The B2B CMO’s essential playbook for building a strategic marketing plan
Ah, the holidays. Trimming the tree. Lighting the menorah. Sipping hot cocoa by a roaring fire…
Wait, that’s someone else’s holiday. Every CMO knows that while everybody else is kicking back with a hot toddy as they ring in the new year, we’re scurrying about, doling out the dregs of our budget to last-minute programs, updating messaging, locking down sales kickoff details, planning the next year’s first launch, and helping sales drag last-minute deals across the finish line. Aaaaarrrrgh!
But not this year! Let’s get a head start on our marketing plan, exit summer with a credible draft to socialize with stakeholders through the fall, and hit the ground running with a solid plan in the new year. Here’s your step-by-step playbook for getting it done.
Start early
Get going on your marketing plan early — like months, if you can. In fact, always be planning. Write down your next-12-month plan in a deck, doc, FigJam, Miro board, whatever, and keep it open on your desktop at all times so you can tinker with it, add ideas to your “parking lot,” refer to it when making decisions, and use it to get others on board. Bonus: When the inevitable encounter with a board member or other “gotcha” person arises and they say, “What’s your plan?,” you don’t have to say, “bduh, bduh, bduh.” You can just whip out your handy plan on your laptop and show ’em how smart you are.
Take stock
Before you start your plan, make note of the state of play in your market and your company’s position within it. Note the key players, growth factors, technical innovations, competitive dynamics, and analyst predictions. Include your relative financial performance, trajectory, product comparisons, and key partnerships. Consider how major market shifts could impact your position. This effort should result in a set of foundational assumptions that inform your plan.
Model the business
Get on the same page with your peers (especially sales) on your financial model, revenue targets, and underlying assumptions. From there, create a pipeline model that works back from your quarterly ARR goals and calculates exactly how many opportunities, SALs, SQLs, and MQLs (or whatever stages you define) you need to generate each quarter, taking each stage’s conversions and timing into account. By knowing exactly how many conversions into of each stage you need per quarter, you can gauge progress on a weekly basis. A few weeks in, you should have enough data to know if you’re off-track, and be able to make the necessary adjustments. Besides modeling pipeline ARR-down, I like to build it up from programs (including channel and ABM initiatives) to make sure what I’m expecting to generate matches what I need to generate. I also estimate the cost of each program to make sure I’ve allocated enough budget to make it happen.
Also create a revenue sources model (see example, below), or your company’s hypothesis about where revenue will come from. You can slice it any way that makes sense for your business (by customer segment and product line, vertical and use case, etc.). You can also add indicators for growth and strategic importance, if they’re useful. You should use it to guide your marketing investments, stay in lockstep with your sales and product counterparts, and find gaps in your plan. For example, if you estimate that you’ll sell roughly five times your security product to energy customers than monitoring to retail ones, that gives you some inkling of how much you should spend generating demand in those segments (all else equal, of course).
Make strategic decisions
Going through this modeling exercise may prompt you to think about your strategic priorities. For example, in a tight budget environment, you may need to deprioritize marketing in an underperforming segment, or even make a tradeoff between two segments with equal marketing return but different growth trajectories.
Rather than do this in a silo, bring your peers along so you can make decisions more collaboratively. One simple analysis to facilitate discussion is to plot products (or segments, verticals, or business units) by revenue, growth, and profitability. You can even overlay unaccounted-for characteristics such as strategic importance. Now’s the time to make these hard choices as a team. (Aren’t you glad you got started early?)
Articulate your strategic priorities
With foundational pieces such as your market assumptions and pipeline model in place, now think about your strategic priorities. As a CMO, your priorities need to align with the company’s overall strategic priorities, as well as set a clear agenda for your team. I like to have a goal for each of three stages of the marketing funnel (awareness, demand, and sales), and then define achievement for each based on customer need and urgency, competitive dynamics, company positioning, and other factors. Beyond definitions, it’s helpful to include “as measured bys” for each, such as share of voice (or a derivation thereof), pipeline from target accounts, and competitive win rate. I usually summarize the priorities on one page and then flesh each out in a separate section. Here’s an example of the summary page for a past company.
Shore up your brand
Based on what’s going on in your business, use this time to assess whether your brand needs a refresh. This includes taking a look at your brand assets, such as logo, color palette, and visual identity, and asking whether your “system” is working. Where are your blockers? For example, is your visual identity based on complex illustrations that are expensive and time-consuming to produce? Maybe now’s the time to simplify them to streamline your production schedule (and lighten your budget). Also, evaluate core messaging, value pillars, company narratives, and other statements to make sure they’re still relevant. You may choose to make these changes going into the new year, or save them for your next major launch if they can wait. Whatever you choose, account for the change in your marketing plan. Hint: Try as much as you can to de-couple big brand changes from set-in-stone launches. That way you won’t torpedo a critical launch with a project of non-essential timing that may be partly out of your control (especially if you’re relying on outside agencies for some of the work).
Plan your go-to-market
Include important go-to-market elements in your plan. These include your ideal customer profile and target accounts (or immediate ones with a placeholder for the rest), your go-to-market model, your intended prospect journey (and how that may change over the year, say, with the introduction of a slick new product trial), and key awareness and demand programs you’ll execute to attract them. Your plan shouldn’t have every single element, especially in the outer-months, but I find it useful to put placeholders.
Create a thematic calendar
You should have at least one at-a-glance page in your plan that serves as a thematic calendar. It’s the page you flip to when a board member, fellow executive, or new salesperson asks you about your marketing plan or strategy. More importantly, it gives you and your team visual guideposts for planning launches, campaigns, key moments, and other activities. It helps you see gaps in your plan and horse trade launches and programs based on what else is happening in the same timeframe — such as scuttled product releases, unexpected partner momentum, or newly-committed events. While I don’t include every detail behind this page, I maintain documentation about the next few planned launches, sub-campaigns, and awareness initiatives. Here’s an example thematic calendar from a prior company (of course, you should substitute in your most important elements).
Say what you need
Once you have your plan together, make sure your budget and headcount requirements support it. Socialize the plan and required budget early and often with your CEO, finance, and HR counterparts so you are on the same page, and can get a running start. If success requires some important new hires, you may need to get going now (I am always in “networking” mode for this purpose).
Here are some useful templates for your marketing planning process
Positioning and messaging exercise
Now that you have your marketing plan playbook, you’re armed and dangerous. It’s still early enough to get your team ready for the new year, and maybe even enact real change in your company. Go forth and conquer!
