonna talk about defining marketing campaigns and, and then planning them out.
18:38 OK.
18:38 Thank you, Bruce.
18:40 What I’m gonna do is we went through that.
18:43 I even saw some questions like people struggle with this B2B organizations just struggle and they struggle because of three reasons, there’s three basic obstacles to come up.
18:52 First one is a product centric focus and this comes up because companies and hence campaigns sometimes overly focus on products and this happens because, you know, product teams usually own a PNL.
19:04 And so they have a natural tendency to wanna promote their solutions.
19:10 But the problem this causes is that your campaigns are product focused and it really shifts the burden on to the buyers to really basically sort through and decipher what’s important this message for me, like what, what, why, how does this fit my needs?
19:25 The other thing is that there’s multiple products, they have to sift through multiple messages to figure out what’s important.
19:32 And the third thing that comes up on this is there’s usually a lack of portfolio management where it’s again, it’s forcing buyers to figure out like all products are not created equal.
19:45 And again, it’s your duty as a marketer, not to put this on your buyer, but for you to figure out, take those messages, tail them for each specific persona at a particular stage.
19:56 And when you’re product focused, it ends up being more about the product and less about the buyer.
20:01 So that’s one obstacle.
20:03 The second one’s just siloed planning, the silo planning comes up usually because of time constraints, it’s annual planning time, we run out of time.
20:11 So all the functional teams, digital field campaigns create their plans in a vacuum, they take all their slides, they throw it into one big deck.
20:20 They presented a lot of times like Jim said, the executive teams of the board, we get approved.
20:24 Great.
20:24 Go on a virtual shelf.
20:25 We never look at again.
20:27 And that leads to really if you have no cross functional planning to, you know, it’s not tied to any big business goals and it just ends up with the tactical teams having really a disjointed outreach.
20:40 The other thing is, is usually a resource competition going on again because those plans were created independently.
20:47 No one really had an overview of capacity from your shared services, whether it’s your ops team, your email team, your webinar team, which then leads to the third thing I see really there’s been a new tremor on this called collaboration rack.
21:03 And if you have like a small marketing team, there’s four or five of you, sure you can create campaigns.
21:08 No problem.
21:08 It’s easy to coordinate once you start adding on teams, what comes up is an increased need for coordinations, for meetings, for communications.
21:19 And this just leads to basically a lot of random acts of marketing where each team, you know, independently is doing their outreach and they’re doing it under what they control.
21:30 And again, you’re placing the burden on the marketers to make sense of it all.
21:33 But more importantly, you’re losing the impact of having a unified approach and a unified plan So these are the three things we see constantly come up to go.
21:41 We’re struggling with planning.
21:43 But luckily there is a solution and what we look at is a couple things around campaign planning.
21:50 One is just agreeing on the general framework when we look at these seven steps, but the first one is around annual planning.
21:57 So what Bruce talked about?
21:58 First thing you wanna do in that PO box is get alignment if you’re marketing and the input you’re looking at is what’s the business plan?
22:05 What are the objectives?
22:06 What are my pipeline goals?
22:07 What are my revenue goals for the year?
22:09 What’s going on with competition product road maps with that?
22:12 I’m taking all that information in and usually the output from that from the CMO is the marketing plan is usually a product marketing document and then there’s an annual sales plan and the people that participate in that is usually marketing leadership, sales, leadership, executive leadership.
22:27 Once that is done, you have your marketing plan, there’s a number of things that happen.
22:31 But the VP of campaigns usually he has to come up and say, OK, now I have to create an annual campaign plan and this is just in the big again.
22:39 What are the themes I’m doing?
22:41 What are the goals, objectors persona in the large?
22:44 What am I looking at for the year to do?
22:46 A lot of times, I’m also looking at particular industry events, things I’ve already had pre committed dollars to.
22:52 And I’m collaborating closely with my content team to come up with those themes, the value props, the key messages and probably a lot of those flagship assets from there you go into quarterly planning.
23:05A gain, that was the high level like Bruce talked about what does this look like when the quarter starts?
23:10 Like what’s really gonna happen?
23:12 So here you’re looking at what are the number of programs gonna run?
23:15 What are the type do I have the tactic mix and flow?
23:20 Then I go into and I’m gonna build it out.
23:23 I’m gonna launch it and then I’m gonna look at how to measure and, and the outcomes until you look at annual planning and you look at quarterly planning.
23:30 One is at a high level and one is the actual things you’re gonna do each quarter to achieve those business goals that you outline instead of where marketing was gonna help along with that.
23:41 Once you have your framework, Evan agrees to, you need the next level down, need to racy.
23:46 So for every step in the process, you have to have who’s responsible accountable, consulted and informed.
23:54 Where do they contribute to actually the campaign planning process, then you need a planning work flow from annual planning to launch to measurement.
24:03 And again, this is where you have approvals dates where the teams all intersect the execution work flow of how you’re actually managing timelines dependencies, schedules you wanna make sure that when launch day comes around, everything is ready to go, your emails, your ads, your creative, your content.
24:22 And then along with that, you need basically a planning a meeting cadence.
24:26 So what are you doing on an annual, quarterly and campaign basis?
24:30 And it’s for each stage, who comes to the meeting?
24:32 What do I have to come prepared with?
24:34 What’s the agenda?
24:35 What is the outcome of that meeting?
24:37 What are next steps?
24:38 So once you have your framework, your racy, your work flows with SLAs and plenty of make meeting cadence, this adds to the structure.
24:46 That’s surprising, actually makes it easier.
24:49 And the one last thing we add on here to make it easy is be sure you have templates, templates will allow you to scale, it makes it easy and gives you consistency.
24:58 So people on the receiving end, know what to expect and you know, in every meeting, going in what you need to fill out, we have a number of templates.
25:05 But the main one’s gonna show you here is the strategic of the annual campaign plan.
25:10 Again, once you get your marketing plan, the VP of campaigns or demand will fill out.
25:16 Hey, here’s my campaign.
25:18 Here’s the theme, the objectives, the personas, here are the program, families.
25:22 Here’s what I plan to do under each one here, any dependencies and risk.
25:26 And here’s the budget.
25:27 Again, this makes easy to scale.
25:29 Everyone knows now what’s actually gonna happen this year in the big quarterly, then you have to come down.
25:35 How am I gonna actualize this?
25:36 What am I actually doing to achieve those goals?
25:39 Do I do a program strategy for a webinar for an event for a program?
25:44 And what’s on here is what’s the objective?
25:46 What’s the content?
25:47 What’s the budget?
25:48 What are your KPIs?
25:49 What’s the offer?
25:51 What’s the segment, all that type of detail goes on here?
25:55 So someone could actually take this, build it and execute it.
26:00 And then if you’re wondering how does this stand out overall?
26:04 If like some companies, you may be starting next week on your annual planning.
26:10 And again, what you wanna do first is start getting all those inputs, your pipeline numbers, your business goals, your competitive intelligence, your industry trends with that, then you start to think of out of all those things going on for the year.
26:24 What is marketing actually gonna contribute?
26:26 Where do we feel we can add value?
26:28 You come up with the house.
26:29 So what’s the approach you gonna take the goals, the key actions?
26:32 And then in reality, can I do all that?
26:34 Do I have the budget?
26:35 Do I have the resources?
26:37 What are the constraints I have?
26:38 And then making sure you socialize it concurrently.
26:42 If you’re the VP of campaigns, you’re gonna know, hey, as they start working on the annual plan, I probably need to do a look back on my campaign.
26:51 What was the prior performance?
26:52 What are things I wanna stop what I wanna continue.
26:54 What I wanna start do?
26:56 I have new tech coming in this year.
26:57 What are the things I need to know to put together a good annual plan for 2025?
27:02 At that point once they’re socializing the annual plan, you’re filling out that template.
27:07 You’ve got your goals, your objectives, your high level program identification, like large industry events, you’ve got your budget, your resource allocation and then you wanna basically socialize that with the team.
27:19 I’ll say that’s the part that really people fall down the job there.
27:22 It’s amazed me how many of them people just put in a virtual shelf and never share it again.
27:26 But I could have a whole session on that gym.
27:28 So I will not go there.
27:30 But in reality though, probably not most marketers get this all done before Christmas.
27:37 And so what you get into is what I call Q5.
27:40 So before you start activating programs based on this new plan, and you ha don’t have your new plan because you didn’t get your goals, you didn’t get your budget.
27:48 Sales has not figured out what segments we’re going after this year.
27:52 You have to keep marketing.
27:53 So what I suggest is don’t panic whatever your goals were the year before at 10 or 15%.
27:59 I’ve never seen a company say we’re gonna cut back on your goals, Jim.
28:02 You did such a great job.
28:03 Do 10% less next year.
28:06 Make that assumption.
28:07 Just look at Q1 as Q5 and continue the programs that have done well and make that transition in Q1 as you get more information and the gym, I’m gonna turn over you because this is where budget really starts to play a role.
28:20 What can I actually do?
28:21 I have great plans.
28:22 Do I have the money to do it?
28:26 That’s right.
28:26 Thank you, Kathy.
28:28 I’m looking forward to doing 10% less next year.
28:34 So as Kathy said, so now you’re going through your campaign planning process, right?
28:38 That is what is the intent, the intent of the dollars really?
28:42 Like what, what are you trying to achieve with the dollar?
28:44 So this is where you kind of come back to the dollars at this point.
28:48 Now, as this campaign planning process has happened, you know, in advance of that, there’s already been a say top down allocation of budgets, right?
28:58 While the marketing team starts to think about the campaigns and that what they need to achieve and their objectives?
29:03 And is it gonna be a, you know, buyer centric strategy or is it gonna be new markets or are you gonna offer new products, et cetera?
29:09 You know, in the background, the executive team has already had conversations at a high level, but roughly what is the allocation gonna look like, right?
29:16 So you have this idea of 100% of the budget.
29:19 Now, 100% of the budget can mean many different things for different companies, right?
29:23 That can mean 10% of your revenues if you’re a tech company or it can be as high as 25% of your revenues if you’re a CPG organization, right?
29:33 So you talked about big dollars here.
29:35 This slide is was created by Forrester, well, serious decisions and then Forrester before.
29:42 So we, we get all the credit to them because I think it’s a very compelling slide and it highlights a couple challenges that marketing teams have their 100% of dollar then gets allocated into roughly your marketing programs and your head count that dominates.
29:58 And this chart says, 45:45 is a balance between personnel and working dollars.
30:04 If you will in marketing program spend, there are other things that need to be accounted for non program services, capital expenditures, all that type of stuff and systems can go here.
30:14 If you think about your martech spend, the systems are gonna be used universally across the marketing team that a that of course accounts for some portion of your entire budget.
30:25 But this is where this, this is where it gets really interesting.
30:28 The objective with campaign planning is to align your dollars to those campaigns.
30:35 And this is actually really hard to achieve.
30:37 I think many of us on this call as marketers just kind of look at our budget and what we have is functional allocation of dollars.
30:45 Here’s what’s going to the digital team.
30:46 Here’s what’s gonna go to the demand team.
30:49 Here’s what field events, trade shows, content, et cetera.
30:53 But the problem with that is then you’re giving money to everyone based on their function and they start to think about how am I gonna spend the dollars to get my task done and not thinking about those 4 to 5 high level, 12 month thematic campaigns that you need to pursue in order to hit your corporate objectives.
31:13 So what serious decisions and then forced to advocate is to then take your marketing program spend and start to allocate it against those campaigns.
31:22 And your idea here is to try and get 70% of your work dollars associated with campaigns.
31:28 Why is this important?
31:29 Because it keeps everyone focused on that higher level objective, that campaign, right?
31:34 Better collaboration across the team.
31:37 It also answers the vexing question that your CMO may get from the executive team of the board that says you said you were gonna do these four things or these five campaigns.
31:47 How much are you allocating to those?
31:50 What are we spending against that strategy?
31:53 Show me that your dollars are working against company objectives.
31:57 And so getting to this view is critically important.
32:00 Now, outside of that 70% there’s what we call out of campaign spend.
32:04 And depending on how your organization is, put together and your objectives that may be things like a corporate event, right?
32:11 Or your website, your website supports all of your marketing.
32:15 So it’s kind of hard to stick it into a campaign specifically.
32:19 There might be shared services in there, content or creative or branding teams that go across the organization.
32:26 But it’s really getting over this campaign side where you now want to take those campaigns and start to think about the attributes that Bruce talked about.
32:34 What segments are we going after this campaign, right?
32:37 What geographies, what products we supporting, what industries, et cetera use cases.
32:41 That’s what you want to get to with your strategic allocation of dollars.
32:45 And when you get down to that campaign, this is where the interlock starts to happen.
32:50 Your marketing teams are thinking about all these campaigns they’re gonna do and they’re thinking about dollars.
32:53 What’s it gonna take to actually execute all these things that are being asked to do?
32:57 This is where you start to match those up, the top down allocation to the bottoms up budget planning.
33:06 What gets in the way of this is a different language, right, Bruce talked about language matters.
33:12 Well, unfortunately, the people that manage the dollars in your organization speak a very different language than the marketers that spend the dollars in your organization.
33:23 And I like this slide a lot because it just illustrates if you’ve ever ever had a conversation with your FPNA person or your controller and they start coming to you during say a reconciliation meeting of your budget and asking.
33:36 Well, does that trade show, is that professional services or is that travel and entertainment or is that just marketing expense?
33:44 Like as a marketer, you think everything is a marketing expense, right?
33:47 They’re all working dollars.
33:48 And so we advise early on to make sure there is firm alignment with marketing and finance so that how they see the world with the general ledger of accounts.
34:00 you know, their cost center allocation world can match up against marketing view which ties dollars to campaigns, programs, activations, et cetera because it can get very complex.
34:13 So really, really important to get that alignment with finance and I will come back to that shortly because when you get in the execution of campaigns, that alignment with finance is gonna be critically important.
34:27 Now, step six execute campaigns, you know, if you’re in this and you’re in the audience, you’re probably thinking, OK, that’s just one chapter.
34:36 One part of the seven step process is a heck of a lot that goes with executing campaigns.
34:40 And we absolutely acknowledgement, the intent of the blueprint, this guide and this webinar is not to inform you on how to best execute your campaigns.
34:50 You know why?
34:50 Because there’s probably 100 ultimate guides and definitive guides and best practices on using ABM and marketing automation and running events and running your ads and, and everything else.
35:04 We’re not trying to inform you of that.
35:07 What we are unique perspective on this part of the seven step process is the importance of alignment that I alluded to earlier over the course of executing campaigns.
35:17 You must be completely aligned with finance.
35:21 Why is that because the lack of alignment with finance, right, that disconnect between how they view the world and you view the world will result in unspent dollars or overs spent budgets or over saturated segments or under saturated segments, right?
35:37 Like dollars really count especially in this environment.
35:41 And so stay tight with finance, make sure you’re socializing that plan and the investment plans meant to support your company objectives.
35:51 You gotta stay on the same page, right?
35:53 Track what is planned, what actually gets forecasted which could be different from the plan, right?
35:59 What is actually committed?
36:00 Those trade shows you signed up for the Analyst relations program, those are committed dollars, right?
36:06 All of your martech versus what is non committed and then get into alignment on that reconciling pro reconciliation process which should happen monthly.
36:16 So you know exactly what is left in your budget at any given time.
36:21 This will also help you to better understand your working versus non working spend.
36:26 The second part will say on execution is the absolute requirement to have one calendar to rule them all.
36:33 How many of you as marketers have gone to socialize your plan?
36:37 You get into the New Year and then immediately you get a question from the head of a global sales region who says, what’s happening right now, what’s in market, what emails have been sent, what campaigns are being executed?
36:47 And you go back and you look at the plan and then you got to get it up to date and say, well, this is what we’re doing this month, et cetera.
36:53 It’s just a hassle on my entire career looking for the universal marketing calendar.
37:01 And it’s critically important to get this today.
37:05 Unfortunately, those things can exist in work, you know, project management tools that can be on PowerPoints, they can be on SharePoint sites, all of those have gaps as I think we all understand.
37:16 So it’s important to try and figure out how can you have a real time view to keep the team aligned and message to your stakeholders with that?
37:25 We had to jump ahead to the next step, which is measuring campaign ROI and optimization Bruce.
37:32 Thanks Jim.
37:34 And so here we go.
37:36 Let’s get into the final step here, step seven and measuring our performance.
37:44 And we start again with language, we need a common language for measurement.
37:48 And I spent a lot of time as in my role with Forrester as heading up our marketing analytics consulting practice.
38:01 And I hear a lot of the words that you’re seeing across the top of these columns used interchangeably and they’re not interchangeable.
38:08 They are very distinct and they have specific functions and we use them for specific purposes.
38:14 When we think about a measure versus a metric, a measure is something that I can literally count or, or track or to take a survey and get a response to that is something that I, I measure.
38:27 And some examples of those are just a few examples are things like impressions and clicks and the amount of pipeline or the amount of revenue.
38:35 It’s something that I can go into a system and I can look it up and I can see where we’re at.
38:40 When we move from measures to metrics, it’s quite simply they are very similar, but a metric is calculated from two or more measures.
38:48 And this is where I get into things like I can now take some of those measures.
38:51 I know how much I spent, I know how many impressions I got.
38:54 I put them together.
38:55 I get cost per impression, cost per click retention rates.
38:59 All ratios that I might wanna calculate.
39:02 Those are all metrics.
39:04 So sometimes people use metrics to include measures.
39:07 In this case, I’ve got them separated so that we know exactly how to go get them.
39:12 The next one we get into is dimensions.
39:15 And oftentimes these get confused by I, I take a dimension and a metric together and I still call it a metric.
39:21 And people think they have way too many metrics.
39:23 The reality is you probably don’t have that many metrics and measures.
39:28 It’s when you combine them with your segmentation that things feel like they’re out of control.
39:32 But if you separate those conceptually, you can get a better handle on that.
39:37 So by dimensions, we’re really looking at creating these components of segmentation, they often fall along the themes that we talked about for prioritization.
39:47 They often fall along segmenting our buyers, segmenting our market, segmenting our offers.
39:52 and then combining those together when we do combine them together, that’s where we get the cohorts.
39:59 A cohort is a combination of dimensions that spec specifically defines a the characteristics of a group or a population that I want to analyze.
40:10 And what I can do with that is typically define my cohort such that I can take a specific action when that cohort exhibits a specific behavior.
40:21So that’s why I wanna do cohort analysis that allows me to really tightly target the things that I’m trying to accomplish to create more success than a blanket approach.
40:31So what about this term KPIs that kind of muddies up the waters of the whole thing.
40:35 A KPI is simply a subset of measurements and metrics elevated to due to their level of importance.
40:45 It’s a key performance indicator.
40:46 Everything else we’ve looked at is a performance indicator, but a key performance indicator is one that you have determined is really important to your company.
40:55 It might be that there’s a leading indicator when people do this, good things happen.
40:59 So we want to track that as a key performance indicator.
41:03 And, and they’re often this is where the pairing with dimensions does often take place where our North American retention is a leading indicator of our global retention.
41:13 So I wanna track that as a key performance indicator because it’s really important to the decisions we make going forward.
41:20 That’s just a little piece on language so that, you know, you can kind of get put, put some framework around what you’re doing.
41:27 And let’s give that even a little bit more context.
41:30 This is a a construct that Forrester had put forward about seven or eight years ago called the measurement spectrum.
41:39 And it’s a really easy way to classify the metrics and measurements themselves into these different groupings.
41:45 So we would have first on the operation, I’ve got it split left and right on the operational side, we would focus on inputs and outputs.
41:55 And that is by inputs.
41:56 We mean, what, what is it that we do?
41:58 What, what did I do?
41:59 Did I bid?
42:00 did I place ad bids that I hold a webinar, et cetera?
42:04 Those are the things that I did and the results that we got quite specifically are the outputs.
42:09 That’s just what resulted from those inputs.
42:13 When we think about the operational side, that’s really the type of metrics that I wanna put on dashboards for departmental leaders and practitioners.
42:22 the people that are focused on the day to day, what, what am I doing?
42:26 And, and what, what is the result of it on the strategic side, we focus more on what’s called readiness and impact readiness is about.
42:34 What did I invest in?
42:35 Did I invest in enablement?
42:36 Did I invest in data?
42:37 Have I invested in programs?
42:40 So that, that’s really where I’m putting my money.
42:42 And this is more on the strategic side when you think about the audience for this is senior level wants to know where, where, what we’re investing in and then we want to know the impact that it has on the business now, instead of just the basic outputs, I wanna understand the impact on pipeline, I wanna understand the impact on retention on revenue and those types of things.
43:03 So as you can imagine what we invested in and what impact we had on the business fits nicely on the strategic side.
43:09 And that would go on a higher level dashboard and it would have its commensurate dimensionality and filtering associated with it.
43:18 All right.
43:19 So now we gotta put this together.
43:21 So when we start to put it all together, we can start to build around our pyramid here from the bottom up around tactical optimizations supporting very specific roles.
43:32 And looking at, you know, the metrics that are geared toward that audience, the inputs and outputs the website traffic and the social engagement.
43:40 And then we elevate that up to our next level of campaign operations and those types of metrics.
43:45 So we start now looking at this is where we get to ROI.
43:49 And this is where we get to looking at different channels and how, how people are engaging with them.
43:56 And then we jump up one more level to the, the macro performance of marketing as a whole.
44:01 And, and this is where we start looking at brand awareness and market share impact and ROI across different functions.
44:10 And then ultimately, that will ladder its way up to business outcomes.
44:13 And that’s where we get into pure profitability, revenue impact, targeting different segments and our ABM efforts and things like that.
44:22 So that’s how we’re, we’re gonna bring it all together.
44:24 Now, we combine that with the segmentation and the dimensionality and this is where we end up with our very nice lego block.
44:33 And we have a, we have a current kind of LEGO theme going on to our messaging and this is where I can now slice everything that I’m looking for whether it’s in terms of the operational metrics across the top, like the clicks and the impressions and the sign ups or the inputs across the bottom in terms of the media, the social, the event, or whether which theme we’re part of in terms of the campaigns, which products were focused on in terms of the products.
44:58 And then we see it from an outcome standpoint.
45:01 We look at our business line of business sales, we look at our campaign conversions and we can slice and dice and look at specific cohorts and it might be that, that one green cohort in the middle is the one that I’m gonna get the most ROI out of.
45:15 So that’s the one that I’m really targeting.
45:17 And I’m making sure that I’ve got the programs and the plans and the tactics directed in that direction so that we get the outcome that we’re looking for.
45:27 All right, with that, I’ll turn it back over to our host, Jim.
45:35 Thank you, Bruce is a whirlwind tour of the seven step marketing planning process.
45:40 Again, we call it a blueprint.
45:42 There’s a lot, there’s a lot to impact.
45:44 We totally understand that and today’s webinar is not meant to turn everybody on it into experts in every step of this.
45:51 that’s gonna require a bit more work and a bit more guidance, a bit more content frankly.
45:55 And so with the knowledge that planning season is coming and we do have several other things today.
46:02 We’re gonna give everyone else.
46:04 We said a recording of today’s presentation.
46:08 But along with that will become a very straightforward planning assessment checklist.
46:14 We listed a lot of steps, a lot of things you should consider a lot of to dos, put that into our checklist for you and just use it as a guide as you start to think about the planning season.
46:23 That’s that, that’s upon us.
46:25 Start thinking about which of these things am I prepared to do right now?
46:28 Do I have the right people, the right content, the right metrics, the right data.
46:32 Am I talking with the right people across the organization in order to make my way through this seven step checklist?
46:39 So look for that in your email.
46:42 We’ll follow up in August with the launch of the marketing planning blueprint, right?
46:47 That is a comprehensive piece of content that goes into detail on each of the seven steps.
46:53 Also lists rough timelines for the planning process, depending on the size of the organization who gets involved, key functions, best practices and tips that we’ve learned from working with many, many organizations about their planning process.
47:07 Look for that in August and then because you know many of you, we’ll come back like I will from my August vacation and boom, it’s there tight deadlines, planning process, collaboration, lots of meetings, negotiations as the case may be.
47:25 in September, we will launch, working with Inverta, a workbook.
47:29 You saw a lot of those frameworks, right?
47:32 A lot of those best practices, kind of guides that you can download and use as templates.
47:36 That’ll be in the workbook that Inverter will be launching in September.
47:40 And in pairing with that, we’ll have a number of workbook sessions to help get you up to speed and how to best use them for your organization.
47:47 So think about it that way today marks a start.
47:50 But over the next several months, we’ll be providing more content for you with that.
47:56 It’s 1248.
47:57 Let’s get to the questions before I jump to the questions.
48:01 Just a reminder because there was some questions in the in the channel about.
48:05 Well, how do you get to this universal always on on-demand calendar?
48:09 Well, if you want to stick around for what we call the backstage pass after the webinar, please do.
48:13 We’ll actually walk you through what a system of record for plan and spend looks like a platform to help manage this process.
48:21 That’s a reminder, stick around and Drew will do that.
48:24 But for now, let’s get back to the questions.
48:28 The first question that came in relatively early on.
48:30 It’s actually one of many questions from that, which is really good ones is I think that’s worth addressing.
48:37 So Bruce, I’m gonna ask you to address this one.
48:38 How do you feel about adding contingencies into your planning process or is it not worth it if you don’t know exactly why or how you’ll need to pivot over the course of the plan.
48:49 So, thanks.
48:51 Thanks Jim.
48:51 And I love this question because I think the answer depends on your specific situation.
48:59 If you’re in a market that is not experiencing a lot of volatility, it’s pretty stable right now, then.
49:05 Yes, I absolutely would have very specific well thought out contingencies.
49:10 A few of them that point in either direction, whether it’s scenario planning for a 5% increase or decrease, I would know exactly what I’m gonna do in the in those circumstances.
49:20 Whereas the more volatile the market is then I think you have to be a little bit looser in those contingencies.
49:28 Now, we start talking about things like a 25% or a 40% increase or decrease in our budget.
49:35 So I’m gonna have to be a little more flexible in how I adapt to those because that means market conditions are changing dramatically.
49:43 And the decision that I make based on the market conditions during my planning might be very different than during my execution.
49:50 So yes, contingencies are important.
49:53 The more volatile your markets are the more flexible.
49:55 I think you need to be good.
49:59 Good answer.
50:00 I’m gonna follow on with another question from that because he’s had some good ones in here.
50:06 He said that with so many organizations cutting staff and, and asking others to do more with less et cetera, et cetera.
50:12 I think we’ve all heard that.
50:14 How do we sell this kind of complexity as necessary, Bruce?
50:19 Do you wanna take that one?
50:20 Yeah.
50:20 Absolutely.
50:21 So this, this one might be counter to people’s thinking and, and once I state the answer you’ll kind of get where I’m coming from in good times.
50:30 People throw resources at problems.
50:33 So you add people without regard when you’re growing and things are going really great and you can just throw bodies at the problem.
50:42 The issue is when you start cutting, you have to get better at planning.
50:47 So the more you are cutting, the tighter the belt gets, the better you have to get at planning.
50:53 And, and I can explain this with a real easy analogy when I was growing up.
50:57 my father was the ultimate planner and my parents had more free time than any other parents out there because of how good he was at planning and how much planning they did.
51:06 And as a kid, I had no idea how hard it was to do all the things that they did until you become an adult and you start doing it on your own.
51:15 So I, I lived through the consequences of not planning in my own.
51:19 but saw what, what it meant and it means free time.
51:22 And it means the ability to really execute on things.
51:24 So take the time and do that planning and if they’re cutting costs double down on the planning so that you make the most of what money you have left.
51:35 Great insights.
51:36 Thank you, Bruce.
51:36 I will say that my parents were really good at cost cutting.
51:39 I’m not so sure about planning, but there’s a couple of other questions I think are worth getting to Kathy, maybe you can take this one.
51:48 because I hear this an awful lot who is ultimately responsible for leading this planning process.
51:56 To me, it’s the CMO the head of marketing like you can’t wait on others if others aren’t gonna deliver.
52:04 Like I, that’s why you have a Q5, not a Q1 at the end of the day, no one wants to.
52:09 Well, I didn’t get you because some other team didn’t do it.
52:11 I didn’t get my numbers from finance like you just have to with the information, do do the best plan you can either responsible or irresponsible I think was the line I once heard it’s good insight.
52:24 I will say that we obviously work with hundreds and hundreds of companies around planning, managing the planning process.
52:32 Yes, ultimately, it is the CMO but often the CMO will assign a team or even an individual to help on the collaboration involved in the planning process.
52:44 So we have seen this role chief of staff to the CMO pop up very frequently in our conversations and they’re actually coordinating between finance and marketing and managing the timing deadlines and the deliverables and everything else.
52:58 There’s that and we also have seen what we call the rise of marketing operations from managing a mar tech stack and doing analytics to taking on this new role of getting into kind of strategic ops and planning.
53:11 And I will say a little hint there, the blueprint will talk about what marketing operations role in the planning process can be and should be.
53:21 I agree with you.
53:21 I’ve seen two of those roles.
53:23 I’ve seen two of those roles come up.
53:25 Yes.
53:30 This is a good one too.
53:33 What is the biggest challenge for marketing teams during these seven steps?
53:38 I’d love to hear from both of you on this Cathy will stick with you to start.
53:40 But like there’s a lot of challenges and through these seven steps, which one have you seen to really bite teams?
53:48 I it’s, to me it’s a siloed planning.
53:52 Like everyone really meaning well, that they don’t coordinate and you just have six different plans at the end and that just leads to total chaos later on.
54:02 I mean, everyone means well, but it’s like it’s easy to get it done on your own.
54:05 Why should I work with them?
54:06 They weren’t ready, Europe didn’t get their stuff to me.
54:10 So I, I think getting someone to coordinate across all those teams.
54:16 where I’ve seen probably the biggest, like, people just try just get it done on my own Bruce.
54:22 I’m curious where you come across it.
54:25 So again, so what Cathy said is absolutely true.
54:29 Where I come across it is the piece that Jim talked about and that’s the budget side.
54:34 If you truly set a goal to have 70% of your budget be campaign or purpose driven, the stuff within the campaign by definition has to be co-ordinated across the silos.
54:46 So at least you know that that big chunk of your program spend is being co-ordinated.
54:51 And if you can keep the other side under 30% well, you can deal with a little bit of silo work, it’s practical.
54:57 And it’s driven by the functions, but at least they’re aware of all the other campaign stuff they’re doing and at least it’s co-ordinated from that respect.
55:04 So, yeah, I would agree with you, Cathy that the silo is the biggest place people get derailed.
55:11 But there’s a real simple metric to follow.
55:13 It’s that 70:30 rule.
55:14I f you can get 70% of the money into the campaigns, you’re pretty much insulating against those silos.
55:21 Good, good perspective.
55:23 I’m gonna add one more.
55:24 Not that we want to belabour the challenges involved in this process.
55:28 Although I did say generally marketing is not great at planning and that’s this notion of impact modeling.
55:36 And what I mean by that is, you know, if you leave the marketing, you know, marketing teams, their own devices, they’ll come up with all types of great ideas, we can do this and this and this and this and this but kind of where the rubber meets the road is holding them accountable to what the outcomes are.
55:51 What expected outcomes are you going to get from this set of webinars, this roadshow, sponsoring this trade show, doing a giant user event, whatever it might be, what do you expect to do?
56:03 And, and often that’s a conversation that is based on, as I said, kind of gut feel and hunches when it really should be a bit more of a mathematical process where you say if you were to execute these plans, give me some estimates on the ultimate impact in sales revenue, profitability margins, whatever it might be, go through that mathematical exercise, build your funnel, make some assessments about, you know, how many responses you’re gonna get and tell me what that that outcome is and then line all of those up across your campaign plans to make hard decisions about what will actually be funded or not.
56:41 But I think you what I see missing around that is people do these large campaign plans and annual plans.
56:47 So don’t get socialized.
56:49 So like if you’re the email person or the webinar person, you’re just like, well, I do six webinars a month or a quarter or whatever.
56:55 And so it’s never tied to that.
56:58 So I don’t think people don’t think that way where if you change, if you had your annual plan on a page here are the goals, every measurement meeting should be for every team member.
57:07 How did you contribute to one of these three goals?
57:10 And I think they have to change that mindset that doesn’t get socialized.
57:12 So they do come down to, I don’t know, this is the tactic because marketing is so specialized now we are by function.
57:19 There’s the SEO person, there’s the digital person, there’s the webinar person.
57:23 And so I think it’s really hard when you do a campaign across to say, what are you laddering up to?
57:29 I bet if you stop people in the hall and ask what is your big mission?
57:33 How you’re tying in?
57:33 They’d be like, I don’t know, I do webinars, I do marketing ops, I do Marquetta, they can’t tie together.
57:43 That’s good.
57:44 It’s a really good point.
57:45 It is an ongoing challenge guy Bruce.
57:47 Yeah, I think, I think the impact modeling is, is incredibly important and I think it has to do with this concept of what we call plan integrity.
57:55 And that is by definition that if properly executed my marketing plan will result in me reaching my goals.
58:02 The only way to prove the integrity of a plan is to do the math.
58:06 And I know, we don’t like to do the math, but it starts with the laddering up from the impressions to the responses to the engagement to the conversions.
58:15 And, and you’ve got to do that math so that you can at least predict that the plan I’ve put in place if we properly execute, it is gonna result in me achieving my goals, many, many organizations and we’ve done this in surveys and live in front of audiences.
58:30 I’ve asked the question, Don’t do enough impact modeling that they don’t even know whether or not they could achieve success if they in fact executed on their plan.
58:40 And I, I think that’s, that’s a really valid point.
58:44 I think a lot of that because they just measure it on revenue or M Q L.
58:49 So everyone has to say I generate M Q L or generate revenue even though you ran an ad.
58:55 But we’re time we could go on to on talk on this topic.
58:58 So if we had, but the one, the one resource I think we wrestle with the most as marketers is actually minutes even more so than dollars.
59:09 So we’re actually out of time where we use full hour, there’s some great questions in there.
59:13 So thank you for contributing audience.
59:16 And now, as I said, before I say goodbye, I thought I would turn over to my good friend Drew who will go through what we call the backstage path.
59:29 So if you want to stick around and see exactly what a temple’s planning, software does and how it helps you to manage this whole process with a single system of record.
59:39 Please do.
59:39 It’s about a 10 minute walkthrough, not to put too much pressure on you Drew, but about a 10 minute walkthrough of how we kind of manage that planning calendaring activity, budget management outcomes process.
59:54 So today, I will be showing you how those seven steps that we just went through today with all that knowledge and all the unpacking that we all have to do how those things can be realized in a single platform with up tempo and in up tempo for marketers or any users that are accessing the system, everything is broken up into easy to understand modules and we kind of bucket these things into two different areas.
1:00:19 We have our planning between strategy and activities and then we also have our budgets and investments.
1:00:26 So the spend side of the house and we’ll talk about how those two interrelate.
1:00:30 But really to start when we think about strategic planning and having to align the business goals and set marketing strategy and goals.
1:00:38 So both steps, one and two, this is done within the strategy module where we can articulate those business objectives and have those documented within the tool and how those cascade to marketing’s priorities and goals and then ultimately cascading to the key actions, those key actions can in turn be linked to different lines of investment, which we’ll show you in a little bit here.
1:01:00 But what’s important about this is it’s not just about getting the data in, we need to understand the relationship between these.
1:01:09 So if I click on any one of these goals within the tool, I can see how they’re interconnected, both up to those business level objectives and down to those key actions and what’s serving and supporting those different initiatives.
1:01:24 And if I open up any one of these goals, this is where I can then add in additional details such as a status update, key measurements, I can even assign owners to all these pieces.
1:01:35 And the strategy isn’t just necessarily let’s put pen to paper and have this information in the system.
1:01:40 This can also be supported in our activities module where we can visualize those plans in a timeline manner.
1:01:49 So I can see what I’m planning and when across different strategic initiatives across different strategic programs and having all that documented in one system.
1:01:59 And the great thing about this is you think about strategic planning, there is often collaboration, there’s multiple meetings, there are points in times where individuals need to get access to that information.
1:02:09 And instead of it living in powerpoint and in emails, this can live in a tempo using workflows and workflows, give you the ability of putting a defined process or structure a workflow to that strategic planning where you can have approvals as well as documenting detailed information about what you’re doing at any level within that plan, whether it’s something like a SWAT analysis, where I’m determining my strengths and weakness for this year, maybe even a pestle analysis, whatever that might be, these can be configured in the tool they can live in one place.
1:02:45 And this is where I can then collaborate with colleagues outside of those meetings, where we’re doing that discussion.
1:02:52 This in turn is then used to support the planning process and this is done inside the activities module.
1:03:00 And what we have here is a way to define and plan our campaigns through simple configuration.
1:03:06 And the beauty of this module is that the planning process is supported through a flexible model that enables multiple different plan types with their own structures and their own requirements to coexist.
1:03:20 And so if I use that strategic plan as an example, I of course, have my top level plan where I can see all that plan summary that I’m pulling from the workflow.
1:03:29 I might have details on my strategic initiatives.
1:03:33 We have a completely different structure than what I’m doing for my channel marketing plan where I might have individual campaigns where now I’m communicating the messaging or the theme.
1:03:43 And if I dive down a little bit deeper, I have my programs where now I’m looking at things from an objective perspective, what am I offering?
1:03:50 What’s the program family that I’m working with and continuing on down to the individual tactics as well as activations where I care about.
1:04:00 What is the customer stage that I’m focusing on?
1:04:03 Maybe those different planning scenarios so I can optimize and consider.
1:04:07 Yes, I can execute against this.
1:04:09 If I have more budget, maybe I need to remove it.
1:04:11 If I have less even things like target persona as well as other details can be synced into the tool and documented here.
1:04:21 I saw this question in the chat, having one holistic view is incredibly powerful and the activities module of course supports multiyear planning, but it’s also the place for everyone to see things from a perspective that matters to them.
1:04:35 And this is done by simple filtering and grouping using any of those attributes within that hierarchy.
1:04:41 So if I quickly want to do an example of this, I might go in and say I want to see things by target persona, by grouping by target persona at the appropriate level within my plan.
1:04:52 I can now get all of those activities underneath my specific program as well as the campaign ultimately rolling up into my plan.
1:05:01 Now, for those teams that might be focused on a very specific subset of activities, maybe events, if I use a quick example here filter out everything else within my plan.
1:05:13 All I care about is events I can get all those details again, still grouped by my target persona, but now filtered for that.
1:05:19 And I can then of course, review this throughout the year as I’m continuing on with my planning where this becomes incredibly powerful is that all these activities don’t really sit by themselves.
1:05:32 They’re not stand alone components, they are integrated across the entire ecosystem here.
1:05:38 So if I just refresh my screen, I can go through and give you an example of what that might look like.
1:05:44 So let’s click on this Q one digital banner ad.
1:05:46 I’ve got all my details here.
1:05:48 I fill this out using a simple form process.
1:05:50 Once I have that in place, I then need to start considering how I am funding this.
1:05:57 And this can be done in a couple of different ways.
1:05:59 We can articulate it as estimated costs, which is a simple pay.
1:06:03 I’m expecting this, but I don’t really have any budget set aside for it.
1:06:06 I haven’t really planned for it.
1:06:07 This is just my gut check feeling of getting those details in here and this can be used as both a top down guidance as well as bottom up, roll up.
1:06:17 So I can see all those different activities that reside within the plant underneath this.
1:06:22 Ultimately, though these activities, whatever level they are in the plan can be connected to spent.
1:06:29 So whatever funding source, I might have whatever budget bucket or team I can connect it to individual line items, which then allows me to have granular information on what am I funding?
1:06:41 How am I funding it, who’s funding it and so on.
1:06:44 If I use another example here with my Q2 banner ad, I can actually see I have details on my forecast, how that’s different from my plan spend and so on.
1:06:53 And what this enables you to do is ultimately track budget from multiple different buckets and see how that ladders up into those individual activities within the plan.
1:07:03 And I can very easily click on the magnifying glass in order to trace this to its source, it will select it automatically for me.
1:07:09 And now I can get details on that line of spend such as information on the supplier, maybe the cost center that’s associated with this and so on.
1:07:18 And now this is the other piece of the platform.
1:07:21 So we’ve shifted from steps three and four where we’re talking about defining our plans and our campaigns and being able to actually do that planning exercise.
1:07:29 How do we finalize the marketing budget?
1:07:31 Well, of course, a lot of this is going on in the background and with an up tempo, it’s organized really into those two areas.
1:07:37 Our budgets and our investments, investment plans are a place where I can get out of spreadsheets and go in and document my plan values and structure these.
1:07:47 However, I operate as a function in this example.
1:07:50 I’m using the digital media team as a a quick and easy way to understand where I am and what I’m doing.
1:07:56 I can also very quickly provided I have access jump to any one of the other budgets within the tool in order to see what I have going on and where all of the details are available to me at any point in time.
1:08:09 So as I’m looking at this from a spend perspective, I need to understand what budget I have available, how much I have left to plan and whether or not I’m aligned to those strategic objectives by clicking on any of these, I can of course, get back to those detailed panels where I might see additional information about how this is rolling up to finance in order to be able to give them their perspective on what we’re doing and where without losing the granular details that we need by having all this spend in one system, we can then integrate with P and back office purchasing tools in order to bring in our committed values as well as actuals.
1:08:46 So at any point in time, I can filter on this slice and dice and see the roll ups across that entire budget.
1:08:52 But ultimately looking at this across the entire organization where I can roll up from all those budgets to see how we’re doing for soulless this fictitious company, what we’ve committed so far, what we have for our actuals and all of those details.
1:09:09 Now, when we want to execute against these pieces.
1:09:12 This can be done through integration.
1:09:14 We can of course use workflows, but we can also use simple action buttons in order to connect different systems within the tool and drive information into those downstream systems such as project management.
1:09:28 So if I use a simple example here, let’s say I need to create a sales force campaign by creating that sales source campaign.
1:09:35 I now have a connection to that system.
1:09:38 And this would then allow me to then pipe back any funnel data or performance data into the system so that not only do I have my plan and I have the spends but ultimately, I have the performance against this particular campaign.
1:09:52 This could also be done with a project management tool such as workfront.
1:09:55 A simple action button can push all of my briefing information over into that system.
1:10:00 Meaning I have now increased efficiency where I don’t have to do duplicative entry between multiple tools and then we can ultimately bring back things like the project status, the owner deadlines things along those lines.
1:10:12 And I can then use that to sort pivot and filter on my plan at the end of the day.
1:10:19 At step seven, we then need to measure and optimize this can be done using up tempo is built in impact model where within the tool I can make assumptions on what kind of engagement I’m going to drive.
1:10:33 Those can be modeled out based on funnel assumptions.
1:10:36 So we can track and use different conversion rates, different velocities as well as different deal sizes.
1:10:43 And based on what I am planning the target audience, the region, the product or service, all of those attributes can in turn, adjust the model and give us a prediction of when we should hit our engagement as well as when we should expect the revenue impact.
1:10:59 And this is particularly important for long deal cycles where marketing has gone out.
1:11:03 We may not see the impact in revenue for a couple of months over time as those actuals come back in.
1:11:11 We then can understand whether or not our predictions were accurate and adjust our models going forward.
1:11:17 But more importantly, all of this information now resides in one system where we can look at that model roll up to a higher level such as our programs or even our campaigns and have all that information visualized for us throughout the plan very quickly and very easily.
1:11:35 This can also be done in a very efficient manner across the spend and different KPIs as well as things like as Bruce talked about the different measures in metrics, we can see them in a simple roll up summary view articulated via our plan.
1:11:51 And if I use a quick example, here I have it saved as a another tab if I want to look at those details as excuse me target personas and then we’ll filter again by our different activations.
1:12:07 We’ll just narrow down to tactics here just to keep it simple.
1:12:12 I can then still use that summary view in order to analyze what information I have across those tactics.
1:12:18 I can see the overall roll up.
1:12:19 I can see it by those target personas or whatever attributes I’m using as well as having those ROI calculations.
1:12:26 So for any other individuals that might be accessing the plan, they can get to that information very quickly and easily.
1:12:32 But you can too, which then gives you the ability to act much quicker using data driven decisions.
1:12:38 And with that, that’s how you can accomplish all seven steps within Uptempo.
1:12:43 Thank you, Drew.
1:12:45 That was a great walkthrough of the product.
1:12:47 So thanks for that.
1:12:49 Listen, for those of you who stuck around with the backstage pass.
1:12:52 We appreciate it.
1:12:52 I hope you learn something about the Uptempo platform.
1:12:55 Look for our checklist webinar recording blueprint workbooks, all types of good stuff in the coming weeks and months and enjoy your summer.
1:13:06 Thank you.