How to Align Your Teams to Achieve Business Growth

Aug 19

Has your company ever been in this boat? You create a solid and creative marketing plan to take you the long haul, yet you assign a budget just to keep you afloat and then expect mega results?

This meme gives us a chuckle because it’s all too common, and we’ve certainly been there. Many brands with tenured, smart stakeholders are sometimes sailing different seas as it relates to growth goals, resources, and expectations.

The culprits of this misalignment are often a lack of communication and connection between marketing leaders and the team that directs the budget. When these teams aren’t aligned, it’s easy to fall into plans that don’t produce strong results. But, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Let’s look at what leads to this friction and outline the steps to get your finance and marketing teams working together to reach your brand goals.

What Creates Friction?

Marketing teams, executive leadership, and finance teams approach business from different perspectives. Both bring valuable perspectives and insights, but these visions often aren’t fully shared, understood, and aligned.

These misconceptions and differences can make it difficult to support each other.

The finance team:

May see marketing as a line item expense.
May think marketing can work with the same budget every year.
May think marketing results are quickly shown.
May be directed to cut budgets or save money.
May need to see long-tail data to understand value.

The marketing team:

Sees marketing as a direct investment in business growth.
Thinks the marketing budget is directly tied to impact and results.
Believes a budget must grow as relative goals grow.
Knows that marketing takes time to produce meaningful results.

In order for marketing to work effectively, brands need to resolve these differences. The CEO, CFO, and CMO need to work together to align their visions and create a plan to reach their goals.

How to Align Stakeholders

If your brand wants to reach growth goals, you need to align your teams. Here are the steps to make it happen.

1. Define your business goals together.

If you don’t know your goals, it will be difficult to reach them. A business may have a variety of goals such as:

Attract more customers
Drive more sales
Expand into a new market
Introduce a new product or service
Build brand awareness
Increase profitability
Improve customer satisfaction
Increase hiring and retention

Define your primary business goals and determine how marketing is needed to support the goals. If the goal is growth-oriented, marketing is going to be essential in achieving success. Marketing will need to be involved with every step.

2. Turn goals into numbers (KPIs).

Once you have goals outlined, turn them into measurable metrics. Create key performance indicators (KPIs) that define what success looks like.

For example, if your goal is to attract more customers, how many customers do you want to attract over what time period? If your goal is to drive more sales, what percentage increase do you want to see and by when?

Rely on your previous performance and benchmarks of previous KPIs along with marketing research and trends to plan your upcoming KPIs. Or, run small trials before the start of the fiscal year to get a better understanding of the market and what a potential budget could deliver.

3. Outline a marketing plan and required resources.

Once the marketing team has clear goals and KPIs, they can outline a realistic path to achieve the objectives and list the resources they will need to succeed.

The marketing team can determine what they need in terms of:

Tools
Time
Team
Marketing assets
Strategies
Ad spend

With a list of required marketing resources, it will be easier to set a realistic marketing budget needed to reach desired results.

4. Set a realistic budget.

Too often, marketing budgets are set without regard to marketing goals or resources needed. Executive stakeholders often give marketing the same budget as the previous year, or they set an arbitrary percentage of revenue for the marketing team.

Instead, refer to upcoming goals and required marketing resources to create a budget.

Ask questions to determine the budget marketing needed to achieve outlined objectives.

How much will it cost to get required marketing resources?
What is a standard spend in your industry?
What are our previous cost per lead and cost per customer benchmarks?
What is our retention rate?

How much are competitors spending on similar objectives?
How will the budget change if efforts don’t produce intended results?
What tools are needed and how much do they cost?

Once a budget is set, the marketing team can determine realistic expectations for results to help finance see the projected ROI.

5. Track results, review, and iterate.

In order for marketing to get buy-in from the finance department, they must share the results of their work and plan to work together to make necessary changes.

Marketing produces reports that track spend, KPIs, and ROI. Marketing and finance alignment will improve when both teams can see the results of the investment. Finance understands data so it’s on the marketing team to track metrics that show progress.

Teams meet to review reports and discuss possible changes. Metrics alone aren’t enough to understand marketing progress. Context is often needed to explain results. Bring marketing and finance teams together to discuss progress and determine if any changes are needed.

Review the budget. The best marketing budgets aren’t set in stone. Use results and metrics to determine possible changes to the marketing budget. And if the goals for the business change, know the budget will change too.

As new growth goals are assigned, go back to step one to align marketing and finance teams and create a plan most likely to help your brand reach your new objectives.

Reach Your Growth Goals with a Better Marketing Plan

When a brand has growth goals, marketing is essential. It is the driver that can help a brand increase sales, reach more customers, expand into new markets, and drive demand.

But for the marketing department to create meaningful results, it needs the right investment and buy-in from the finance department. Both teams have to be on the same page to reach growth-oriented business goals.

Use these tips to get your teams on the same page and create marketing campaigns that will help you reach your growth goals.

If you need help aligning your marketing and finance teams, SpotOn is here to help. We can help you develop marketing plans based on your goals and realistic budgets. Talk to our team today about how we can help your brand set up better marketing goals and plans to reach them. Contact us today to learn more.

budget

Robyn Spoto