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About Planning and Budgeting for Marketing

Siebel Marketing provides support for planning and budgeting across the marketing organization. Using marketing plans, marketing executives and managers can create high-level business plans that cover a broad set of tactics, including outbound and inbound programs, campaigns, and events. For each plan, the marketing executive or team can set goals and objectives, identify available funds, assign budgets, associate multichannel marketing tactics, share documents, and generate forecasts.

Table 4 explains some of the marketing terms used in this chapter.

The Marketing Planning module can be applied to fit any organizational planning approach, including plans based on time periods (such as quarterly or annual planning cycles), business units, product lines, or any other management structure. Plans can be organized in hierarchies with any number of levels to support small marketing organizations as well as more complex planning processes.

Executives can also set high-level corporate objectives and then assign goals to each business unit that is participating in the plan. Each business unit can then create its marketing plan to meet its own assigned goals, forecast the organization's ability to achieve the assigned goals, and submit the plan for approval. Based on common goals and performance metrics, marketing organizations can develop their own set of key performance metrics and institute the use of those metrics across their marketing plans.

There are several phases to the planning and budget cycle. The following are some typical processes using Siebel Marketing Resource Management, although the process for your company may differ.

• Planning and Alignment Process - This process is usually performed one time a year or one time a quarter. In this process, your company executives establish the overall marketing budget amount for the planning cycle. Based on the company priorities, a rough budget amount is set for each department or cost center. Meanwhile, the marketing teams develop their proposed programs, and submit them for review as budget requests. Budget requests that have good potential are approved to continue planning. The total cost of the approved budget requests is used to finalize the exact budget amounts (marketing funds) for each cost center. After the budget is finalized, the finance organization enters the official fund amounts for that planning cycle.
• Budget Approval process (for internal programs) - In this process, the owner of a marketing program submits a budget request to request that funds be allocated from a Marketing Fund to pay for the program (this step may have been done during the Planning and Alignment Process). If the program is being jointly funded by more than one cost center, each cost center submits a budget request for their portion of the cost. The fund owner reviews and approves the budget request. After the budget is approved, the request details can be entered into a procurement system for additional approvals if required, so that a purchase order can be issued.
• Expense Tracking Process (execution phase) - In this process, the marketing team executes a marketing program or event. During the course of the program, expenses are incurred. Before the final invoice is received, the estimated value of each expense is tracked using the expense line items, so that a forecast of the expense amount can be monitored. After an invoice is received from a vendor that was hired for the program, the invoice is sent to the Finance department, and the invoice and purchase order number can be associated with specific expenses under the program or event.
• Budget Adjustment Process - This process can occur at any point during the year. Usually this process happens at the end of a quarter when executives want to adjust the annual plan mid-cycle. This process may also occur if there is a change of strategy or the overall budget increases or decreases. In this process, the finance team or fund owner can transfer money from one fund to another, or use an adjustment to directly increase or decrease the money in a fund.