Know-How Exchange : Career/Training

This is a very broad question, and as such, is likely hard for folks to answer (which is probably why you haven't received any responses yet).

To take out subjectivity in advertising spend, you need to make the process more objective. To do that, you need to be working towards determining the ROI of all your marketing programs. This sounds easy when said like this, but is a huge challenge.

if you search this site for "marketing ROI" or similar terms (using the search box up top of the page), or just search this term on Google in general, you will find lots of articles and thoughts on this.

Dear Mike

Disclaimer: We are business partners and owners of the software packages I refer to, Maximizer and SymVolli. SymVolli used be sold as SalesVision which was a sales forecasting and marketing management tool. SymVolli does the lot. We have been Maximizer Business Partners for 10 years.

You make the assumption that there is a template or even a programme to assist you solely with the planning of advertising which rather pre-supposes that the suppliers know what you intended advertising strategy actually is and that they can assume your tactics in advance so that they can be enumerated, forecast and then reported on – presumable against some sort of target.

This is unlikely in the case of templates and firmly puts you into the area of Marketing Relationship Management packages where the intricate interactions between you and your marketing suppliers can be project managed against a desired outcome, set as a target and series of sub-targets.

That is hard work and apart from the really big FMCG companies is usually more trouble than it is worth in terms of measurable improvements in marketing outcome (Leads and business for B2B or brand presence and additional turnover for B2C)

With ongoing monitoring of return on marketing spend, activity analysis and sales forecasting, our clients are committing themselves less and less to a rigid advertising and marketing spend. On average, they are booking less fixed advertising except where they feel that the economies of bulk buying merit it. They are doing activities which are manages, monitoring the return on their efforts campaign by campaign.

To do this, they enter the marketing activities in the marketing section of their CRM systems, but monitor leads and activity through the sales side. Consistent forecasting based on the results of campaigns being measurable in this manner, means that activities which are demonstrably profitable over the course of a campaign are often refreshed and repeated. To this extent, the concept of there being a marketing budget has been overtaken by an ability to roll further marketing expenditure from successful campaigns whilst canning the unsuccessful efforts.

This is a paradigm shift, because eventually the strong forecasting tools lead to a reduction in the need to devote a month each year to a planning process, setting a sales plan and targets and writing a budget. They don’t stop planning or budgeting – it simply becomes an on-going activity where the forecast and booked sales are monitored against the sales plan and drives the direction of effort and the direction of marketing expenditure.

Freeing up time in this manner allows more resource to be directed towards sales effort, whilst the forecast drives activity towards making the numbers to meet the company’s fiscal targets and cash-flow.

It’s not utopian, but simply a way whereby small and medium sized companies can optimise their efforts in the same way in which Unilever can.

To achieve this they use a couple of our tools, though I’m sure that others will do the Job. Maximizer Enterprise is deployed as the CRM and marketing resource management tool and SymVolli is used for forecasting. In several instances, their business needs are met by SymVolli using it as the CRM, Marketing and Forecasting tool.


Steve Alker
Xspirt and SymVolli