What CMOs think they look like when they put on their annual user conference
Welcome back to part 3 of our 5 parts series on Annual Planning.
If you’re late to the planning party, here’s a snapshot of our syllabus:
Part I: The Kickoff
Who’s involved in annual planning?
Bottoms up vs tops Down forecasting
Guiding questions and guardrails
Part II: Building sales capacity
Modeling out rep ramp time
Pod ratios: Business Development Reps, System Engineers, and Sales Managers
Quota deployment and over assignment (shhhh!)
Part III: Designing a marketing budget (This post!)
Modeling Pipeline Coverage and understanding the marketing funnel
Working with your CMO to develop a “GL pick list”
Programs vs People cost split
Part IV: Costing out the P&L
Modeling headcount as an input, and a driver
Forecasting non-people costs
Developing a mutually exclusive list of expense types
Part V: Bringing it all together (the week after next week)
Modeling P&L by cost type vs P&L by department
Checking your outputs: CAC Payback, ARR per head, cash runway
Five year plan tie in
This guide comes from thousands of hours on the job, designing annual plans for multi billion dollar tech companies. And it’s strongly influenced by the hundreds of hours spent with my entrepreneur friends who are building their very first budgets.
Today we’ll explore the nuances of building a marketing budget to ensure your sales team has enough pipeline to hit their goals.
Unlike our sales capacity model, which is built bottoms up, marketing targets are built in reverse (and then sanity checked tops down).
Let’s secure the bag pipeline.
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