Marketers know the frustration of getting a growth target from finance and your board, and being asked to build your marketing plans around it. You have to try to color inside already fixed lines to accomplish something strategic with a budget that was set without your strategic input.
It doesn't have to—and shouldn't—work this way. Done right, the annual planning process is where marketing shows up as a true driver of strategy and growth.
To do so requires three shifts.
- Redefine what "plan" means
- Ground your choices in real data rather than your gut with some spreadsheets
- Learn to communicate in the language of your CFO and CEO
With these shifts, planning becomes less about surviving a budget cycle and more about actively shaping the business.
Redefine Your Planning Process
Stakeholders use the word "plan" to mean different things. It's one of the most common—and fundamental—sources of friction during budget season.
- Your CFO and the board see the plan as the financial model: revenue targets and margins, and the spending constraints that support those outcomes.
- Your CEO sees the plan as the strategic story they're telling the market and the board: which segments to win, which new markets to enter, which "hills" to take.
- Your stakeholders expect a marketing plan that's far more definitive: the specific set of campaigns, channels, content, and programs that must get funded and executed.
The best planning processes explicitly connect these three layers at the very start. Instead of waiting for a finished model, marketing leaders push to see the assumptions early—growth rates, regional priorities, product bets, and non-negotiables. For each assumption, the question becomes what, realistically, marketing has to do for the company to actually achieve the desired outcome.
The marketing plan is then framed not as a wish list or a request for spend, but as a reconciliation exercise to determine the right investment. Explain how you'll operationalize the financial plan, and outline any risks, trade-offs, and constraints.
If you're not prepared in your planning cycle to explain to your CFO how your proposal reconciles to the financial model and to your CEO how you'll succeed, you're already playing defense.
Question Marketing's Revenue Rule
Another quiet culprit in poor planning is the unexamined assumption that marketing will or should get the same eight to 12 percent of revenue it has for decades. That range has become a safe default. It's rarely challenged, even as markets, channels, and expectations change dramatically.
The issue is not that this range is wrong—it's just not strategic. Some years and situations demand more. You might be entering a new region that requires heavy awareness-building; repositioning a brand after a misstep; or navigating disruptions like AI, new regulations, or aggressive new competitors. In these cases, clinging to a fixed percentage is a way of avoiding conversations about hard realities.
To shift the conversation, marketing leaders need to articulate a case that goes far beyond needing more money to overcome the difficulties to execute plans.
Your argument needs to address:
- The performance and risk profile of your current spend
- The specific areas you're under-invested relative to your growth story
- The likely outcomes if you hold steady versus add two to three percent of revenue in specific areas
When you address these concerns, you end up having a very different conversation than simply asking for more budget.
Build—Or at Least Approximate—A System of Record
Too often, CMOs walk into planning with a patchwork of spreadsheets, dashboards, and proxy metrics. They have intuition about what worked in the past and what didn't. They have anecdotes and channel-level KPIs. They might have visibility into the first half of the current year's performance. But they have nothing from the second half to indicate momentum into the following year. And they rarely have a holistic, real-time view that ties together three essential elements: how much they spent, what they spent it on, and what business outcomes they influenced.
Finance has had this kind of system of record for decades. Sales has some version of it in customer relationship management (CRM) tools. But marketing is often still trying to manage an enterprise-scale portfolio using a set of disparate tools designed for small, isolated tasks.
In a perfect world, marketing would have an enterprise-grade system of record that connects enterprise resource planning and CRMs with the marketing execution stack and provides a unified, real-time view of spend, execution, and performance.
Marketers who aren't there yet—and who want to improve their position in the planning process—should start to move in that direction now.
Standardize how you categorize spend so you can roll it up cleanly to the general ledger codes finance cares about. Create campaign hierarchies that let you look across regions, segments, themes, and products with consistency. Consolidate performance information so that, at a minimum, your major initiatives can be viewed side by side in one place instead of scattered across 30 different files.
The goal is a shared version of the truth, not a heroic effort every time someone asks a seemingly simple question such as your previous month's spend and results.
Learn to Speak Your CFO's Language
Most marketing metrics are, at best, proxy indicators of business performance: engagement, likes, impressions, event attendees, or imputed views of ads at train stations. This isn't a criticism; it's just reality. (Okay, it's a criticism.)
CFOs do not wake up worrying about impression volume, creative cycle time, or task completion rates. They care about revenue, margin, productivity, and risk. Which doesn't mean you need to throw away your dashboards. It means you interpret them.
For example:
- Instead of reporting "We increased followers by 20%," explain that "We reallocated $X from a low-return program into this initiative, and it generated Y opportunities at Z% lower customer acquisition cost."
- Instead of reporting "We launched 35 campaigns on time," explain that "We shifted in-flight spend from underperforming campaigns to those with a higher contribution to pipeline, and here's the impact."
To test how you're framing your work, consider your pitch slide deck. Ask yourself, "If this were the only slide the CFO saw, could they connect it to dollars?" If the answer is no, you're still speaking marketing, not business.
Shape the Budget Before It's Done
In many organizations, the formal budget arrives as a fait accompli. The board has already approved the numbers by the time marketing is told what you have to work with. At that point, marketing leadership's role is reduced to making the best of a fixed amount. Too often, we're simply grateful we haven't lost budget, even if we really do need more.
The workaround is to treat planning as a continuous conversation instead of a single annual event. Throughout the year, capture concrete examples of in-year reallocations where you moved money from underperforming efforts to higher-yield ones.
Document the surprises—the places where the market moved faster than the plan, where you had to adjust on the fly, and where you could have done more if you'd had the flexibility or visibility.
Then, as the next planning cycle approaches, use those real stories as the basis for proactive conversations with your CEO and CFO. Explain what actually happened over the year, what you learned, and how next year's model should look different.
The more you show how marketing can identify waste, reallocate in-flight, and make rational trade-offs, the more credibility you have when you argue for (or against) budget changes.
Plan to Shield Against Second-Guessing
Everyone thinks they're a marketer when there's no shared framework. Without a clear, data-backed plan the rest of your organization understands, marketing becomes a magnet for unsolicited ideas and reactive projects. A strong annual plan grounded in data and tied to your company's financial model is your primary tool for moving out of that defensive position.
A good plan starts from your company's objectives and financial targets, shows how your portfolio of activity maps to those objectives, and makes the trade-off logic explicit.
Then, when you're asked why you're not doing something that doesn't fit in your plan, you can show what it would cost, what it would return, and what you'd have to stop doing to fund it. And then have a conversation about whether that trade is a strategic decision.
This is what it looks like when marketing shows up as a strategic operator, not a cost center.
More Resources on Marketing Planning
Eight Key Elements Your Annual Marketing Plan Must Have to Succeed
The 4Ps Are a No-Brainer, But the 4Ms Are Crucial to Executing Marketing Plans
Why Internal Politics Will Always Be Part of Your Marketing Strategy
Five Marketing Strategy Frameworks to Choose From for Business Success
