What's up everyone. Today, we have the pleasure of sitting down with Jim Williams, CMO at Uptempo. [00:01:07] About Jim --- [00:01:07] Phil: Jim started his career in PR and product marketing before spending seven years at Eloqua as a senior director of product marketing and helping the company rise from 15 million AR to. [00:01:17] To 92 million and eventually an IPO. He also created the first marketing operations function at Eloqua. He later moved to influitive, the popular advocate marketing platform as VP of marketing, where he helped to grow the company from pre revenue to 12 million in ARR. He then moved over to the DNS world as senior VP of marketing at blue cats, where he led all facets of the company. [00:01:39] Marketing, and then he then became CMO at brand maker, which has since rebranded to uptempo, the leading marketing enterprise operations software. Sorry, I'll say that again. Uptempo, the leading enterprise marketing operations software that helps marketers plan better spends murder and execute with confidence. [00:01:58] Jim, thanks so much for your time today. Really [00:02:00] excited to chat. [00:02:01] Jim: Thanks for having me, Phil. I'm looking forward to it. [00:02:03] ​ [00:02:03] Phil: [00:03:00] Like many folks were deep in planning for the next year right now. And I'm excited to have a deep dive with you on this. Like I'm hoping that buddy and listeners have a better idea and some practical tips on making this a bit less of an exercise as throwing darts at a board [00:04:00] with your eyes closed. [00:04:01] What Is a Marketing Plan --- [00:04:01] Phil: But maybe we can start by unpacking what is marketing planning for you? [00:04:05] What are some of the misconceptions that marketers have about planning? Let's start there. Maybe Yeah, [00:04:15] Jim: obviously at Optempo, we have a point of view on planning because we sell enterprise marketing planning software. And, um, you know, the first misconception about planning is just what you said. The idea of throwing darts, you know, at a dartboard to come up with your plan is crazy, but there's all, there's a whole bunch of other crazy. [00:04:35] Things that happen out there all too often, and one is taking last year's plan and dusting it off and turning it into this year's plan. And why do I say that's crazy? Well, it's not the, uh, it's not really the key towards career longevity if you're ahead of marketing. And the reason is because, like, we live in a world of constant pivots. [00:04:55] You know, we used to talk about how do you pivot? Remember that word? Like, it kind of surfaced. Get a [00:05:00] pivot. Pivot the company. It used to be like, change the strategy, and then it became a marketing term. And It's really like constant pivots, which is why everyone talks about agility and the need for agility. [00:05:11] Um, so, you know, I know you're gonna ask me about the planning process and when does it start? When does it end? The, you know, the truth is you're constantly planning and replaying as marketing team. There's a couple other misconceptions too, though, which is funny. Cause I have seen this play out. A lot of people get their budget. [00:05:32] Right. And they, then they allocate their budget and they divide it up. And here's, we're going to spend in demand. And here's, we're going to spend in content. And then they come back and be like, look, here's the plan. And that's not a plan any more than a business plan is. Here's what our growth targets are. [00:05:45] We want to have this revenue growth rate. We want this profitability rate. A plan is not a spreadsheet. Right a plan is the articulation of what you intend to do with the dollars in the spreadsheet. As long as you keep those 2 things separate your plan, which is the [00:06:00] intent. Okay. And the budget, which is the funding against the intent, you're generally pointed in the right direction. [00:06:07] Phil: I've seen that all too often. Like here's our plan and it's a spreadsheet budget and it's basically a copy paste from last year with a couple of new requests and a different price line items because your, your user base grew on, on some of the tools. But like two, two of the, the. I guess most popular approaches to planning, um, that I've been part of, at least there's probably like a bunch of different ones in the middle, but like, [00:06:32] Building a Marketing Plan That Aligns Top-Down and Bottom-Up Goals --- [00:06:32] Phil: there's a top down forecasting and planning approach and a bottoms up approach, and maybe we can start with top down, like how do you handle. [00:06:40] Getting a top down forecast from finance or sales who are completely removed from the marketing world. Like they just see dollar signs and they hand you a number to like make our board happy. Next year, we need to hit 350 million next year, marketing, go off and build a plan and a budget to make that [00:07:00] happen. [00:07:00] Like how, what advice do you have for marketers to convince their CMOs to prevent this top down forecast approach, or maybe you like the top down forecast approach, curious to get your thoughts there. [00:07:11] Jim: Yeah, I don't, it's not an either or [00:07:14] for one, like, um, the planning process is actually quite complex, especially at a very large enterprise global company. It is not a. Let's do an offsite and come up with a plan. It is like a six to nine month process. And each of those has defined stages. Um, if you go to the Google later or better chat, GBT and start looking around for like, what is the definitive best practice to planning? [00:07:44] It's kind of shocking how few resources you find. You know, it's like this secretive mystery, you know, like, ah, you'll figure it out and you know, that, you know, as marketers, the other challenge here with planning and figuring it out is [00:08:00] nobody gets taught how to plan really, they don't. I mean, I don't, I don't have an MBA and I don't have a degree in marketing. [00:08:07] You know, I'm good old poli sci liberal arts guy who hacked his way into marketing, but, um, but I suspect that nobody gets formally taught how to plan. And so, uh, it's a bit challenging by the time you have to master the art of planning. You've already progressed in your career. You're starting to manage people or teams of people in large budgets. [00:08:27] And then someone comes to you and says, we got to do planning. So, you asked about annual planning, annual planning is the predecessor to bottoms up planning, right? Annual planning is the top down approach. That interlocks eventually in this process with a bottoms up campaign plan. We kind of see it in actually seven steps. [00:08:48] And we took our time after searching the web at uptempo to say, what are the best practices that we could advise our clients, how to best use our platform, where plans go to live, [00:08:58] realize that someone's [00:09:00] got to author a new one. So we just, we just published just this year, what we call the blueprint for marketing planning, seven step guide. [00:09:05] So if you go to uptempo or search uptempo blueprint, you'll find it, break it all down. And the first thing that happens is setting company objectives. You know, that's when a bunch of executives go together. They're informed by investors. Or whatever it might be that you need to hit these metrics as a company for your valuation or for your stock price, whatever it might be. [00:09:27] And from that, you come out of it, say, all right, we got 3 to 5 key objectives or be hags or okay. Ours or whatever. These terms are that you use. And marketing planning can't start until they know those company objectives. Marketing is usually tasked with helping to grow a company or grow product sales or grow market share or grow margin or whatever the case may be, depending on your industry. [00:09:51] But until you get to three to five objections, uh, objectives, you can't do the dirty work of saying, well, where's growth really going to come from? You know, is it going to [00:10:00] come from selling what we have today to a new buyer or selling exactly what we have today in a new market? Or are we going to introduce something totally new to sell to our existing buyer? [00:10:10] Or are we going to go through merger and acquisition? You know, like, are we going to go through efficiencies, right? Like, what, what is the strategy? And from that, you then come up with what we call the plan on a page. How marketing articulates what it's going to do to help the company achieve the objectives. [00:10:25] That's the top down process. And there's a strategic budget allocation process that happens along, along with that, which says, if you're looking to go to finance and you know what you're going to fund for marketing, and here's a chunk of dollars, you then go through, like, this very high level exercise to divide those dollars up between non programmatic costs and programmatic costs and within programmatic costs, what's in campaigns, what's outside of campaigns, you know, you kind of go through that exercise to get these big, um, Buckets of dollars. [00:10:56] Why Marketing Goals Need to Be a Two-Way Conversation --- [00:10:56] Phil: Do you think there's ever a world where this like objective that [00:11:00] comes from the top is more of a conversation and it's not a, this is the number we need to hit marketing, go off and figure out, figure out like how we're going to hit that number or build a plan and tell us like what we're missing to hit that number. [00:11:15] Or do you think like it should be more of a conversation where like the board sits down with like senior management and senior management has a chat with. Different business leaders. And they say like, here's what we're thinking. The goal should be, do you think this is realistic? Do you think that like, we need to double a head count to like, even come close to that. [00:11:32] And then there's like a negotiation and we kind of land in the middle and it's not 350 million goal next year for marketing and it's actually 300 or it's like two 80, because we don't want marketing to come back and say, like, yeah, we need to double head count or we need to have like this much. Like, do you think that it should be more of a conversation or is it typically just gonna The board says, this is where we're going to go figure out how to make that happen. [00:11:55] Jim: Yeah, no, I think, I think it is very much a conversation. It's funny the [00:12:00] way you term the question is part of the problem we have, right? Where the general perception is somebody goes into a back room, comes up with a number and then hands off to a junior team called marketers who are a cost center and says, you need to produce these [00:12:13] results, but that's not how it really works in most modern companies. [00:12:16] Most modern companies, the people that are trying to sort out. What the owners of the business want to achieve financially are the executives of the company, which includes a representative for marketing a CMO or a head of marketing. So marketing is very much in that conversation. You know, when I say owners of the company, I mean, every company is owned by someone, right? [00:12:40] See, the public shareholders, the private shareholders, et cetera, right? That's what sets the direction of the company, right? Many if we're talking, I assume your audience is primarily technology, right? And, uh. The ownership of technology companies wants to maximize valuation, right? That's what we're trying to maximize. [00:12:56] And then they come back with like, hey, there's industry benchmarks that set the valuation of the [00:13:00] company, their rule of 40, which determines how much you need to grow and how profitable you need to be. And so these are your targets, and usually those targets are not this year. It's like you have a 3 to 5 year target, a strategic plan. [00:13:14] And in order to work back to those, you have to get to these metrics this year, then that's handed down to an executive team that says, what is the best way to get to those numbers? If possible. And then coming out of that, say, okay, now we know what our corporate objectives is marketing that goes to marketing leadership and says, we need to come up with a marketing strategy to contribute to these corporate objectives. [00:13:34] Right? [00:13:34] Phil: That's, that's the ideal scenario. I guess I asked the question like that because I'm personally jaded and it hasn't been [00:13:41] as well thought out as you've kind of laid it out and like, maybe there was a marketer at the sea level in that conversation about [00:13:48] what the number is going to be, but they didn't advocate that hard for us, or maybe that, you know, Person wasn't even part of that conversation. [00:13:55] It was the board and it was like the CEO [00:13:58] and that number is handed to us. [00:14:00] And then we need to like scramble and build a plan and say like, Hey, the only way we even come close to that is if we start doing some of this and we start like doubling down on this big bet and then we have like different conversations. [00:14:14] So eventually like it does become a conversation, but I feel like there's this like bottom up planning scenario where. Marketing leaders are asked to suggest or pitch a plan and then they get budget approval. [00:14:27] Structuring a Bottom-Up Marketing Plan --- [00:14:27] Phil: But maybe walk us through like the first few steps of, of tackling this. Like if you're, you're handed a plan or like you're handed a number and like there's some flexibility in that number. [00:14:37] And that's, that's kind of the instructions there. But like, do you start with a big list of. Projects that you want to do next year? Do we stack rank them? Do we build a budget after that, the KPI list and you assign KPIs to other teams? Like, what's the order of this? And maybe some of that's in, in the guide that you, you called out. [00:14:55] So I'll, I'll make sure to link that resource for folks on this episode. Mm-Hmm. [00:14:58] Jim: That's very much. It's [00:15:00] very much in the guide because all of those things come into effect, right? So like we talked about the annual plan process you end up with this idea of a plan on a page So that kind of happens at one level then that gets circulated with a team Marketing team and the marketing team then usually breaks up into functions or whatever and starts to build their bottom up plans Right that they haven't even received a final budget. [00:15:24] So right now what they're saying is if I had unlimited dollars You This is what I would love to do. This is what I would love to do. And that is based on a whole bunch of stuff. Market research that comes in, what's happening in the market, what's happening with your buyers, you know, what, are there regulations, is there a new competitor emerging, is there a trend, is there COVID, is there a supply chain issue, is there whatever it might be. [00:15:48] You know, like, that all has to come into consideration. And a quite a bit of analysis on what's worked. Obviously, you got to go look back and say, all right, what has been working so far? What is not [00:16:00] working as well? And those can be measured in so many different ways. You know, as a market. This is where marketing ops typically gets involved, right? [00:16:07] It's like, okay, what are we measuring? Are we measuring raw pipeline growth or, you know, the speed at which your growth or sales cycle velocity? Are we going to go to ROI? Are we just looking at metrics like. Okay. Brand related metrics like, you know, share of voice. Are we going to look at visits, search results? [00:16:24] Like what, what is it? Ad spend click, you know, is [00:16:27] this what we call the hierarchy of KPIs kind [00:16:30] of needs to be established so that you can roll things up, but that is what we call the bottom up process. And really, you know, you think of it like. You know, that process, you think about it one, one of two ways, you know, it's like either shark tank, you're coming pitching because those bottom up plans need to be put together and then a business case gets made to say, here's what I'd like to do to execute against that plan on a page in demand. [00:16:56] I want to do this. You know, or in product, I want to do this, or I [00:17:00] want to do these field events or hold a corporate event or enter a new market or whatever it might be. Like, this is what I'd love to do. So it's kind of like, that's the shark tank, or it could be like the squid game. Then it comes back and it says, well, guess what? [00:17:12] I've looked at all of these ideas across the team to try and hit these objectives and, you know, to kind of do the mental exercise of stack ranking by. Resources required to hit objective and, Difficulty of hitting objective or likely to succeed, you know, you kind of stack rank and say, just put it in a simple four box thing and you can start to look at. [00:17:34] These are the things that I should absolutely fund, just like you would looking at your portfolio, right? [00:17:42] Looking at your 401k. This is, I absolutely should be the, in these stocks. [00:17:47] Phil: Mm-Hmm. [00:17:47] Jim: But, here are the, here's the ones that hold promise for us. And here's the ones that absolutely based on the data presented, we're just got to stop doing. [00:17:57] We're not getting a return on it for any given reason. So [00:18:00] that bottom up kind of, Plan happens and then there's an interlock, right? We talked about that strategic budget allocation, like that interlock occurs where it says, based on everything we've seen from bottom up planning, this is what we're actually going to fund. [00:18:13] Now, one thing that we see a lot when we work with customers, and we tend to work with large customers is money then gets allocated into departments. Demand engine gets this and content gets this and brain gets this. Corporate common is this field available. Here it is. And that's always been the way. [00:18:35] It's worked in the past, and it creates real problems, right? And one of the problems it creates is people get away from the plan on a page, right? You get what's called plan drift, where suddenly what seemed like the rally cry, we're all going to work against these objectives against these strategies, which are articulated by these themes or campaigns suddenly becomes. [00:18:58] Well, I mean, I go, [00:19:00] I need to produce this content because we got it. This is a great piece of content. It was a great idea, you know, so you got this idea of people spending to create content. That wasn't part of the plan, right? Or on the demand side, people are buying media placement that where there's no plan for what the messaging is, it's going to go through to those audiences, et cetera, right? [00:19:17] People start to devolve into just spending their budget and you get kind of bad behaviors from that. So, [00:19:23] we recommend that that strategic allocation then goes and gets allocated against the campaign ideas themselves, which keeps the whole team focused on what is the objective? What are we trying to achieve here? [00:19:35] Phil: I feel like that's a good segue into like, [00:19:37] The Strategic Role of Marketing Ops in Annual Planning --- [00:19:37] Phil: what is the role of marketing ops in this planning process? Like there's kind of a couple that you mentioned there. The making sure that the big bets that we are doing, the campaigns that we are doing are, Are going and being aligned to these objectives that we agreed upon at the start of things. [00:19:55] So there isn't that plan drift, but also the, all the metrics that you mentioned [00:20:00] there, like, uh, my, my first taste of marketing was at a dashboard company. So I'm like super deep into metrics and OKR land. And so very familiar about that side of the world. I think that there is also another component there where you mentioned like. [00:20:14] Part of the process, there's like an unlimited budget where like it's not fixed yet and people come up with these crazy ideas and that's where like marketing ops comes to play a role a little bit too, because I've seen so many leaders say, I have unlimited budget right now. I can ask whatever I want to hit these goals. [00:20:30] So we're going to ask for a new package, CDP, and we're going to ask for an AI web conversion optimization platform and this and that, and we're going to Marketing ops is like, guys, guys, let's calm down. This is like a year long project, like hooking up a C platform, CDP and re engineering how we're doing stuff. [00:20:49] Like there's foundational work involved in getting that stuff out the door. So making like it, like bringing stuff back to reality a little bit when it comes to like building those [00:21:00] unlimited budgets, but yeah, curious to just riff on that a little bit, like. Where do you see the role of marketing ops in annual planning, but also just like throughout the year when you mentioned, like, this is more of an agile, like living, breathing plan. [00:21:12] Jim: Yeah. That's a great question. Um, because like our audience typically is marketing operations, you know, but marketing operations often gets brought in when they think about the planning process, like, oh, they're, they're kind of dragged in to do a technical evaluation type of thing, which is a huge missed opportunity for all the reasons I talked about earlier. [00:21:35] The fact that planning is difficult, it's high pressure involves a lot of different players. It's high visibility. You're talking about big dollars, right? And There's no formal training and not a lot of guides, but you add that all up and to me, and I said, it's a complex process, and I'll talk a little bit about that complexity, but that is an enormous opportunity for marketing operations to kind of [00:22:00] move out of their role as being the administrators or Martech and the people that do analytics and reporting, and they do integrations, you know, like And actually move into a role that becomes much more strategic [00:22:11] where they guide that process because that process has to be rooted in metrics and analysis and frankly, taxonomy and nomenclature [00:22:22] and all types of things. [00:22:24] And frankly, who is in a better position to guide that process than a marketing operations, a strategic marketing operations. In a lot of our customers, we find there is either someone. Who might not know own marketing ops, but their title is actually strategic planning and operations, or often we go in and guess who we're talking to the person who has the vision for like, you know, marketing executive leadership can't get the information they need about how we're executing to get the plan. [00:22:52] We can get a gazillion reports out of a gazillion systems where you can't all piece it together and be like, how are we doing? It's the annual plan. And, [00:23:00] uh, that person who comes to us with the problem is a chief of staff to the CMO. [00:23:05] Phil: Hmm. [00:23:06] Jim: Right. Which is not like an executive assistant, a chief of staff to the CMO is the eyes and the ears of the CMO who needs to aggregate data in order to give some analysis to the head of marketing, you know, give direction. [00:23:20] To answer simple questions that are really hard to answer with all these 13, 14, 000 MarTech apps of which any enterprise business may have 150 of them. None of them answers the question. Is our marketing strategy working? [00:23:34] Phil: Hmm. [00:23:35] Jim: You know what I mean? Like you get a lot of different points of view on that, [00:23:38] but it's kind of hard to aggregate it. [00:23:40] You know? So that's why UpTempo is in the business of creating what we call a marketing system of record. It's the thing that answers that question. It's where your plan lives. And where the analytics flow into your plan to suggest where the plan is successful or not, and where that plan is financed, tied together with the budget, but back to marketing ups. [00:23:59] So there's a huge [00:24:00] opportunity just from the beginning to guide that process to understand the best practices of planning. That's 1 thing. The 2nd thing is, you can look at planning and the creation of a plan, the same as you would look at the creation, you know, 10 or 15 years ago of. A funnel, right? Like we have used to have the notion because I'm very old. [00:24:22] We talked that earlier before the call started. Like, I was at a long time ago. There was a notion of like, you throw leads over and salespeople close it. Now you would look like that is that's just archaic right now. It's you got all these stages in the funnel and some people saying the funnel doesn't exist anymore and it's flipped. [00:24:38] And the funnel should be accounts and not people, you know, all of those debates and whatever. But marketing ops long ago realized that the way to interlock between marketing sales to divide up these into defined stages and systematically measure the progression through stages in order to get analytics that can be predictive in nature, right?[00:25:00] [00:25:00] And planning actually is the same [00:25:03] way. Like, we long ago defined an MQL and SAL and SQL, like, whatever the acronym is you want to use, you divided up all those things and, you know, serious now force used to publish benchmarks to guide how we doing against that. But in planning. You may have hundreds of marketers in some cases, you have thousands of marketers that don't even have the same language. [00:25:25] They don't, they're not even using this, speaking the same language to describe what they're doing. So is this a program or is this a campaign? Is this a tactic, an activation, a flight? You know, like you've got your team in Europe that's calling it one thing and that, you know, it doesn't match up apples to [00:25:39] apples with what they're doing. And all of that taxonomy and the hierarchy between them needs to be defined. And again, who is in a better position to do that than a strategic marketing operations function? [00:25:52] Because if you don't do that and collect the metadata associated with the plan, you're not going to be able to answer that question, what is [00:26:00] working in our plan and our strategy? [00:26:02] Phil: Yeah. Taxonomy just that word itself, like should excite the, the [00:26:06] true marketing operations folks out there. [00:26:09] Yeah. I've seen that too. Like I've consulted with companies that have. Global teams and you deal with that right away. Like everyone has different terminology for stuff. And I can just imagine how important that piece is to the planning process. [00:26:24] ​ [00:26:24] [00:27:00] [00:28:00] [00:28:12] Distinguishing the Chief of Staff and VP of Marketing Ops Roles --- [00:28:12] Phil: I want to ask you something that you mentioned earlier was this like chief of staff role to the CMO. Um, I'm super familiar with like a chief of staff role to the CEO. I'm curious, like, uh, the way you described it was like someone who is Pretty data savvy who does like the aggregation and is like the ears and eyes specifically for, with like a data lens for the CMO. [00:28:36] How different is that chief of staff? To the CMO compared to like the VP of marketing operations. Like what's the biggest distinction there other than obviously like them not having a bunch of people under them and owning that department. [00:28:51] Jim: Well, I think a chief of staff to a CMO can deal with a variety of topics, so go beyond Infrastructure or technology or systems of process, right? [00:29:00] Like, it also could deal with personality issues. You could deal with all types of culture things, like all [00:29:03] types of things. You could deal with, um, you know, managing the cadence. [00:29:08] Over the course of the year, you know, when do you do your and when do you have to do your analytics by division and everything? It's like, there's all types of things that chief of staff can do. But, you know, I use this model. There's a. Person that I, uh, that I always think about who's Chloe Washington. [00:29:25] And I'm going to apologize to Chloe if she hears me. She's going to kill me because she got married and I can't remember her married name, but Chloe Washington, she's the chief of staff for the CMO at HubSpot. And her job is to manage the interlock between marketing and finance, right? Because following the money is critically important in a large company. [00:29:45] And you, you wouldn't. Like we does a whole separate podcast on the breakdown of communications between finance and marketing. And [00:29:52] what, what is the cause of that and how to overcome it and everything else. But she started with that. And from that became, well, financial planning [00:30:00] is that's the fuel for your marketing planning. [00:30:02] And so she got into marketing planning and eventually carved out this role with a group called the, she calls it SOAP strategic operations and planning. [00:30:10] Um, and that is not MarTech. It is not a marketing operation. And she entered. Interacts frequently with the head of marketing operations, but there's a different different mandate there. [00:30:21] So, the question you have to ask yourself is, you know, which one's more influential and which one is the better path? If you want that to marketing leadership, [00:30:32] Phil: Yeah, super interesting. [00:30:34] Estimating Project Lift in Marketing Ops --- [00:30:34] Phil: Um, one, like as a marketing ops person, like my favorite role in the yearly planning is to be the guy who looks at plans before they go live. And I get to poke holes at and like spot areas where. There's underestimated lift. Like I mentioned before, like if we go a package CDP, like it's going to take a lot more time than maybe most people like to think or admit, especially on the things like foundational elements of [00:31:00] marketing ops, how can we get better at estimating the lift in the impact of certain projects when we're doing it? [00:31:06] We're like ranking big bets next year that we want to do next year. Like we, like engineers talk about this all the time, right? When they're like doing features, which, which stuff should we build and they're estimating lift. And it's always this big joke that like, we're always underestimating. So we always like put a bit of buffer in there, but how do we get better at doing that with marketing ops? [00:31:26] Is it just like including us more in that planning process? Curious, your thoughts there. [00:31:32] Jim: yeah, 100%. And I think a lot of it has to do with communication because look, that tension around what is, what are the resources actually required? Resources being time, money, people, all of it. To get something done anything we can talk about marketing operations and the implementation of technology. It could be anything that tension naturally exists on the spectrum of authority, right? [00:31:56] The people. Who are in charge or at the [00:32:00] executive always underestimate, always underestimate and say, like, we can get this done. This could have a major impact. People are responsible for actually getting the work done, et cetera. Somewhat tend to be conservative. It's like sandbagging, right? A project is going to take on, I'm going to need a lot more resource and a lot more people and everything else. [00:32:15] Right. So the truth is somewhere in the middle, always with almost any decision that happens, and I think it really has to do with analytics and collaboration. Right. So, um, that is a problem that persists more broadly. More broadly, marketing operations still to this day, even with, you know, the recent trend where people started to look at mops utilization rate, right. [00:32:39] And like, and like consolidation efforts because of cost cutting efforts because of economic factors, right? Like all these things cascade, even today, there's still a perception that. Oh, we have a business challenge. Let's go buy a tool, right? There's still this indicate act like. And I, I, we, I'm at a company that sells marketing technology. [00:32:59] Right. [00:33:00] So we've benefited, we've benefited from that, but you know, it's this false narrative, [00:33:03] Phil: Yes. Yeah. Nice. [00:33:05] Jim: tools, tools and technology scale, a solution that you have discovered. Right. That's the way to do it. Like experiment, try things when it works, scale it. The way to scale it is by investing in the right technology to do it. [00:33:18] Right. Versus we have a problem. Let's go buy a CDP. [00:33:25] Phil: Yeah, no, that is one of the narratives we try to fight on the show, obviously being like the humans behind all of that tech [00:33:32] and you don't solve problems. And the strategy is not equal to buying a new Martech tool, but. Yeah. [00:33:39] Embracing Marketing Agility in Long-Term Planning --- [00:33:39] Phil: I think like another area that marketing ops is involved in, in this like longterm planning is this idea that you mentioned a little bit at the top of the show and like agility with planning. [00:33:48] Um, like there's, there's a reforecasting bit involved in the yearly planning. Like you said, pivoting stuff, like shit changes on a dime, especially in the world we live in today. Like, obviously [00:34:00] no one can predict what next year is going to bring exactly as people are polishing off their crystal balls. [00:34:06] Like how can marketers use agility? With long term planning and maybe chat about like how uptempo helps marketers do that. [00:34:15] Jim: Well, um, I think for a long time. We have talked about agile marketing [00:34:21] principles, but like, agile marketing, the methodology is actually quite difficult to implement in marketing for a variety of reasons, right? Like, marketing is really It's a complex business, right? And some things lend themselves to agile techniques and some things do not [00:34:37] lend themselves to agile technique. [00:34:38] So when I talk about agility, I'm not talking about agile marketing. I just flip the words and talk just about marketing agility, right? The ability to like, pivot to change the process behind it, the analytics involved. Some of that, especially in technology companies, that's like, built into a, like an embedded process, right? [00:34:57] The notion of doing like a, a quarterly business [00:35:00] review, right? Where you stop and consolidate your analytics and have a discussion about what's working, what's not working. What are we going to do differently? Right? At least on a quarterly basis. That rhythm has been built in the challenge that we find is. If you go back to the beginning of this conversation, we talked about, Hey, we have a plan on a page, right? That's going to define our marketing strategy in order to help the company hit his business objectives. And then we document this whole plan, the interlock between top down and bottom up, and then we like, this is our plans, what we're going to do. [00:35:31] And those plans exist in PowerPoints and spreadsheets. For the most part, people are using freeware, like not just any freeware. It's like, I'm like steam powered freeware. This is old stuff. Yes. Not going to drive or on a SharePoint file, et cetera. And you rarely go back and pull it off the shelf. And then suddenly something happens, right? [00:35:52] Like this isn't working. Our strategy isn't working here, or there's this opportunity or a competitor's entered or exited the marketplace, or we do a [00:36:00] merger acquisition and you go back to try and find that plan and dust it off. And it's completely out of date. It doesn't match up with reality. So, you know, if you're in a large enterprise, the process of, like, of making change happen based on an agile thought process or an agile, you know, uh, exercise, it's like trying to turn the Titanic just doesn't happen fast because all of the resources you have to marshal to make that change happen are documented in some silo somewhere. You know, version 1. 4. 3. 7. 8 of the budget. No one even knows that the latest version. It's crazy. But that's the case. So you were asking, what does UpTempo do? UpTempo turns plans that are in PowerPoints and spreadsheets into like a living system of record, right? Get, get out of it, you know, get out of the [00:37:00] PowerPoints, et cetera, and just have a plan that's documented, that's Easily accessible by everyone on the team stakeholders tied to budget tied to performance such that those discussions can happen. [00:37:12] But when you actually need to make a change in strategy, you can change it in real time and redirect resources. That's necessary. [00:37:18] Phil: Very cool. [00:37:20] Jim: Yeah, that's that's essentially what it does. It links strategy. The campaign plans to the budget, and those things are tied into different systems, like. On the budget side, it's tied to your financials. [00:37:31] So marketing knows exactly what they have to spend at any given time. And on the planning side, it's tied to your execution stack, right? Your work fronts in the world where projects are managed, your execution system, et cetera. So you can get that performance data back in. [00:37:45] Phil: super cool. Like you, I got a bit of PTSD from a former company when you mentioned like the different versions, uh, different versions of budgets and, and planning. Like we had this massive spreadsheet that our forecasting and our budget was [00:38:00] part of. It's like version five and some of it was locked down cause we couldn't have people edit it. [00:38:05] But then anyways, it was, uh, definitely PTSD enhancing. And I think that like how, how you guys are doing it is super helpful, especially in these bigger teams where like there is so many moving parts. Right. Um, I think that, so like, [00:38:21] The Rhythm of Continuous Planning in Marketing --- [00:38:21] Phil: how long would you spend on doing this? Like planning exercise, like maybe yearly or like, how often are you like relooking at the forecast and like tweaking it based on different factors and stuff, like how often or how long do you spend on planning gym? [00:38:39] Like what's, what's the, the, the crystal ball answer there. [00:38:43] Jim: Yeah. Look, well, this is not the definitive answer you're looking for, but there isn't a definitive answer as with all things in life, it really depends on the business you're in, right? Like the planning process, we work with, uh, a global [00:39:00] retailer that has 500 stores that are in 70 different countries. The planning process for just the annual plan is a 9 month process, right? [00:39:08] So, like, literally, you get in the quarter 1st, quarter of the year and you start the process [00:39:13] Phil: that's crazy. Hmm. [00:39:16] Jim: Like, they are planning, um, across all of these regions. They're thinking about promotions. Those are seasonal promotions. So at the same time you're sending to some countries one promotion The other is the opposite just based on the season like plus culture currency language barriers like all this stuff It's a constant play It's also this big pull between centralization and decentralization, right? [00:39:41] Because to our earlier conversation and to your point you want to give the flexibility people in market to make decisions But you want to have it aligned back to the corporate objectives and the branding and everything else. So this is huge interplay that occurs versus me. Like how often do I plan? [00:39:55] Well, I'm at a 50 to a hundred million dollar [00:40:00] software company. And I think about planning in, in terms of, uh, quarters, you know, like I, I think of a time horizon of six months. Right, and then at the end of that, we're going to get together and think about the ensuing like the ensuing 6 months. Like, I'm in that type of thing. [00:40:16] And we're doing reviews are a quarterly basis. And I'm tracking all my metrics on a monthly basis. And we have sometimes a weekly call on some of the. Metrics related to demand, of course, right? That's that company always comes back to demands. Right? So are those. Planning conversations. Yes, someone, because every bit of data that you collect and synthesize and analyze points you in a direction that's going to affect your plans. [00:40:41] What you're going to do next. The more you can get to that notion of, I don't know if you want to call it continuous planning, but at least. Continuously have your finger on the pulse of the business. I think the better off you are especially in today's day and age [00:40:58] How to Connect Marketing Plans with Budgets --- [00:40:58] Phil: yeah, I want to talk to [00:41:00] like one thing you said earlier that uptempo does maybe like one of the final steps is like connecting the plans to the budget. Like, I feel like in a lot of spreadsheets out there, when folks are doing this planning, the budget is like very much separate from. This process, like it's obviously related. [00:41:18] It's one of the steps, but it's its own spreadsheet. Finance has one marketing has one. We kind of like share it with the finance team when it's kind of approved there. But maybe chat about like some of that, that process that up tempo helps with like connecting plans to budget, like chat about like some of the key challenges that maybe bigger enterprise clients, um, that you guys have like face and connecting marketing plans to budget. [00:41:43] Maybe like curious if you can share like real stories of like enterprise customers and how they've, uh, done that with them, with uptempo. [00:41:51] Jim: Yeah, sure. Um, I think it's a there's a couple of pieces there to unpack right? So we think of the connection of plan and [00:42:00] spend right? Those are two different entities two different processes They never connected together But if you think about spend as being what marketing views as their budget that is a totally separate entity from what? [00:42:14] Finance Views as the corporate financial record, right? So you said, Hey, you got a budget and then you share that with finance and budgets, go back, spreadsheets, go back and forth, et cetera. Like that process happens on a regular basis at a large company, right? It's a reconciliation process. Yeah. It's important to keep in mind. [00:42:35] And we, and I hinted at this earlier, like finance homes, the company record, they close the books, they do financial reporting, they're responsible for tax and auditing, et cetera. Right. The way they view numbers is like a completely different language from market. They look in terms of general ledger codes. [00:42:52] That's why if you ever dealt with finance at any size company, and you say, hey, can I give me a give me a sense of where we are [00:43:00] against the budget? They send back something that is. Almost illegible to you, right? They use these codes like professional services. Well, 80 percent of your you're pretty good on your professional services, uh, GL code. [00:43:11] It's like, what does that mean? I send campaigns. I buy media. I talk to analysts. Like, so there's a translation layer that has to occur there. One of the things that we do is get spreadsheets out of that process entirely. So there's a system that is like a Rosetta Stone between finance and [00:43:25] market, right? [00:43:27] They see everything they need in Oracle, or NetSuite, or whatever the financial system is, that integrates with our tool that automatically translates that into a language that marketers understand, so they know what is my budget. What's forecasted what's actually been spent what's remaining up to the date up to the date if you think about You know marketers are terrified about overspending, right? Oh my god overspent That's really really dangerous But what's really happening is marketing leaves money on the table all over the [00:43:59] place [00:44:00] because they're so scared about going over what they actually Do is leave four five six percent of their money unspent and think about the opportunity cost [00:44:08] And to put those dollars to work and like every dollar spent should yield xyz you're just You're killing yourself by underspending, right? [00:44:16] So we helped us solve that problem. And, um, you know, we get our companies like Cisco, we got a case study on the website, Cisco, it's got thousands of marketers and hundreds of people that are our system. We get them within 0. 05 percent accuracy. [00:44:31] So they know it's like, we always use this term on the money and it's like, it's on the money, right on the money with them. [00:44:38] That's just a financial thing. Then you talked about the plan and spend, which are two different things. Now marketing has their version of the budget. Reconciled with finance automatically. How does that tie into a plan? And it actually gets really complicated really quickly because things unnatural things happen all the time. [00:44:57] It's not a 1 to 1 relationship, you know, like, [00:45:00] sometimes a, A single activity, like an event is funded not only by different investment lines in your budget, but entirely different budgets, you know, like your. America's budget and your media budget are separate in the financial structure. They're both funding an annual event as is. [00:45:19] Departmental budgets that's related to those things, et cetera, and it becomes really hard to kind of. Marry those up to actually follow the money, you know, because. As I said earlier, what you want to get to is a dollar allocated to the campaigns because the campaigns support the strategy, which supports the company objectives. [00:45:38] So, unless you kind of do that translation layer, it's hard to figure out, say, uh, how, you know, how are we funding our company objectives and marketing? You know, what percentage of the budget is dedicated to this? Company goal of entering a new market. That's pretty hard to do because of this translation layer between plan and spend. [00:45:58] So that's something we [00:46:00] do. And by the way, the opposite of the case too, right? Where multiple activities may point to a single investment line. I mean, you need to do that kind of connection. [00:46:10] Phil: I [00:46:10] Jim: Again, why, why marketing ops gets involved? It's you're talking about data tables here. [00:46:17] Phil: I love how you've explained it as like a, or the Rosetta stone between marketing terminology, marketing numbers, and reconciling that with finance. Cause I feel like that's, that is one of the most important components there because often they do live in two separate spreadsheets. Um, I got two last [00:46:34] questions for you, Jim. [00:46:36] Jim: like you're talking about sometimes [00:46:38] dozens or even hundreds in a large company. It's crazy. Each with [00:46:42] Phil: recent versions. Yeah. [00:46:43] The two last questions for you, Jim, like how we can't get through an episode without talking about AI and in 2024, [00:46:51] Preparing for AI and Automation in Marketing Planning --- [00:46:51] Phil: how do you see AI and automation impacting? Everything we talked about today, marketing planning, how marketing operations fix into that in the next couple of [00:47:00] days. [00:47:00] Like how can marketing teams prepare for AI advancements specifically in this like planning and like budgeting allocation process? [00:47:09] Jim: that's a really good question. Obviously, you gotta have the AI question and we've been thinking about it a lot and we're, we're well on our way in the AI journey as a company. There's a couple like obvious use cases, right? The 1st, most obvious use cases, the copilot type approach, right? Where just task management, you know, we talked about, like, how the notion of taxonomy is really important in plans. [00:47:32] Well, in order to get taxonomy and to collect the data that you need associated with the plans, so you can marry up the performance and then analyze the performance against the original plan that requires a lot of data pending and a lot of data entry, and frankly, AI can do wonders there, like the last thing you want in any system. [00:47:50] And I think Salesforce users are odd nod their head is the end user burden with filling in tons of fields, right? Like nobody wants to do that. So there's simple use cases [00:48:00] like that. There's also like. The challenge of this is around building the large language model that's specific to a, to a business's financial picture, [00:48:09] but the query your data stuff. [00:48:11] I mean, nobody likes this, but I think everyone's heard it at some point over the last two years. Hey, we need to cut the budget by 15%. Or even more specifically, we need to cut our event budget by 15%. What do we cut? Okay, so you're either going to get an answer, which is just based on favorites from people, right? Or are you going to get a, a big project to go and let's actually calculate the ROI. What do we pay per lead? What do we pay per up? Like, all of all this stuff to try and marry it up, et cetera. And frankly, like, I could just look at your spend pattern and be like. You know, pretty quickly make some obvious suggestions or [00:48:49] even more smartly say, guess what? [00:48:51] You underspent in the last quarter here, here, here. Are you sure you want to pull from field marketing? [00:48:56] You know, like, things like that. So, that's that's some real [00:49:00] obvious ones. The more advanced ones, which we're on the, it's a little bit longer on our on our road is, um. Number 1, we say, get out of PowerPoints and spreadsheets. [00:49:10] Like, let's make it easier to do that. Just upload your PowerPoint and your spreadsheet and we'll build the beginnings of your [00:49:16] plan. Right? Like, that [00:49:18] to me is a huge, huge, huge gain on implementation and usability. And, you know, the enemy isn't PowerPoint and spreadsheet. The enemy is using them. Using them in an ongoing basis, like PowerPoint is fantastic way to communicate and a plan on a page to go into a PowerPoint. [00:49:33] We don't disagree with that, but like an interplay AI interplay between get started by importing. And or take all the stuff we have summarize it and stick it into a document to easily communicate it. That's that's a, that's a real obvious use case. And then there's just performance. You know, once once you get into, like, how are these things performance? [00:49:52] It's like, where would you reallocate data is just based on the performance factor alone. [00:49:58] Phil: Super cool. Yeah. [00:50:00] There's so many interesting advancements there. Like we're probably like the, where do we cut budget? Like spend optimization. There's probably even like related areas with capacity planning, optimization. Like we talked about, um, Like [00:50:17] the, the effort, the lift to do certain foundational marketing things, marketing operations teams could probably use some help there and having AI be like, Hey, here are all [00:50:27] the lists of things you, you need to have in the project to implement a package CDP or to bring on a conversion rate optimization tool for webpages. [00:50:37] You need X amount of traffic. You need like three months to be able to like that. That could be super cool in that capacity planning to prevent marketers from just saying, like, This is my wishlist thing. I want to do it. And I only need this much budget and resource like, Ooh, hold on. Like, let's, let's pause that for a second. [00:50:53] And I can help us poke holes. So [00:50:54] marketing ops isn't always the bad guy pointing that stuff out. [00:50:58] Jim: totally. Turn AI [00:51:00] into the bad guy for all of us. [00:51:03] Phil: This has been super fun. Jim, we've got one last question for you. [00:51:05] Finding Balance Beyond the Office --- [00:51:05] Phil: You're a CMO marketing leader, MarTech veteran. You're also a father of two. One question we ask everyone on the show is how do you remain happy and successful in your career? Well, Well, how do you find balance between all the things you're working on while staying happy? [00:51:19] Jim: Yeah, happy and career I think has to do with happy outside of work, right? Like it's this a huge balancing act and obviously spending time with my kids is a it's a it's a big part of that You know, I got a daughter who's wrapping up law school, which has been a journey She's in their last year there [00:51:35] and my son lives in me and he works it and so spending time with them is is a big part but I'm also for some strange reason, I guess I'm a glutton for punishment because I'm just getting too old for this. [00:51:47] I decided to, like, take on a massive renovation project. I bought a house. That's got needs to be completely gutted. And I'm a knee deep in that. And like, you know, when after a long [00:52:00] day of zoom meetings. Preparing your board deck and dealing with budget and replanning and thinking about this and doing podcasts, you know, for a long day of talking to my computer, nothing actually helps me get balance in my life and the back of my life, like going over there and wielding a chainsaw or a sledgehammer or whatever to get some work done. [00:52:20] It just reminds you a bit like this is how some people work every day. Uh, and anyway, it's a, it's a bit of a passion project, but, uh, it has given me this, which I enjoy. [00:52:34] Phil: I've definitely, uh, had a small share of like using my hands and like [00:52:38] more like a DIY projects. And it's crazy to think that. Some people are so good at this stuff. And like we spend our days on laptops, like talking to other humans and writing words and spreadsheets and PowerPoints that, [00:52:54] Jim: totally. You know, it's like every time my mother says like, what do you do? She comes away completely disappointed. [00:53:00] Like, what? I didn't understand the thing you just said. Meanwhile, that guy's building a house. [00:53:06] Why don't you just build a house? [00:53:07] Phil: look at that house. I built, but mom, look at the PowerPoint that I worked on. Look how [00:53:11] nice it is. Awesome, Jim. It's been super fun. We'll, uh, we'll link that to the report that you guys released and obviously uptempo folks want to, uh, want to check it out. Um, yeah, super curious to check out the, the Cisco case study that you guys did to, um, yeah, the enterprise world is, uh, distant to me, so I'm always curious to, to learn more there, Jim. [00:53:31] Thanks so much for your time. It's been super fun. [00:53:34] Jim: you got it, Phil. Thank you. I appreciate it. [00:53:36] Phil: Cheers.