Build an Enterprise B2B Marketing Budget

Building a marketing budget is a demand generation exercise. While building your annual budget, you outline your best plan to build awareness, educate the market, and create sales-ready leads.

A well-organized annual marketing budget expedites executive buy-in.

Why? Because a well-designed budget considers the following:

1.     Committed vs fungible expenses

2.     The timing of spend

3.     Prioritization of expenses

I’ve developed a free Enterprise B2B Marketing Budget template that incorporates those considerations. Click below to access the Excel spreadsheet.

Template: Marketing Budget, Enterprise B2B

3 Tips for Building an Enterprise B2B Marketing Budget

In addition to providing a head start with the Excel spreadsheet template, I want to arm you with additional tools to ensure a smooth budget planning process. Growth-stage organizations need to:

1. Play with Time: Timing can be everything, especially for growing organizations and companies managing burn. Before building your budget, answer these questions:

   
   

   1. Should you amortize contracts or place the lump sum in the given month?

   2. Should you backload your budget to ramp spending in the fiscal year? Should you backload each quarter?

   3. Should you eliminate spikes in monthly spend by rearranging line items with no set timing?

      
      

   Knowing these answers will help arrange expenses that allow you to focus on demand generation questions vs accounting questions during the approval process.

   
   

2. Offer a Contingency Plan in Version 1: Offering a contingency plan does not cede ground. Showcasing flexibility helps demonstrate your understanding of the business's macro environment. That builds trust AND mitigates adversarial conversations about shrinking or expanding the budget.

   
   

   This also has the side effect of boosting confidence in the team. So if capital becomes available later in the year, the marketing team is among the first teams considered to deploy the capital.

   
   

3. Categorize Committed and Fungible Expenses: What portion of the budget is committed under contract? Some line items are not negotiable. Make that clear so you can focus on the parts of the budget that can be changed. This transparency saves time and helps create healthy marketing team pressure to keep expenses fungible.

Put your best foot forward this budget cycle. Allow your executive team to focus on what matters, demand generation, by delivering what the finance team needs.

Template: Marketing Budget, Enterprise B2B

Reach out if you have questions about the spreadsheet or would like me to consult during your budget process.