‘Do More With Less Budget’ – words I’ve heard many times throughout my career as a marketing leader. And my reaction to them has changed over the years. In my youth I was frustrated by them, I didn’t understand how a company expected us to achieve more, make suppliers cut their costs and profits, while just a few months later we suddenly had tons of money. Then as I managed teams it became a challenge, how could I haggle with the regional teams and my own team to do the work ourselves rather than spending budget with a supplier.
Until at some point, I realised it was actually an opportunity for creativity.
Now, I relish the opportunity to do more with less. Yes, I did indeed say opportunity. In fact, opportunities for creativity. Think about it as a makeover combined with a spring clean combined. Here’s how I see it:
- The scrupulous trim – yes folks, it’s time to get into the weeds. Literally. This is not a time to scrimp on detail, you need to dig into exactly what’s going on. If you’re like me and prefer being in the strategy, tune into your investigative self and get curious. Keeping with this horticultural theme, you know what a gardener would do to get new growth – give a hard prune – and that’s exactly what’s needed. Start with what your data is telling you:
- Accurately measure your programmes and really look into what’s going on. Don’t just look at overall results, look at trends for long-term programmes. You’ll soon spot tactics or programmes that aren’t delivering but more importantly, pinpoint the ones that are.
- Next, assess the programmes for the level of effort (how much work) it takes to make each one happen. How many stakeholders are involved, who and what are your key dependencies? Mapping resource intensity to the programme effectiveness will give you eye-opening insight into your Return on Resource.
- Prioritise your programmes against what you are being measured on, i.e. pipeline generation, revenue generation, net new logo wins, maintaining your customer base. Note here that we’re focusing on the bigger goal and not about the more granular metrics like the number of MQLs that need to be generated or a % of engagement. It’s collectively the varying tactics and how they contribute to the programme that will help determine priorities.
- If your programmes are high pipeline generators but not high revenue generators then you’ve got to talk to sales to understand the value the programmes are bringing. Or it might shine a light on something more operational, for example, if they are not following lead protocol, so you can’t measure their impact, and therefore can’t justify keeping them going.
- Assess the sales pipeline – any marketer should be able to access a sales pipeline dashboard and understand what it’s telling them. Granted, marketing will always have a different view of the world to sales, as they’ll look at the need to build / maintain the brand or get new leads and new contacts. But the question is what does your sales team need to bring in revenue? This is where marketing can truly move the needle when faced with ‘do more with less” because it’s critical you understand what will shift the pipeline into revenue. Often the conversation here is that sales will want marketing’s help in building reputation and supporting relationships. But there are tactical programmes that can really make a difference even in a quarter, e.g. focused call-downs, or bespoke/personalised programmes targeting customers that are likely to close within the quarter. Use the data to help you prioritise the programmes that will achieve this.
- Reaching consensus on the programmes that must be prioritised can be tricky. Wanting to avoid consensus by committee is smart, but have you considered working with your team, or leadership team to give each person one opportunity to submit a ‘save it vote’? The intention here is that the team members vote for a programme which is at risk of being cut. The programme with the most votes stays. This should be data-driven to help remove the emotion from the process. We recommend giving enough time for members to do their due-diligence before casting their vote.
Now you have the data and know what to cut, what’s next? Time to tune into your creativity! Stay tuned for the 2nd part in this blog to find out how to double-down.
