Unleashing the Power of Modern Marketing: Upgrading your Enterprise Planning Capabilities

In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, staying competitive demands innovation, adaptability, and smart decision-making. Among the key players in steering a company's growth trajectory are CEOs, CFOs, and chief marketing officers (CMOs). Yet, in most organizations, the CMO and the CMO organization are not viewed as equals at the enterprise planning table. Why? One reason is a gap in the capabilities of marketing departments when it comes to connecting, aligning, and measuring enterprise goals with marketing spend and work efforts compared to the precision of other departments. It's time to address this issue head-on and transform your enterprise planning capabilities.

The state of marketing

CMOs have among the shortest average tenure in the C-suite, a mere 3.5 years. One of the areas to rectify this troubling statistic is “aligning metrics with expectations.” And yet most marketing organizations lack the ability to provide accurate, specific, and timely visibility into how things are progressing with planning, execution, and results due to a lack of robust planning and work management enterprise platforms that empower marketers to prove their worth to other C-suite executives. As a result, marketing's critical role as a revenue driver often gets overshadowed by perceptions that it's merely a cost center. This perception must change because a revolving door in marketing leadership impairs an organization’s ability to hit revenue, profitability, and market share goals. Companies tackling this problem are seeing dramatic performance improvements.

Spreadsheets: The silent productivity killers

Since the 1980s, people have updated much of the technology in their corporate and personal lives, but not the spreadsheet. Most marketing departments still rely on outdated spreadsheets and spreadsheet-driven processes for financial planning, work planning, and bridging the gap between sophisticated campaign analytics systems and C-suite planning conversations. These spreadsheets are "silent productivity killers," undermining organizational effectiveness and impeding the ability to connect with other C-suite functions promptly and convincingly.

While finance, HR, IT, and sales have embraced advanced systems of record, marketing continues to struggle with fragmented and manual processes. Spreadsheets are great as personal productivity tools but were never designed to be an enterprise planning platform. The reality now is that companies upgrading their financial and work planning brains from spreadsheets to enterprise planning and work platforms have a significant competitive advantage, especially in their revenue-generating departments.

Empowering CMOs and senior marketers

It's time to liberate your marketing team from underperforming spreadsheets and outdated processes. The solution lies in adopting a modern marketing system of record, a dynamic platform that seamlessly integrates financial planning and spending, work planning, and execution performance. This transformative platform empowers CMOs and senior marketers to:

• Connect the dots: A marketing system of record provides a central nervous system that connects every facet of marketing, enabling data-driven decisions and fostering collaboration between sales, finance, procurement, and other departments
• Harness real-time insights: Say goodbye to vague, outdated insights. With a cutting-edge platform, CMOs gain access to real-time, actionable data that helps them understand campaign performance, tie it back to budgets, and make informed decisions on the fly.
• Benefit from closed-loop marketing: The days of shooting from the hip are over. A well-designed system of record empowers marketers to analyze each campaign’s performance with the original enterprise goal, top-down budget, bottom-up spend, and work-resource investment in mind. It allows marketers to modify spending and work resourcing in real time to achieve optimal outcomes.

Real-time sucess stories

Leading companies across industries have already harnessed the power of marketing systems of record. Here are two of many examples:

A large consumer technology company achieved global visibility into its billion-dollar marketing spend. It saved over $1 million in costs within the first year with 2x faster planning cycles and a 45% increase in revenue. This company implemented first in the US in four months and completed its global rollout to 60 countries in seven months.

A leading streaming media company transformed its marketing planning process with incredible efficiency improvements and, more importantly, gained the ability to make data-driven decisions on where and how to best invest in TV and movie content production to drive subscriber retention and growth. As a result, the company is a big winner in the streaming wars. An important takeaway from this case study is that a streaming media company can only succeed if it generates the right customer experiences. Every TV show and movie is a marketing campaign with a robust planning, build, execution, and analysis cycle. If adopting a marketing system of record optimizes the complexity of streaming media campaigns, it can optimize marketing efforts across industry verticals since every company seeks to generate better customer experiences to drive revenue, profitability, and market share.

Partnering for sucess

Companies looking to transform their marketing financial and work planning can typically implement in three to four months in a large market like the US and have a full global rollout with integrations in less than a year. This includes integrations with purchase order and invoice systems like SAP, leading work-planning tools like Adobe Workfront, analytics tools like Adobe Analytics, content management solutions like Adobe Experience Manager, and CRM solutions like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.

When implementing a marketing system of record, partnering with experts is key. Argano, a leading Anaplan partner, offers comprehensive strategic planning roadmaps, implementation, support, and initial and ongoing enablement services to help you drive your digital transformation efforts.

The time for change is now. Upgrade your enterprise planning capabilities with a modern marketing system of record. Empower your CMOs and senior marketers to make data-driven decisions, demonstrate marketing's strategic value, and drive revenue growth. Don't let outdated processes and spreadsheets hold you back. Embrace the future of marketing, unleash its true potential, and secure your position as a driving force in your industry. Contact us today to learn more!