Planning for 2023: Get Your Sales and Marketing Budget Approved

Get your annual budget approved with these strategic tips from Matt Heinz. TranscriptIntro: Welcome to Mimeo’s Talk of the Trade. I’m Mike McNary. In addition to leading a sales organization here at Mimeo, I’m also interested in unlocking the secrets of sales and marketing. In each episode, I talk with creative leaders to find out […]

Get your annual budget approved with these strategic tips from Matt Heinz.

Transcript

Intro: Welcome to Mimeo's Talk of the Trade. I'm Mike McNary. In addition to leading a sales organization here at Mimeo, I'm also interested in unlocking the secrets of sales and marketing. In each episode, I talk with creative leaders to find out how they approach problems like motivating sales teams, structuring the revenue cycle and fitting product to market. At the end of the conversation, you and I have new takeaways to apply to our everyday life. Let's jump into today's episode.

Michael McNary: Hey, everyone. Mike McNary here with another episode of Mimeo’s Talk of the Trade Podcast. Today's episode is titled Planning for 2023: How to Get a Budget Approved Tactically for the Year Ahead. Our guest today is a recurring guest, our first Matt Heinz. Matt is the president and founder of Heinz Marketing and someone I'm really appreciative of giving us the time today. So welcome to the pod, Matt.

Matt Heinz: Dude, when you get invited back, that's pretty cool, right? I did something right the last time, so now it's a pleasure to be here again.

Michael McNary: Yeah. For those that maybe not heard the first podcast or don't know Heinz Marketing well, tell the listeners a little bit about your organization and its kind of overall mission.

Matt Heinz: Yeah, I appreciate it. We help B2B companies build predictable pipeline, really sort of help marketing teams embrace revenue responsibility, embrace the complexities of today's modern buying and selling processes and really drive revenue impact in their organizations in a predictable, scalable, repeatable way. Partners with the sales organizations, partners with account management, partners with the CFO to drive real business performance moving forward. So we are project based consultants that teach teams how to do that internally. So that has repeatable, scalable impact for their organizations moving forward.

Michael McNary: Yes. Which is listen, there's a lot of different ways you can help a business, but if a business does not have scalable, repeatable pipeline, they have nothing, in my opinion. Right.

Matt Heinz: Yeah. It's a real challenge. I think a lot of companies will sort of speak a good game around that, but too often the execution is lumpy. Right. You have sort of sort of random acts of marketing to generate some pipeline one month, some pipeline the next. And in the past that's been the nature of sort of marketing campaigns, but that doesn't support the consistent and growing needs of a sales organization. So to have those things aligned and to not just talk about sort of jazz hands or revenue responsibility at sales kick off, but to figure out what does that look like on a Tuesday morning, right. Landing a plane on a strategy and intent and figuring out what are the processes in playbooks that are going to drive that predictable performance. That's where the rubber meets the road and that's where you get that consistent, scalable impact on the organization moving forward.

Michael McNary: Yes, I totally agree. And I'd also say it's probably the problem that companies struggle with forever. Right. Even if you have a good playbook or go to market strategy, the question that they probably are asking often is how do we even make it better? Right?

Matt Heinz: Yeah. And sort of germane to our conversation today about planning for next year. Right? I mean, I know what worked last year may not work with this year. What worked in Q1 for this year may not be what's working in Q2 and 3 as who knows what's happening in the market, who knows how that actually impacts companies this year and next year? But there certainly are headwinds that people are concerned about. So where people might have prioritized four or five things in Q1, they're prioritizing one to three things. Now, how are you honing your message and your pitch? How are you honing the precision and targeting of who you are addressing in the market to make sure you're still hitting predictable numbers into headwinds of different economic conditions? So refreshing your view of the market and refreshing how you approach go to market is a key part of being successful with that.

Michael McNary: Yeah. Well said. Yeah. It always strikes me when I talk to you about how passionate you are about, obviously informed as well. So what would you say is your favorite part of your job these days?

Matt Heinz: Honestly, it's getting to spend time with CMOs and marketing leaders to not only sort of hear where they are succeeding, hear where they're innovating, but also hear where they're struggling. And it's a combination of understanding how marketers are leading their teams. How marketing leaders are becoming revenue-responsible business leaders in their organizations. And how they are migrating from being sort of a Chief Marketing Officer. Which is sort of I think of marketing as the doing the marketing to in many cases. Acting as the Chief Market Officer. Which means you now also have responsibility for what is the market we're going into. How is that market changing and shifting. Who should we be selling to? How do we go to market as an organization, not just as a marketing team? And so sort of understanding where different marketing leaders are in that continuum, going from being the leader of the campaigns to a real driver of go to market strategy and then what that means not only for those marketing leaders careers, but also what that means for the organizations they work for and the impact it can have. Honestly, those conversations that I get to have every day, it's a lot of fun. And it's also fun to see the impact it can have on people as they continue to sort of innovate their roles as well.

Michael McNary: Yes. Making a difference. Right. And I think that's totally understandable and I think a lot of our listeners could totally relate to that. I love a lot of the content that Heinz Marketing puts out. I subscribe and I recommend that anybody listening get their inboxes with your expertise and thought leadership. You recently posted a great quote from Thomas Friedman. He said, “pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong, but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.” I really like that. I think it's insightful, accurate. I think it's easy to get your head wrapped around. But in your opinion, what should people kind of take away from that notion and make it actionable?

Matt Heinz: Yeah, it's a great question and I have to give David C. Baker sort of credit for that. I stole that from something he wrote recently. Love his content, especially if you're in professional services. Highly recommend his book The Business of Expertise. He does a great Sunday newsletter. The idea is in difficult conditions where a lot of companies sort of the metrics that we were used to, the velocity we were used to maybe last year and into Q1 of this year, is different than what people have seen in the middle and late part of 2022. And so now as we sit here and do budgeting, as we start doing planning for next year, we're wondering, what is that actually going to look like? What are we going to go into? And it's easy to start to say, well, people aren't buying as fast or sales cycles are lengthening or people aren't making as good a decisions as they are. You don't control those things, right? So how do you then take that and look inward and say, what do we control? What do we control about how we're going to market? What do we control about who we are targeting? What do we control about how we position the problem we are solving with the same solution you have, with the same product you have? Is there a shift or a pivot in how you describe the problem and what problems you address? And listen? I mean, even in the best of markets, you will try things that don't work. That is going to be true now, that is going to be true in 2023. But I think the most successful leaders have a balance of sort of optimism and pessimism. Like, they're cynical and they're critics of what's going on, but they're doing that in a productive, constructive way, moving forward. And I think if you're trying to lead an organization, if you're trying to lead a team that is looking at the tea leaves and looking at this and might very well be scared, like, are we going to hit our number? What happens if we don't hit our number? What happens to my job? What happens to my job? What happens to this house I just built or my kids in, the tuition that I have to pay or whatever? It is, like, fears go deep. But I think if we step back and say, listen, there are things that I can't control, but there are things that I do, it gives you an opportunity and a place to position that optimism and to figure out a path forward it may not be a guaranteed path. You're still going to have to look at what works and what doesn't. But I think as a marketing leader, as a marketing practitioner, as a business leader, that's our job is to sort of figure out, okay, let's be realistic. Let's not look at things with purely rose-colored glasses in an unrealistic irrational way. But there's always a path through. There is always a path. Even in the worst of markets, people are still buying. Even the worst of marketing companies are innovating. So we're actually addressing budgeting in a session. We're doing the CMO roundtable tomorrow, and we actually did a survey just real quick, of people that are attending to get a sense for sort of where they're at and just high level. What we're seeing is most people are saying they missed their Q3 number. Most people are saying that their numbers are still up significantly from last year. A small percent. Only about 20% to 22% of people say their budget will be lower next year than this year. And only 6% of respondents said that they are pessimistic about next year. The vast majority. And maybe there might be some selection bias in here based on whoever responded. But the responses we had from that indicate a higher level of optimism going into 2023 than I expected. And maybe I expected based on sort of all the dark clouds we keep seeing in headlines and social channels everywhere. So I came away from that feeling better about and feeling pretty proud of, quite frankly, the marketing leaders in there to say, okay, to that comment earlier about optimism versus pessimism. I think they're on the right side of that.

Michael McNary: Yeah, that's interesting, actually. I'll tell you that that 6% number is, you know, I thought all those numbers were something you could kind of dig into and probably get some really interesting takeaways from. But the 6% way lower than I would have expected.

Matt Heinz: Way lower, I would agree. Yeah. And it wasn't just like pessimistic versus optimistic. I'm just refreshing the math now. 74% of people said optimistic about growth. 18% said treading water this year versus last year, with more respondents. Now it's like six to 8%. So 8% of people are pessimistic, but the vast majority of companies, it looks like 80% of companies are going to at least spend the same amount this year as last year. And 44% are saying they're going to spend more on marketing in 2023 versus 22. So, yes. Headwinds yes, this year is a struggle, but amongst B2B marketers, they're saying that we still see a very optimistic view of what the market is going to look like long term.

Michael McNary: Yeah, very intriguing. They see potential growth in an ROI from investment. Right. And I think we'll talk a little bit about that today. Let's get into annual planning and how to maximize it. Why don't we start kind of maybe in more broad sense, what should a sales or marketing leader’s key objectives be during annual planning?

Matt Heinz: Well, I think it starts not with what you're going to do, but what you're going to achieve. And so I think you have to start with what is our outcome and what is that value to the organization? And so let's take this from a marketing budget standpoint. Too often you hear people say like oh well here's all the things I have to spend money. Or a CFO will say you get this amount of money, if you have this amount, what are you going to go and buy? Right? I don't care where you're spending money, I care about the outcomes. You are focused on a lot of different terms people use for this. Some people call it zero based budgeting, I call it sort of bottoms up projections and budgeting. Like saying here's the outcome we care about and what will it take to achieve that outcome and there's a short and long term vision of that outcome. So if you're an early stage company you may be entirely focused on what deals can I get in the next twelve months? So you may have a short term focus on how do I generate the right demand to build pipeline to get deals closed. A larger, more mature company may say I have a short term and a long term view, I have a short term objective of building that pipeline but I have a long term objective of driving efficiency of pipeline growth over time as well as building brand awareness to create a subsidization of pipeline moving forward as well. So now you get more complicated. You may say I'm investing in things in 2023 that may not see a return until 2024 and later, but how you start with what are the outcomes we care about, what are we trying to achieve and how do we get there? Again, the most important, I think mind shift I can give to marketers is instead of giving a line item budget to your CFO where you are spending money, tell a story about what you are buying. You are not buying media, you're not buying channels, you're not buying time with an agency, you're buying business outcomes. And those business outcomes likely come from a package of things you are spending money on. But again, like position it that way and then manage it that way. Whereas if things aren't pulling their weight, if they're not contributing into the year, you cut them. If things are pulling their weight, if things are working, how much more can you do, how much more can you spend with similar predictable results? And so from that standpoint that bottoms up budget becomes variable into the new year as well.

Michael McNary: Yeah, totally. And I think that narrative is really important. Right? And you're delivering results versus products or platforms, right? I think that's a really important takeaway. What maybe do we think is making 2023 maybe more challenging to plan for or maybe different than a typical year.

Matt Heinz: Well, in a typical year, it's hard to know what's going to happen that could create obstacles for you to go to market. Even in a great market, you don't know what a competitor is going to do and launch. That could sort of block you somewhere. You don't know what new company is going to launch something. For years there's always been a risk that a Microsoft or a Google or a Facebook or an Article either launches something that conflicts with what you do or even sort of signals they're going to launch something that could change market conditions for you as well. Independent of whether we're intersection, whether we're going to intercession, whether oil prices, inflation, there's always something and we can really get afraid of sort of these macro conditions that are real, but there will always be something. I would narrow the aperture to again, what you can control and who is in front of you. And I could be a broken record with this next answer, which is like the better you know your customer, the better you know not just your target market but what some people call the som. Right? Not the target addressable market, but the SOM, the Serviceable Obtainable Market. What is that subset of the subset of your market. Those are the companies that have the need you are addressing, if you target that correctly. And if you narrow that in on sort of real time needs and conditions, I'm not saying it's independent of those external variables or that it's going to exist separate from economic conditions, but if you identify that need, that is something they need now. That is something they're going to need into next year. And so will your close rates be a little lower? Maybe. Will your sales cycles be a little longer? Maybe. But if you're targeting the right people that still have those needs independent of the macro conditions, you can still be successful. And that level of precision is more important in these tighter markets. When we face recession or face constriction in an easier market, you can be like, well, they'll find us, right? Like everyone's spending more money. They'll find us now. Your need to be more precise at speaking to the right companies to hit your number is more important in these tighter markets than ever.

Michael McNary: Fewer swings at the plate potentially. You need to make sure that using a sports metaphor, that's the right pitch, right. And you've got a vision of how despite some of these obstacles, you still get to a number.

Matt Heinz: Right.

Michael McNary: And that's the trick, right? Because the likelihood that organizations are going to maybe downsize their targets for growth or year over year change in general, that's not usually how it happens, right? The likelihood is far higher that we're going to say, hey, we're still going to try to get to this number. We just got to get creative and tactical in how we get there, right? So that makes a lot of sense. You're talking about planning based on outcomes, right? Making decisions based off of what it is that you're trying to target and understand your customer and some of the outside conditions that you need to kind of navigate in order to get the right things implemented in your planning. So let's talk about outcomes. How do you during annual planning, either in marketing or sales, how do you decide what is going to have the most potential impact on your business in terms of a potential implementation or an expenditure? How does that stack rank come about, in your opinion, if done well?

Matt Heinz: I'll use an analogy in a slightly different context. When people start talking about what tools should we buy, what should our tech stack look like, hey, we're taking an account based approach in the next year. One of the tools we need, as you say, listen, we can have that conversation, but we just talk strategy first, process second, technology third. And if we want to have a conversation around what our go to market motions need to be in the next year, again, strategy first, sort of process second, and then implementation, execution third. And so, like, what are we trying to achieve next year based on what the market needs, based on what the market can handle, based on what the business needs, based on what investors, shareholders needs, what do we think is possible going into next year? And based on what we have seen internally and externally, based on the evidence we have, what is the best way to go to market there? So, for example, I've seen some companies say, listen, we look at the market this year and we've done really well historically with selling into software companies. We think software companies are going to be the most affected by economic conditions. And we see a number of companies in more traditional industrial markets that may be less impacted by sort of economics in the next year. So maybe it may not be true, but there's a strategy, there's a conjecture which may change how you go to market. Say, okay, we're actually going to go and try to sell to manufacturing, we're going to sell to medical devices, we're going to sell more to healthcare versus technology. And if you say those are focus areas, do you have the right go to market motions? Is that still a direct sales channel model? Should you be using channel partners to go after that model? And so that will change, okay, like, how are we going to market and what are the tools and processes and channels we need to get there? But that could sort of narrow who you're focused on. If you say, listen, we've been successful selling to all different sized companies, but we actually see that mid-market companies are more likely to close faster than enterprise companies. For us to hit our number in the medium term. Right. And so how does our message need to change to target bid market and scale phase companies versus larger enterprise companies? How is the buying committee different? How do our go to market challenges change? Right. Again, back to not thinking about what little micro adjustments do we make to our paid search or our dark social or direct mail or our field? But how are you going to market based on what you see? Where are you making bets on where you think you're going to hit your number, what number you think is reasonable to be able to hit going into next year, and how does that impact the tactics? How does that impact the process and the details at a micro level?

Michael McNary: Yeah, very interesting. And I think we're talking about and I think a recurring theme is being able to understand your market, your targets, but your outcomes that you're seeking. Right. Keep going back to that outcomes that you're seeking and making plans and investments based on achieving those outcomes. How important do you think it is to be able to vet that thinking right. Against quantitative data? Like, how much of this is kind of objective and how much of it should be subjective in the sense that you're placing a bet or you're making an educated guess or you're going forward based off of limited intel.

Matt Heinz: Right.

Michael McNary: Should it be a mix or what's your perspective there?

Matt Heinz: Well, it's always a mix. Perfect is going to be good from the standpoint. I think there's more data available to us now than ever before. I think most companies have a ton of interesting information inside their own tools, inside their own databases. But the ability to unlock and make sense of that is the hard part. You can go do surveys and focus groups, but it's going to be there's going to be bias in that. I mean, I just quoted some stats, but, like, we just launched this two days ago, so the number of respondents isn't super high. So I wouldn't want to be able to go and make a bunch of investment decisions just based on sort of a sort of a quick, snap piece of research. But the data you have and what it looked like in Q1 versus Q2 and Q3, there are some really interesting trend lines around sort of budget and ROI and pipeline velocity at the beginning of the year versus maybe it's input. Right. I mean, you can look externally and see how the market is changing and sort of how are there certain industries that are more likely to continue to buy and less likely to continue to buy? There will rarely be a set of data that tells you precisely what to do that is guaranteed to work out.

Michael McNary: Right.

Matt Heinz: Because you're still going to have to make some educated guesses. And as soon as you make that decision, time goes on. The world continues to evolve, variables change, right? Look at the stock market, right? Think about just the rationality of like oh, something happens and the market goes down 700 points and now all of a sudden some analyst says well maybe inflation is not that bad and it's back up 500 points, right? So what do you learn from that? There's looking at what the market tells you, there's looking at what your data tells you, looking what your customers and prospects tell you. The more you have your ear to the ground on the data and on the insights and even on sort of the anecdotal feedback, the more informed you are what you still have to make a decision and maybe even more importantly than the decision is like watching what happens next. What do you expect the leading and the lagging indicators to be based on that decision as well as that sort of go to market motion, pivot, change, whatever? And how do you then sort of evaluate what's working and make continued adjustments from there? There isn't a clean answer that I think everyone's like oh, how do we make sure that we have the highest level of confidence that you are making? Well take whatever you got, you make a decision and you continue to watch what's working.

Michael McNary: Yeah, I think that makes total sense to me. And you're right in the notion that nothing is ever certain. To some degree you're placing a bet always, right? There are some sort of odds or equation to predict likelihood of success and I think the more that is unclear is the more I think people are typically cautious about the decisions that they're making or try to place smaller bets, right? Unless they have a very strong feeling behind it. So let me ask you this because it makes me think of expenditures or implementations or new tools, investments. Is there a direct relationship between level of confidence and maybe how someone decides whether to go down the road of having a fixed cost investment versus a variable cost investment? And is there something that's very valuable about having maybe the ability to pull out or pilot versus having to make a long term bet on something by way of budget planning?

Matt Heinz: Great question. I guess in one case you say where does that confidence come from? Is it a CEO that thinks, you-know-what doesn't stink and just says like here's what I believe? Or in some cases you have a founder that built and created the business based on certain expectations that have been validated initial performance. But then as market conditions change and variables change, those expectations don't change and a founder has a lot of power and has voting decisions. You've got that, that exists as well. I think it's always got to be variable, right? I mean you always have to be looking at and adjusting and the last thing you want to do is be sort of agile from an objectives and strategy standpoint all the time. I see some companies say well this is an excuse variable in some volatile markets we need to be agile on everything. You can't keep changing your strategy and your objectives on a regular basis. The absence of strategy isn't agility it's chaos. Maybe you'll be successful but most likely you're going to have super inconsistent results and a super high level of employee churn.

Michael McNary: Right?

Matt Heinz: What's more important is to sort of take the information you have, make some plausible decisions on where to move forward, continue to read that information, continue to read the market and figure out how and where to make adjustments. So there's a level of sort of confidence and I think well what's the word I'm looking for? I think that there's a level of confidence as well as fortitude. I guess it's one of the reasons why sometimes I feel like how I want to be CEO, I want to be a leader. Well it's not cut and dry. If it was cut and dry more people would do it. It was cut and dry more people would be successful. And the fact of the matter is there will be some people that choose right. There will be some people that choose wrong. But choosing wrong isn't forever. Choosing wrong means, okay, something didn't work the way I wanted it to. How and when do you notice that? How and when do you recognize when to change and how to win? Do you pivot to something that is now more likely to be successful based on the evidence you have?

Michael McNary: Yeah and I really like your point. Well it does give you some flexibility to have variable cost implementation or pilot the ability to pilot or try in a limited term something new by way of an investment or just in general where you're putting your dollars to get returns. But having that flexibility can also be dangerous if you use it too often and it makes you change course. Right. And you don't stay the course in situations where you otherwise would because you have the ability to maybe make a different move because you're not locked into something.

Matt Heinz: Accountability knowing that if you're building… like you hear a lot of people talking about community led growth these days, the power of building a community for your industry, for your brand. That is not a short term campaign. That is not a let's build a community and let's see what kind of pipeline we get in the first month. That's a long term play right. That can create some advantage for you. But accountability says how do we know it's working short term? We don't want to give this two years. Like how do we know that we're actually seeing something early on? What would leading indicators, early indicators look like? So accountability on what you're doing based on agreed upon objectives, whether they are short term or long term and then knowing. Okay. If we don't see certain results, are you willing to cut the court and stop doing it? Or if it's working, are you willing to invest more? If you find a campaign that's working, but you were given a certain amount of money to run that campaign at the beginning of the year if the bank had a sale today on dollar bills, and for the rest of today, every dollar bill costs $90. How much budget you have is the wrong question. Like, go back to your CFO, how much capital can I get at a scale? Like, maybe there's a limit to how much you can get profitably there, but that should be variable as well. And if you establish the right relationship, whether it's from a budgeting or planning standpoint, say, I will cut things that don't work, but if it works, I'm coming back for more money, doubling down, right?

Michael McNary: Yeah. And I think that kind of brings me to the logical kind of next part of the discussion, which is that conversation with we'll call it a CFO, right. I think the term you've used in the past is there are sometimes CF-“No”s, right? Somebody is inclined, they see these dark clouds ahead, perceived or real, depending on how you view things, they may be more conservative than is, in your opinion, healthy for the business. Right. So you have these outcomes you're trying to work towards. You've identified them. You've now put together a plan of what you want to and where you want to invest during planning to achieve those outcomes. How do you bring it to the other stakeholders that validate, approve, or collaborate on decisions like these during planning and make the best case?

Matt Heinz: Well, ideally, all of you are supporting the same ultimate roll up objectives, right? Like, how do we create a sustainable, successful, profitable business that delights our customers, that creates more efficient scale as we grow? That's not a marketing challenge. That's not a sales challenge. That's not an account management challenge. It's not a product challenge. That's a company opportunity. Right. So the way you position in the way you create a marketing budget and marketing program needs to align with the overall company objectives. It needs to coordinate and align with what your peers are doing in other departments. And that objective, that story, that direction needs to be uber clear to your CFO, your CEO, and your board. I mean, the CFO emerges if she doesn't understand what the hell you're doing. If she hears you talk about MQLs and clicks and likes and dark social and a bunch of stuff that just sounds like marketing gobbledygook and has no idea how that actually translates into something that is going to drive business performance. Yes, you may still need a lot of the things I just mentioned. You may still invest in a lot of those things, but in what context does it exist to drive business performance? Like, that's part of the storytelling you have to do. And the best CFO will straight up tell you, my job is to spend money. My job isn't to say no. My job is to spend money on the right programs that will grow the business. So if I have confidence that what you are doing is going to help grow the business, whether it's a short term objective or long term objective, that's what I want to know. And I recognize as a CFO we are going to waste money on things that don't initially work or some conjectures or tests that don't pan out. That's part of figuring out the path forward. So again, if you build trust with your finance partner, make sure she understands what you're trying to achieve, what you're focused on, and where those different investments are focused is to create impact because the opposite is not acceptable. The opposite is like they come back and say, well, you have 20% less budget, but you still have to hit three times revenue, right? And if you come back and say, okay, well, here's what we're going to adjust, but we're going to keep the same number, then she's just going to say, what if I cut 40%, I'll spend less money. If you're still going to hit the same number, that's a bad place to be if you're just spending money.

Michael McNary: Now listen, I think the notion of that alignment is the ideal, right? And I think in a lot of healthy organizations that's what it looks like. But I also think that people sometimes have to make what they consider to be a more compelling or a more granular case than they think might be required in the ideal sense. Once you get somebody to buy in, or the narrative in the case that you've made is seen from the same or through the same lens from your partner, the CFO in this case, how important is having very clearly and closely aligned perspectives on success? How quantitative do you have to get in planning stages about what's going to be something that we care about versus say, hey, this is not good, or is that something that kind of morphed over time, right? What success or a real kind of gold medal decision looks like?

Matt Heinz: Well, I think you have to layer some of those expectations. I think you separate the impact metrics from the operational metrics. If you think about the strategy of the organization and what success looks like for the company as a whole. The company as a whole does not care about your social metrics. The company as a whole does not care about your MQLs. Company as your whole may not even care about pipeline. Like if I'm an investor, if I'm looking at this business, I'm looking at growth rate, I'm looking at profitability. I'm looking at whether your metrics are achievable. I'm looking at how big your addressable market is and whether there's still runway for you to achieve more or are you saturated? I mean, there's much bigger issues relative to like, do we continue to invest in this company? Do we get our next round because people think we're on the right track? Do investors see that we're seeing momentum and are raising the stock price because they're buying, not selling? Right. Depending on the stage of business you're in. So those are the metrics that matter when you're bored your CEO. Like, those are the things they're looking at. What are you doing as a marketing leader to support that, right? Like, what are you doing to support that? And how do you sort of take those overall objectives and sort of get down into sort of things that matter? Some of the best CMOs I know going to board meetings, their first slide is not about marketing. It's not about marketing performance. It's about the market. Right. Let's talk first about the market. Where is the market? How has it shifted since the last time we talked about, is our market opportunity bigger or smaller? Where is the market going? Let's have that conversation. And then that broader discussion, which is a business discussion, not a marketing discussion, will provide context for what we now talk about, which gets into the weeds of what marketing is doing. Right. If you do it the other way around, then you're just arguing about marketing tactics and activities outside of the context of what matters to the business. You have to start with those high level business objectives, make sure everyone agrees on what those are. Then we can talk about how functional programs support that.

Michael McNary: Yeah, I love that. Right? And I think it's lost sometimes. But in instances where you have a healthy process around planning and investment, it's not that changes in the market are major drivers in the decisions that you're making. And we'll call them the root cause of whatever kind of prescribed go forward strategy that you have or that you're putting forth for review and approval. So that really resonates. And overall, I'd say that planning is tough. Right. That uncertainty that has kind of come up a few times in this conversation makes for a daunting objective. Right. Big numbers, important goals that many people have, roles and responsibilities to achieve. And you're trying to decide where the dollars go to get to those outcomes and, you know, major missteps can have a major impact on how easy or difficult that might be. Right. And then the last question I guess I'd have is you're coming up to the next year's planning, right? What's the best way to kind of assess or do some sort of post mortem on what can you learn from the previous year's planning? Right. It's one thing to look at things outcomes, but how can you identify where maybe you didn't think about things correctly the year previous?

Matt Heinz: Well, I think ideally you don't want to just do that on an annual basis. Ideally, doing that more frequently as the market adjusts, I think at least quarterly, sort of looking at especially programs and sort of where things are going. A lot of companies will have the board meetings on a quarterly basis anyway. So sometimes you don't see big shifts in the market from quarter to quarter. Sometimes you see some of those. So I think that's valuable and I think every business, depending on what kind of market you're in, what kind of stage you're at, and from a charity standpoint will have different levels of different cadences for reviewing that. I think what's important is a culture in marketing, a culture in an organization, being willing to look at things objectively and know when to stop, when to cut, when to start and when to accelerate and making that something that is independent of individual performance. What I mean by that is if you are working on a program that was not successful, that does not mean that you were not successful. If you try something based on evidence and variables that we all agreed on, but we say, hey, listen, that test didn't work. What did we learn from that? And how do we now pivot and adjust to different things? That is success if you stop doing it, if you learn from it and you move forward on it. Right? And so I think in a lot of some organizations it is seen as negative as soon as a problem is seen as a potential sort of check mark against your next performance review. If you're associated with something that didn't work like that will kill your company, that will kill your innovation, it will kill the ability for people to be honest with each other about what's working and what's not. And if you've done this long enough. If you've had enough of bats in marketing or business. Hopefully you have failed at a lot of things but been willing to admit when it's not working and be willing to sort of learn from that and pivot from that. That's in good markets and bad. Having a culture of failure. A culture of acceptance. A culture of innovation around that is super. Super important.

Michael McNary: Yeah, I love that kind of as a closing point here in that give yourself a break, right? You can't just say that of course we don't expect everything to succeed. You've got to actually give yourself that freedom and that space to have things go poorly and then the honesty and introspection come review time to say, hey, that didn't work, but that's okay, right? Because we tried it, we know it didn't work and we didn't let it weigh us down any longer than we needed to, right? Right. So I love it, per usual, some really great contributions and thought leadership, in my opinion, on this. You coming on and sharing your ideas is greatly appreciated. Some takeaways for me and for our listeners is when it comes to annual planning, start with the outcomes that you're trying to achieve. Work back from there, but understand what your overall and broader mission statement is once you've kind of determined what that is, tell a story, have a narrative that is supported about what investments you're going to make and how those investments get you towards those outcomes that, you know, hopefully there's a shared perspective on being the most important targets. Right? And then finally, once you've placed your bets, validate them, right? Validate, inspect, measure, and go back and have an honest, introspective moment with yourself and your teams about what worked, what didn't, and innovate. And iterate based on those realities, right?

Matt Heinz: You got it.

Michael McNary: Yeah. I love it. And if our audience wants to, outside of my recommendation to subscribe to Hinds Marketing and newsletters and just posts and publishing, how can anybody listening get in touch with you or Heinz Marketing?

Matt Heinz: Yes. I appreciate it. We've got 14 plus years of insights and research and perspectives tools templates upon Heinzmarketing.com. It's just Heinz like the ketchup. And anyone has any questions or any follow up for me, I'm just Matt. [email protected] would welcome any conversation or feedback on this discussion.

Michael McNary: I love it and I encourage anybody to get involved and take a look at what Matt and his team are doing because it's, in my opinion, has impact. When you have great ideas, you're open to them and you can kind of mix them in with your internal organizational strategy. So thanks from Talk of the Trade. Hopefully we'll do it again sometime soon. Okay.

Intro: Talk of the trade is hosted by Mimeo, the better way to print Find out more at www.mimeo.com.

Select your platform to login.