Part 1 of 3 for newly minted, budget-responsible, B2B marketing professionals
“I’m tired of beating my head against the wall. The company just doesn’t understand how important marketing is.”
Why do I hear this so often?
While you may experience that other departments roll their eyes at those “crazy marketing people,” the actual reason may have more to do with how marketing is embedded within the organization. Most functional areas are co-dependent and deeply embedded within the organization's walls, so even people without access to strategy breathe air infused with internal purpose.
Three areas are traditionally more outward facing than inwards.
1. Product development is often heavily integrated with R&D, production, finance and other business functions. (See Fig. 1)
2. Sales is too important to fail to anchor within the company. All departments need sales to succeed for their own survival.
3. Marketing on the other hand, is a different story. Unless the company has a digital income source such as a web shop, revenue from marketing is often attributed to sales.
Although marketing normally has organizational dotted lines to sales, product development and IT, other departments are not dependent on marketing's success. For the rest of the organization, marketing is nice-to-have.
You could say the function is often more loosely tied to the company with what you could consider an umbilical cord called a budget.
And yes. it's relatively painless to cut an umbilical cord.
Fig. 1. Marketing is less tightly embedded within many organizations
The onus is on you
This puts the burden on you to not only be an ambassador within the organization, but to actively seek company direction. You may need to actively search out strategy that other business areas access more easily. Otherwise your marketing ambitions are unlikely to be aligned with company priorities.
If that's the case, not only will you not succeed, you shouldn't succeed. After all, every business function is responsible to pull together in the company's strategic direction.
Luckily, the best tool to prevent misalignment is the one already available to you.
No matter what marketing buzzword rocks your world, the term “budget” likely has the opposite effect. But whether your experience comes from martech or marcom, if you’re new to managing a marketing department – even if you are a one-person-army – you need to prioritize budget planning.
Allow me to deviate with a short story. I grew up on a dairy farm. Cute calves with long eyelashes, the comforting sound of cud-chewing ruminants, idyllic countryside. Oh yes, I have many wonderful memories of that time. This story, though, is about the other end of the cow.
Part of my job was to scrape all the poop into a pile with a tractor. Hydraulic levers controlled a blade in the back and a scoop in the front. While not rocket science, you needed to keep your wits about you because there were a lot of moving parts with forward, backward, blade down, blade up, scoop down, scoop up, scoop tip. One day in the mind-numbing routine I somehow did the combination that put a scoop full of fresh cow dung above my head and then tipped it backwards instead of forwards, resulting in a sheet of fresh manure raining down between me and my hydraulic controls. The moral of the story is that I had to dive into the shit to get out of shit. When I think about budgets, I remember that life lesson.
Budgets are the life blood of successful branding and marketing management. Without resources you fail. Even though everyone is on the same team, when it comes to budgets you are in a healthy competition against every other department in the organization. Most other department proposals will seem more business-critical, and their success will be easier to measure than yours. So be smart about diving into the budget process; it’s one of your critical success factors in order to lead an effective marketing effort.
Learn the fiscal rhythms in your company
Not every company starts their year on January 1. If that’s the case for you, orient yourself around “fiscal” because the only thing that matters about “calendar” is holidays. The timing of budget planning often is determined by the size of the company:
Global companies are more likely to start at the end of second quarter, as it takes time to roll up budget requests, align with revenue targets, investments and operating costs, and then approve and roll back down to budget-responsible colleagues
Mid-size companies will likely start planning next year’s budget at the end of third quarter, when they have a clear idea of how the year will land compared to plan
Small companies – who may not even have a full-time marketing person – can plan in a week and adjust on the fly. It’s the main reasons startups are so nimble
Find out when your company starts working on budgets, and set aside a couple of days for budget planning the month prior. That way you’ll be ready to pitch your vision and maximize your chances to influence your coming budget.
If this isn’t part of your company’s standard procedure, request a meeting with your manager to review your ideas before he/she is asked for input.
People who can read the room win
You may not be in senior leadership, but be sure you are aware of how the winds are blowing. Is the company on track to achieve this year’s goals? By how much and thanks to what? For both the good and bad news, get aligned with the underlying reasons. There will likely be focus on fixing the negative and accelerating the positive. How can marketing support this?
In most companies, goals are published at the beginning of the fiscal year together with budgets in a kind of annual kickoff. If you don’t have access to early iterations of company goals, comb through previous years’ goals for company direction. Often company goals include a five-year vision, so last year’s announcement is still valuable.
You probably have your own marketing vision but be sure that it is secondary to the company’s overall ambitions. Is this a year to strengthen production? Shore up key account management? Find out and then identify which marketing efforts best align to the company’s near and long-term focus. You are responsible to support these business decisions.
And frankly, it’s a lot easier to get support for a budget that is aligned with company direction.
Remember that your CFO and CEO may not understand marketing lingo in the same way you do. Budget proposals should be phrased in business language.
At first glance, it may seem like there is no connection between company priorities and marketing.
Marketing is not going to support building a new production line, right? But it might make sense to invest in a communication platform and integrate it so you’re able to reach new customers/segments when you start producing the additional capacity in 18 months.
Are your company’s data and systems negatively affecting profits? This could be a good time to invest in cleaning and automizing your CRM data, or a portion of your front-end stack to make it run more effectively.
Is the company so unfortunate as to have a logistics or quality issue that is negatively affecting both sales and reputation? Pencil in creation and execution of a campaign to repair the chink in your armor. Even if it’s currently bleeding, you know it needs attention and wound care; marketing can help.
Sales is still king (I know, content is king, too. Just of a smaller fiefdom)
Always, always, always pay close attention to sales. Study every piece of data you can get your hands on and listen to both what sales leadership says and doesn’t say. If you don’t report to a sales leader, cultivate forthright communication with him/her.
Examples of how marketing can strengthen sales efforts
So how do budgets help avoid marketing burnout?
Coming full circle to the headline about avoiding burnout; burnout comes mainly from feeling ineffective. But when you anchor marketing activities in company tactics and strategy, you contribute to a team effort instead of being the lone soldier at an outpost. You aren’t solely responsible to make the effort or achieve results.
For other marketing tasks that may not have a direct connection to company goals, like a website or social media, be sure to align effort and results so you set realistic goals. I’ll address that in Part 2 of this series. In the meantime, here is a great podcast about marketing burnout: https://technologyadvice.com/blog/marketing/ways-to-deal-with-burnout/
It takes a while to develop relations and learn the rhythms of a company. But one thing is sure: if you are waiting for management to inform you of your budget so you can start planning, you’re already a day late and a dollar short. Learn to love budget cycles and start thinking upstream so you have a chance to influence important decisions that will affect your success.
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