[Music] [Raja Walia] Hey, everyone. So welcome to Pitch Perfect, Winning the Marketing Budget Conversation. And honestly, let's keep it real. Marketing is constantly fighting for budget. We're under scrutiny. We're always under the gun. We always have to prove our value. And I've been in too many conversations with executives where marketing budget is going, and what we're actually doing is we're trying to say then why we need our budget, what is the budget used for. My name is Raja. I am CEO and founder of GNW Consulting. We are a strategic marketing operations agency, and this type of conversation is one that we've had way too many in the last couple years. So in this session, what we're going to do is we're going to walk how we present and how we're going to shift the conversation of marketing budget from more of a defensive reactive standpoint to a more offensive or proactive standpoint. So we're not justifying spend as it's happening, but we're actually proving marketing's impact on revenue and on the long-term growth perspective from a company standpoint. This is the framework that we released, and the key takeaways of this framework is how marketing impacts sales effectiveness, how client retention, how does it impact company goals and corporate initiatives. And those are the long-term growth opportunities that we're talking about. That is the strategic go-to market strategy, a corporate or a company have, while the short-term goals are more how do we retain customers, how we onboard them, how do we make a better experience, and how do we enable sales to better do their job. So some of these are short-term and some are long-term, and that's the biggest takeaway from this, is how to separate that out between short-term wins and long-term impact. Well, we start with this, executives and marketing teams in general often focus on immediate return. We want to show what is the immediate return that marketing has to offer. And that's the scenario we play ourselves into. But marketing, key goal also is to play as a long-term strategic role in brand growth, positioning, and retention. Retention, nowadays is even more important than net new logos, which is couple years back, I think that was like, everyone was trying to get new logos, show that, "Hey, these are the new companies that signed up." But now with the expansion of technology and depletion of market share, we have to do our best to make sure the customer experience is just as good as the onboarding experience. So how do we frame it? So we're going to use this deck. We're going to break it into a couple categories. There are short-term wins. These are quick revenue impact items that affect pipeline goals. Sales enablement, how it affects the sales team, what marketing is doing for campaign attribution as far as client retention, long-term growth, these are the strategic business items that companies focus on and more so what corporate initiatives focus on as well. In this slide, we're going to impact the short-term goal, and that is how we enable the sales team to do their job better and to do their job more efficiently. What this slide helps you do is it draws a direct line of connection between campaigns that we're running and how the sales team is leveraging them. And that's the big difference. It's not so much about alignment, but it's more about collaboration between marketing and sales. We run these campaigns from a marketing tactical strategy perspective and how sales uses them to have more efficient conversations. This helps you draw the line and compare campaign and sales performance from a collaborative standpoint, not an alignment. Remember, we don't have to be aligned on the campaigns. We have to be aligned on what the campaign purpose is and how sales is going to use that campaign. So let's start with a standard example. Everyone's done an ABM initiative. There's content, there's strategy, there's lead nurture, there's a slew of things that marketing does. Well, if we look at the slide, how does that tie into what sales is doing? And that's the conversation that needs to be had. It's not that we sent 500 quality leads. That is a required metric. You need to show that metric every single time no matter what. However, what are they doing with those leads? When are they following up? How is it enabling sales to have better conversations? That's the purpose of this slide. The purpose is to show the impact that it's having on sales to have meaningful conversations. So why don't we want to highlight immediate conversion rates and MQLs? Because we have to do that anyway. That is a required report. How do we show the relationship that sales is actually using the marketing strategy and the marketing campaigns for? Did it shorten the sales cycle? Did it measure engagement and all of a sudden give sales ability to have a conversation and develop a relationship? And how much of that pipeline revenue generated as a result of it? And that's why this slide matters is because there's two plays. Any given time marketing does anything, there's two plays. There's a short-term revenue impact goal, and there's a immediate proof of ROI. Then the second part is the long-term benefits of it. The relationship that the sales are building, the relationship the customer has with the brand, the relationship that is being developed as a company, and how the company is portraying themselves to the customer as well. All of those things, while unmeasurable, are going to make an impact on long-term growth and sustainability. One of the key area of focus is that every company has, whether it's 2023, 2024, 2025, and for the foreseeable future is client retention. You cannot have long-term growth and sustainability with clients churning. So how does marketing impact that? And most executives see marketing as just lead generation and enabling sales and qualifying leads and passing them to sales. Right? That's 80% of the conversation that realistically occurs. But we as marketers, we need to also have this other conversation about how client retention customer success also plays a role in what marketing does, and that's what this slide is about. It's about customer onboarding success, sequences, nurture campaigns, or even loyalty programs that help with that. So what did all of these customer-focused campaigns that marketing ran for customers and clients, whatever you want to call them, what was the result of them? And let's not talk about that there was engagement rates or let's not talk about that there was open rates or deliverability rates. Let's tie it to success. Did they renew? Were they upsold to higher tier products? Did the customer satisfaction improve? Did they end up saying engage longer? Did onboarding help them use your platform if you're a SaaS company, easier and made the experience better? And if you're a services company just like us, did it help them understand what the intention behind the services were? Those are the conversations that us as marketers need to have. Not, "Hey, we had X amount of people click on our link or open an email. What is the end-all result?" So if we're talking about customer success, we're talking about customer retention and customer longevity, and that's how we have to connect it. Overall, did these campaigns over time reduce the churn rate? Did you see an increase in renewals? Well, if that's the case, when a client closes and they become a customer, they get onboarded. At that point, it's the product and marketing that make sure is when renewal comes, that renewal is happening. Sales, once again, where it in the sales cycle comes in either at the tail end of it or a couple months before it to make sure renewals are occurring. But there's a gap, and that gap is filled by marketing. And that's the conversation that we need to make sure that we portray. And very seldom times, which, in my experience, companies don't do that. Companies talk about renewals, but they don't talk about the gap of client before renewal. So did the churn rate reduce? How many customers came from renewals? What was the revenue amount tied to renewals? We don't get asked what the revenue amount is tied to renewals. We should be presenting them saying, "Hey, from a long-term sustainability perspective, marketing campaigns increased customer success, which impacted renewals." And that is why the CLV, the customer lifetime value, is such an important metric for growing companies. Why does this slide matter? Why is this even here? Well, this is the transition. If sales and marketing are supposed to be aligned, and I always say that they need to collaborate more than alignment, when does short-term turn into long-term? This is your transition slide. If enabling the sales team is considered demand gen activities and retaining customers are considered short-term and long-term activities, then this slide is why, this slide is where we separate what marketing impacts on the short-term and how now it's starting to impact long-term growth. And when we talk about long-term growth, if you're a company that isn't investing time and understanding why that's important, you will constantly be trying to find net new clients to fill the void of clients and prospects or customers that are leaving. So as we shift from demand gen, enabling sales to retention, now let's talk about how marketing needs to prove to the company why what we're doing is a long-term business necessity. Short-term wins are important. No one's denying it. No one's denying that revenue is a bad thing. No one denies that it pays the bills. But how are you going to forecast and scale it and make it repeatable if you can, if you don't have a long-term investment strategy? So how is marketing helping grow expansion and efficiency? What is the growth that the company had from last year to this year, last quarter to this quarter? How did the client onboarding increase? Did we go to market faster? Did the sales cycle get shorter? Why is that? It's not because sales is picking up the phone and dialing a lot faster or having a 30-minute demo in 25 minutes. No, there's efficiencies and processes that marketing impact, the marketing does that impacts overall company growth. So are you now aligned to have that conversation with the leadership on the broader strategies that a company has? And if the answer is no, then this is where you need to make that relationship and in this slide is where you need to make that relationship of how did marketing reduce customer acquisition costs. Because remember, there's a slew of activity that happens before someone raises their hand and wants to buy. There's a slew of activity that happens before a salesperson can have a meaningful conversation that results in a sale. What did marketing do data-driven wise-- We want to be there data-driven, but what did marketing do to make better business decisions? What did we invest in? What did we not invest in? What are those learnings? What is the impact of that from a scalable perspective? If you're not presenting that data, you're losing your budget. Simple as that. Right? Because if we focus marketing on a short-term gain, you're always going to be expected to prove short-term value. But what is the data telling you about better business decision-making and customer acquisition costs from a long-term growth perspective? How has brand building positioned the company in a long-term market leadership? How do you separate yourself from your competition? It's not sales. Right? Sales isn't calling more people and saying, "We're really good." They're supposed to do that. Marketing is what's separating and creating that identity of brand building, which is something that you cannot measure. You cannot attribute revenue to it, but you can reduce churn from clients because of it. And that's why this slide is probably one of the heavier transition slides to stop talking about those short-term gains that we've narrowed and funneled ourselves into and now focus on long-term strategy and long-term growth. This is how marketing is aligned with company goals. So in this slide, essentially, what you want to do is you want to say, "What are the company goals? What are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to increase your market share? Are you trying to get net new logos? Are you trying to reduce customer acquisition costs? Are you increasing the lifetime value of the client?" If all of those things are true, these are all the things that marketing has done to impact those. And once again, it's a unmeasurable relationship because short-term is measurable, long-term is sustainable and growth, and that's what we have to identify. Now let's bring all of this together. We've talked about company goals. We've talked about how marketing impacts sales and just makes their job a lot easier. We've talked about how it impacts customer success and the customer retention team to help reduce churn. So now what is driving all of these change? Right? And a lot of this is because of corporate initiatives. Whether you have a board member or you're part of a board that manages a company or you just have an executive team that manages it, there's a couple things that they care about at the highest level which drives all of this. One is it dictates where a company is going to invest. Are you a company that were part of an acquisition, or are you merging with a company, or are you acquiring a company? We're going to look at all of the long-term growth and brand building portion of that as well. How do we expand? And how do we prioritize growth? That's what they're going to be in charge. That's what they're going to be looking for when they talk about investment strategies, whether they talk about mergers acquisitions, whether they talk about the success of a company or when to expand into a new market. So what we want to try to do with this slide, and this is a very, very high level slide, and this is where the long-term fits into from a growth perspective. Long-term growth is based off on the success of a company hitting their goals. In order for a company to hit their goals, sales has to do a good job. We have to retain customers, and we have to present the brand cohesively. And that's what corporate level initiatives are all about. So how has marketing played a role in that? Well, brand building, for one, all of the company goals. Has marketing helped position the company as an industry leader? Absolutely. PR campaigns, website analysis, even outbound campaigns, press releases to the market, all of those are elements of campaigns that marketing controls and runs that impact this level of initiative. And, ultimately, are all these campaigns driving top funnel awareness? Everything that we do drives top funnel awareness from a long-term perspective. So we have to be able to tie in if the corporation wants to do all of these things or the executive team wants to expand into market, when is the best time to do it. Well, what percentage of the total's company revenue is realistically marketing influenced? And the answer is a lot because if you think about it, there's everything that we've talked about at some point in time marketing has helped do or marketing has helped lead. And that's where marketing efforts have increased brand equity, which has led to the long-term market dominance that companies experience. So how is marketing helping leadership future proofs that business? By doing all of those things. And this is what this slide demonstrates. It demonstrates how we're future proofing the business from activities that are not short-term, but long-term focused. And this is where the big picture comes into place if you look at it. It's marketing efforts to corporate initiatives, impact company goals, and that's where it trickles down to all of the things that we semi kind of take for granted from a marketing perspective. Usually, by the time we get to the slide, leadership sees marketing as a strategic function. They don't see it as a-- And I hate using this term, our cost center because we are both. We are cost and profit center depending on who we're impacting. If we're impacting the sales team, we have to be a profit center. We have to make sure campaigns resonate and gives and empower sales something to talk about. If it's customer retention, we have to make sure all the campaigns that we're doing are talking about the customer experience and building the brand so we reduce churn. When we get to this portion of it, this is where generally people say, "Well, that's a cost. That's a cost." And, ultimately, it is a cost just like any other department that is at a company level. It's how we present our cost in relationship to these initiatives, and that's what this exercise helps us do. So how do we win the budget conversation? And, honestly, at the end of the day, securing your marketing budget isn't about defending it. It is about proving strategic value. The more proactive we can be, the better it is for us because when we do that, we turn expense, the conversation of expense, I should say, into investment. We don't give vanity metrics, but we give business metrics that align to corporate KPIs, and we shift the narrative from just looking at us as short-term producers or short-term wins to long-term growth.
If we are reactive in it, then we always will be put into a scenario where we have to show, the expense, what we can cut, what are short-term wins. But if we're proactively making sure that we're painting the biggest picture possible from short-term and long-term, that's when we own the budget conversation, and that's when we back it up with data-driven insights. So what-- Next steps. Right? So use this deck. It's going to be available for download. Use it in your budget discussions. We've done it plenty of times in the last year since we released this framework. It helps paint the picture of short-term versus long-term. Customize it with your own data, practice shifting the narrative of, "Hey, we're a cost center and a profit center, but this is where our cost and profit aren't helpful." Not just trying to justify and defend our cost, but control the conversation. And when we do that, then we're going to be able to control the budget conversation a little bit more clearly. So next time, when the leadership asks, "What's the ROI of marketing?" We don't have an answer. We are not scrambling to get data metrics. We're not scrambling to prove our value. We have everything, and we show them proof across a picture that talks to the leadership level, but it also talks in a short-term gain level as well. This conversation is something that, we've been involved in very heavily for the last couple of years, mainly because a lot of the shifting budget conversations, improving marketing's revenue impact, and balancing short-term, is just at the core, a very simple explanation that marketing isn't just a cost center, it's a business driver. So it's not a measure of cost versus profit center center. It's where does marketing fit into the picture and align with business goals at a long-term growth and a short-term goals perspective.
And people commonly ask, "How do we use this framework?" "Where do we start?" Right? So the immediate impact, "That's pretty easy. We do this on a day-to-day basis and quarterly basis, monthly basis, whenever your KPI reports are due." That sales and client slides. Right? Show the quick wins. That's the revenue influence attribution conversations.
Tie marketing to long-term business growth. So there are campaigns for customers that we're doing that connect to corporate priorities. And then what are those corporate initiatives? How do we want to impact them? And if you don't know what they are, I would find out, and that is how you can relate everything that you're doing. One main thing that we want to walk away with is you have to own the internal narrative when we have budget conversations. We can't report on numbers that are meaningless. We have to report on numbers that impact short-term and then tell the story of how it's fueling business growth quarter over quarter, year over year, whatever your reporting cadences. So customize the framework, use it in your meetings, control your narrative, and enjoy summit. Come say hi. We're going to be at Booth 679. I hope this session gave you some practical insights on how we've been able to help control the conversation of budget. So it's not, like, "Hey, now you have to cut your tech stack." So thank you everyone for tuning in, and enjoy the rest of Summit. [Music]
