Marketing planning & forecasting with Emily Kramer

Ep10 - Marketing Planning & Forecasting with Emily Kramer - Part 2

Episode Description

This is part 2 of the episode with Emily Kramer on Planning and Forecasting. If you haven't checked out part 1 yet, I highly recommend it.

In this episode, Emily pulls up a sample forecasting spreadsheet I created and walks me through how I can improve my current planning and forecasting process.

We spoke in depth on granular forecasting techniques, including separating new revenue from expansion forecasts, analyzing traffic sources, and creating accurate forecasts across different marketing channels. Emily underscores the significance of using historical data, setting realistic assumptions, understanding marketing's strategic role, and practical tips on handling big projects without historical data.

This is episode was a masterclass in planning and forecasting for me. And I had loads of fun as well.

Show Notes

Follow Emily Kramer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilykramer/
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Learn more about MKT1: https://mkt1.co/
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Follow Vikash Koushik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vikashkoushik/
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Learn more about RevenueHero: https://www.revenuehero.io/
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Emily's newsletter on Annual Marketing Planning: https://newsletter.mkt1.co/p/annual-marketing-planning'

Check out the forecasting template: https://www.poweredbysearch.com/resources/b2b-saas-marketing-funnel-forecast-template/

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Episode Transcription

Emily Kramer: You want to be saying, well, what are the biggest things we can do to stand out? Not going to copy what other companies are going to do based on our company's unique strengths. What can I do to set us up for the biggest, best, greatest growth year ever? There are really only four ways to drive more revenue growth.

There's no way to improve all four of these things in equal measure every month, all the time, especially with a small team. The point is know what I can do next year. To help hit the goals that we've set as a company and know what I'm going to do next year to move the needle and make sure I'm doing big bets and focusing on impact and not a bunch of random acts of marketing.

Vikash: Welcome to another episode of the revenue stream, a podcast by RevenueHero. I'm your host Vikash Koushik, and this is part two of my episode with Emily Kramer on planning and forecasting. In part one we spoke about top down forecasting, bottom up forecasting, what comes first, should you plan first and then do forecasting or should it be vice versa and all that stuff, right?

In this episode, we are opening up a spreadsheet and Emily is going to help me improve my planning improve my marketing planning so that I can get better at figuring out how marketing at RevenueHero can continue to win next year, right? I had loads of fun recording this episode and I hope you enjoy it just as much.

Emily Kramer: Okay. So I have shared your model that you've built and full disclosure, I've spent some time looking about looking at this, but not extensive. And so this really is pretty much a live. Analysis of your analysis. So, yeah, I'm excited for you to walk it, walk us through it because it's probably going to be helpful context for me as well.

So you want to want to do that? Yeah, perfect.

Vikash: Yeah. So I think the the current performance sheet is basically just a dump of like, Hey, this is what happened this year. Right? So this, this, this, how much we spent in sales is how much we spent in marketing. Right. We've got the traffic, the lease, the m qls, the conversion rates the CPCs MQL to opportunity.

What are the conversion rates like? And if you scroll down a little bit, we are also looking at things like what's the net new a RR? What is the expansion? A RR, churn rate, all that stuff, right? So, so at the end of the month and at the end of the year, you have like, okay, this is how much we made this year, right?

Yeah, the next sheet is basically a do nothing forecast, right? So what happens if we do nothing, if we don't improve on any of the numbers, right? So what I basically did was I went I pulled in the average growth from the current performance sheet and just, Use that throughout. Right. So so the average performance in the current sheet was like 4%.

So I'm just using that everywhere. Right. So we're not improving. Right. And conservative forecast and realistic forecast and optimistic. What I've done is like, I've increased the budget conservative forecast. I'm saying that heavier. Yeah. We're spending 10 percent more every single month.

Right. And what is the impact of that on traffic, the leads and all this stuff? And I've also left some space for, okay, Hey. How much are we able to you know, improve our traffic to lead conversion rate? How much are we able to improve our MQL to opportunity conversion rates, that sort of stuff, right?

And I've said it as like 1% at the moment. And I did a very similar thing at realistic and optimistic forecast as well. It's just that I've increased the budgets a little bit more 20% and 30% on each of these sheets. And yeah, cool.

Emily Kramer: All right. I have so many things to say, but this is a great start and you have a lot of the pieces here.

And so what's great is that you have the past performance and you have full funnel performance and budget and all of that stuff in here. You need that you need top of funnel all the way to revenue performance month over month. In the past, it can also be helpful to look at 2 years back if you have it not necessarily that you need that in your forecast, but just a lot of businesses have seasonality.

And so if you look at 2 years of data, you can start to see trends in seasonality and traffic or in revenue, or even in conversion rates. If you look at April and April, and you're like, wow, both years. It's also helpful to just graph this because it's easy to see when you look at the lines of just like what happened to revenue, what happened to top of funnel, you can pick another stage mid funnel in those two years prior, just to get a sense of, like, is there some other, you know, external thing shape external thing like seasonality shaping what's happened here because you want to bake that in.

1 thing I'll say here is like, in your performance, you have a new ARR, expansion ARR, contraction ARR, et cetera. I like to do a bottom up forecast for new revenue separate, and I know this is your historical performance separate from the expansion and upsell revenue forecast, just a lot of different assumptions there.

And it's just like, kind of easier to do it as 2 different, like, tabs or sheets and the people that you work with on the new revenue forecast is typically going to be. Sales, or if you're a PLG on the product side a little bit too, if you are doing expansion upsell, that kind of forecasting, you got to work really closely with customer success.

And in fact, I would almost say that, like, they should be doing a bottom up forecast. That's like, it may be they are more the stakeholder on that than even marketing, depending on how involved marketing is and helping there. So that's just a couple notes. So basically you have a bottom up new revenue forecast, a bottom up.

Expansion or existing business forecast. And you can also do that top down as well. So that's like four. But it's great. You have all of these Results in here. And like, just to be clear for RevenueHeroes sake, this is fake. Oh,

Vikash: yeah, yeah,

Emily Kramer: yeah. Oh, fake. So then let's like move over to the do nothing forecast.

This is what I was talking about. This is, it's not doing nothing, but this is like maintaining. This is like, you do the same set of things, you maintain your, your growth. One thing that's interesting here is that this forecast seems to assume that all of your web traffic growth is coming from paid. Is that accurate?

No. But I think, So what I would do here and what I normally do is I would do organic traffic and then I would do, and I'm not going to be able to fix all of this, like, you know, right now, but I would do organic traffic and paid traffic and paid traffic is a direct result of the spend amount and organic traffic is a result of, you know, a number of things, referral traffic, SEO except social.

So sometimes if a lot of your stuff is coming in organically. It can be helpful to break down just like you did with spend, like, from that level of granularity. Like, what do we see happening to SEO? What do we see happening to referral traffic? That's like real sophisticated, but like, or not real sophisticated, but that's like a really robust forecast.

But as you scale, you'll probably do that by. By like the source of organic traffic. So you'll break this down even more. It'll be like, yeah,

Vikash: organic search. Would you even recommend going to the extent of like having separate forecast for say Google ads and then separate for LinkedIn and then separate for organic?

Emily Kramer: I mean, I've done it that way in the past. Like when I was, you know, at Asana, we did it that way because we were, it was, you know, entirely inbound at the time. And it was. Majority organic traffic. And so we broke that down. So if some company is breaking it down by organic and paid might be enough.

For some companies going channel by channel, like, and then, yeah, you're saying basically like breaking this down to SEM and to LinkedIn. It just depends on like, you know, it's, it depends on how much time you have to make the forecast, how much data you already have, where you are in your historical data, like, and how different you think they are.

So a quick way to know if you should do this is to look at the conversion rates throughout the funnel from those sources. So if you look at the conversion rate. To look at the overall conversion rate from like organic traffic to opportunities or something, and if that's like wildly different across, it's easier to talk about this with paid if it's wildly different across paid search and linked in, which it in fact might be because just different stages of the funnel, potentially, or even like different, you know, levels of intent.

And so you. You know, the assumptions and the growth rates might be really different. And so if you increase spend on LinkedIn, it might do wildly different things than increasing spend on SEM. So it doesn't matter. Like, I mean, it matters, but if you want to go more granular, you just do a similar thing to what you've done here, which is you, you change the inputs.

And so you can actually put this on, like, I would almost say, like, I put this on another tab. So you can basically say like, what are the top of funnel inputs? You can put it here too, but it just gets really long and not everyone in the company is necessarily going to want to look at that. They're going to want to look at this sort of summary.

And so, yeah, you can say like, I'm going to make a tab that's just my inputs and that's going to be my SEM spend, my LinkedIn spend, like kind of granular channel by granular channel, my organic search trends. My social traffic spans were into a lot more, you know, posting on LinkedIn this year from our founder.

What's that going to do? So you can really get granular. But if you're just starting out, like, you know, start with organic and start with, you know, start with, so it's testing my spreadsheet skills speed. All right. So you can just do, this is the basic thing that you need. So organic traffic, paid traffic.

I also like to, this is nitpicky, but I think it's easier to look at a forecast as the volume metrics, which is the traffic, the leads, the opportunities as a, as one grouping, and then all of the rest of this is, again, it's like inputs. So like, not, sorry, not inputs, these are inputs, my bad, these are this I would put up in the spend category and then the conversion, is this what you have?

These are your conversion rates. I would put all of my conversion rates just separate because like these essentially the thing that's not clear when I look at your forecast that I want to be clear is where I can. Change the numbers and where I can.

Vikash: Okay.

Emily Kramer: Well, this is a do nothing, but like, do you do that in here?

You, yeah, you do that. You do that. Sorry. Let's look at the conservative

Vikash: forecast. I have the improvement in blue. What can you change? How much am I improving the number that's above? So

Emily Kramer: yeah. Yeah. Okay. There you go. But I would take all of this probably. And like, I just, yeah, this is better. Sorry. I should have been looking at your conservative forecast.

Your do nothing forecast is basically. Like there aren't any inputs. It's just saying if everything stayed the same, what would happen? So yeah this in this forecast you kind of do this you put the volume here And then you have you know, sort of these inputs here. And What I want to see though is is this improvement?

What is this improvement affecting? Is this affecting the CPC?

Vikash: I have to go check my formula. Does it really

Emily Kramer: matter? But if it's affecting CPC, I want to see that reflected. Like, if it's affecting CPC, then I want to see, you know, this times this plus one plus this. Like I want to see it play out month over month.

I don't know how, you know, this is being done, but but yeah, you have the, you have the things here, you have the volume and then you have the rates and the, you know, efficiency costs per metrics and you have the spend and the changes. And so it's great. Like you have the changes, you're seeing this impact things.

The sales is really like, I would call this like. I don't like for things to get like territorial and sales and marketing. So when you're like, this is marketing and this is sales, that's a little bit of a misnomer because marketing should help with materials and things like that. So this is the marketing funnel, or this is top of funnel.

And this is slash marketing, you know, is the DRI or directly responsible individual, but you know, this is or I would just say like, this is opportunity to close. Like, you know, you can say this is traffic too. Traffic to empty well, right. So like, you know, that's probably how I would do it. Cause I don't like, cause I don't know.

I just don't like to get territorial and marketing really should be helping full funnel with some things. And so, yeah, put that in. The only, now here's the issue, not the issue, but like these improvements right now are kind of coming like out of thin air. Like maybe there was logic, but like, I don't know what it is.

So what I like to do, and what's missing from here, is a whole other tab. I think you kind of have this here.

Vikash: No, this is just pulling in data from all the others.

Emily Kramer: Yeah, but, right, but for the improvements, I don't know why you're anticipating these improvements. So what I like to do is I like to make a tab that's called, Assumptions and this is where you, you connect your, your plans for projects.

I don't know why I'm typing this, whatever, and work to your forecast. And so here I felt the need to type and write at the same time. But in here you would say something like we're going to implement. Look at this is, this is so clever of me implement RevenueHero to improve web converter to improve.

Web to meeting conversion. This is saying I'm going to add this tool and then you have your months here. So January, February, March, I'm going to do this in March. Mm-Hmm, . And then I expect a 10% increase right out of the gate, and then I expect a 15% increase, and then it will just remain at 15% for the rest of the year, or not at 15%.

Sorry. It'll just remain, there will be no, like you'll get the improvement and then it will just stay, you know, stay like that, so. Got it. Yeah. So what's the improvement that you're going to get from this? So it's actually saying what are the big projects and big things we're doing, and what is that going to affect?

So you can do this in a more sophisticated way. I'm like adding this in, but you can, you know, have like, well, you can actually map this out, like traffic to form fill, and then, you know, conversion rate or however you have it stated your thing, conversion rate. I don't, I don't know that these are the exact ways you phrase the stages, but you get the idea and then say, well, what am I going to do to improve this?

So I'm going to do this and then you have your months and then you have your things and then you feed that into the model. So this is what people don't do is they don't connect their assumptions or their, their increases, which you have like in blue. They don't connect them to what's actually going to happen and why.

And so you can say you could then have a category for web traffic improvements. And that's when you can say. That's when you can say things like we are going to, well, there's going to be a seasonality negative impact in I got to add June so I can do this in the summer. So we're going to do minus 10%.

That's what we've seen in the past. We're going to do a, so mapping out the assumptions like this is actually where I start. Because I'm connecting the dots between my plan and my forecast. So maybe I start by building out the mechanics of this model. So I put in the current performance, I build out the do nothing.

And then I'm coming in here, I'm putting in my assumptions and I'm saying, based on the work I'm going to do, what's going to happen. And then I might say, and for everything else, you're just saying, well, you know, let's keep it at the base base level, or like, let's have no change. Or you can say And in here is where you can also include spend paid spend.

And so I categorize these things. And when I'm thinking about these things, there's, there's another way to map your work or your plans for the year is to say, there are really only four ways to drive more revenue growth. There are four ways to grow. And those ways are to increase top of funnel with same segment slash product.

So you're in the same slash market in the same market. You're going to, you're going to grow top of funnel. That's one way to grow. So this is, there's really only, there's four. The other way is to increase top of funnel from new segments.

And so that's like, we're launching a new product. We're launching to a new ICP. We're launching in a new market. You, you get it. And then it's to increase efficiency, which is conversion rates. And the, I'll call them, I always just call them the cost pers, like the cost per lead, the cost per whatever.

And then there's to increase dollars per customer. And this is like, you increase the ACV. Yep. The you change the, change the mix of SMB and enterprise. Like all of these things are, you do more upsell, like all of those things are going to do that. So there's these four ways. So another way to categorize this.

Even before you get here is to say what are we doing to increase the top of funnel with the same segment? Not every little thing i'm not going to go in here and be like we're going to use You know, but like, well, we're going to do better on LinkedIn. We're going to do better on paid search. We're going to start to drive more referral traffic.

We're going to, you know, start doing outbound other. So you, you put all these things in and then you map it to the assumption. So this is how I'm, I think about it. I take my work, I put it in these categories. Then I say, well, what individual lever is it going to impact? I start adding numbers month by month.

And then when I'm doing my forecast, I'm much like you're doing, but these now become connected to the assumptions tab. This assumptions tab is the most important part. It's, you know, the, the forecasting part, the getting the math right, the getting the spreadsheet, right. That's like, you know, thing of itself.

Yeah. But if you don't get your assumptions, right, or you overstate the amount of growth you're going to have, if you start making wild changes and improvements everywhere to every, to every funnel stage conversion rate, to volume at the top of funnel, to spend volume, you're going to start to get crazy growth that's impossible because there's no way to improve all four of these things in equal measure every month, all the time, especially with a small team.

So that's like at a macro level, like missing that tab, you're doing the right things in the forecast and you have the right idea, which is like, okay, well, let's see what would happen if we improve this conversion rate here. But what you don't have is like, why that's going to happen.

Vikash: And that's the

Emily Kramer: connective tissue.

Vikash: I have, I have one, like sort of like a very probably a basic question, but when it comes to say like some of the really big projects, right? Like, say, for example and, and let's say you're doing this for the first time, right? Like, say, for example, events is one such thing, right? Like you're going to the, you're sponsoring booths, you're that sort of stuff going to inbounds, all that stuff.

This is the first time I'm going. Right. But you don't know like what sort of numbers to expect from it. Yeah, or maybe you're doing a virtual summit Right. How do you sort of think about that? Especially if you have to put in assumptions in terms of like hey, this is how it's going to impact and all this stuff Because you don't have historical numbers right at best you You can talk to some of your friends and other companies and see what, what they're seeing.

Like how do you sort of approach that?

Emily Kramer: Yeah, for sure. So first off, the, before you even go to the conference, like say you're doing a big thing at Inbound, the first thing you should do is say, well, what parts of the funnel are we trying to affect? Like, what are our goals? And then that's the lever when you're making that assumptions tab, which I can go back to.

When I go back to this assumptions tab again, this is a mess right now, but like if I go back and I say, well, this is going to increase like, we're going to have people fill out forms right away. So, actually, like, if I look at the conservative forecast, I might say, remember how I was like, breaking this traffic number down, or this leads number down.

Now I have a top of funnel source. That is different. So now, like, I don't have events on here. I need to have events on here and events, like maybe at events, you're just collecting, like you're making them fill out a form right away. And so you're considering them MQLs. Maybe they're not, I'm not necessarily saying you should auto MQL everyone at an event.

But either way, if it, if it just goes straight to MQL, you just like if this is actually a good thing to call out, if you, if you just are going to have events, events, And every, ah, that doesn't work here, but if everyone from, you'd have to make another section, but if everyone auto MQLs, then you just put the number of leads as the same as the number of MQLs.

Does that make sense? And you have 100 percent conversion, or you put that you have 100 percent conversion rate. That's all I'm trying to say. It's it's hard to like make changes in real time to someone else's model. I'm like, I don't know, but that's, but you know what I mean? Like, you don't want to put, like, let's say this was just for events.

Like if you were just putting an event, you don't want to put zero here. Cause that's going to mess up your mess up your whole forecast. So you just would want to make it the same.

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Vikash: Yeah, if it just

Emily Kramer: starts at that stage, if you're skipping funnel stages of certain activities, skip funnel stages, you just want to, you know, do that.

Like, for instance, well, that's a whole other podcast on how you do this when you're doing a lot of outbound, but that's. You need to so you're saying, I don't have historical data. So 1st, you say, where in the funnel is this going to impact things? And then you say, well, looking at past activities that we've done, like, last time we did a big project, maybe it was in a different area, but the only the largest swing.

Let me back up. Let's say you think that because of this, you're going to drive more top of funnel because of this big project, you're going to drive more top of funnel leads in that month. You want to look at in the past, what is the biggest swing or the biggest amount of growth you've ever gotten on the conversion rate from what, like, again, this isn't applying to events, but from web to form fill.

Ever in 1 month, what was increased? The biggest increase we've ever gotten. And so for that, I'm going to go back to my current performance and I'm going to start looking at this conversion rate from traffic to leads. And I mean, you have it flat here, but let's say there was a month. That's 4 percent and then you look back.

What did we do in that month? Oh, that's the month. We had a big. You know, we made a big change on our website here. And so then you would say the biggest swing we can get is, you know, going from 3 to 4. And so you'd say, well, do we think that this change is going to be that big or not? So you may not have event data, but you do have data, presumably.

For that stage of the funnel. And you can look at the swings or you're like an econ person. Like you can look at the kind of elasticity there. Like what's the most we've ever gotten to move before. And how does this compare to that? That is probably more effective than. Going and talking to other people because your business is so unique.

And so you don't have this traffic broken out. We talked about that, but you can have sort of an events, you know, you add in an events line item and you're like, well, what's the biggest traffic increase we've ever had before? Okay. We've increased it 25 percent month over month. How did we do that? What happened?

Okay. Well, then we think that it's going to be 10 percent in this month. And it's a one time, it's a one time thing.

Vikash: Okay. Makes sense. Does that make

Emily Kramer: sense?

Vikash: Yeah, yeah, I think, I think that makes sense. Hopefully then, like hopefully if you're capturing all the data and probably for the next big swing that you're big bet that you're doing, you probably have some historic data and you can start using this data into the next Yeah,

Emily Kramer: you, what you have, and I did this in the wrong tab, but like, what you have here is you should, by looking at historical performance, it's easier to see in what you've done here, you have all of these different growth rates.

And so it's really useful, isn't to say in the month that we had 7. 76, that's the highest, what happened? Oh, we did all of these things. And, and so that will then give you some sense of what's the maximum impact this could have. Like, of course, sometimes you're going to do even better than you did before, but the conservative estimate is to say, so max, not the conservative, even the upside estimate is to say like, you know, We're going to have another best month ever, or we're going to have a 10 percent best month ever on this thing.

So it's just like, you're looking at the flex or the elasticity or the ranges that you've had before. So what you've done here is you've said, this is an average. If you're taking, you're taking an average of the growth, what you could also do. It's not letting me change this, but what you could do is you could also do the formula and look at the range here, or just even put like the, You could put the low.

Okay. It's not letting me change the sheet, but you could put the low and the high. So you have the average and then you have the low and the high. And like, if you were planning to have a really great month or a big month on standard or a big month on top of funnel. Put in the high from last year. Does that make sense?

Vikash: Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think it really helps to have a good understanding of like, what is the range, like what is the low and what is the max that you can get? And then sort of like probably have a have a conversation internally and see, like, is that actually possible for this big bet that we're taking and then sort of decide based on that.

Emily Kramer: Yeah. So it's guesswork, right? But that's why you're looking at the range of what's happened before. And saying like, you know, the, the, the justifiable thing to put in the forecast is not higher than the highest, you know, the highest part of the range, or maybe it is. And then if you outdo it and it becomes now you have a new high.

Right? So that's kind of how I think about it. Again, this relies on historical data. If you've never ever done it before, it is really difficult to make a forecast like this. But even if you just have one or two months data, you can certainly try. But you've got to take some guesses and that's why you're going to make three different versions.

And it's a model where you can change the inputs, where you can see, okay, if it improves conversion rate or it improves leads. Any of these inputs, if it improves it by 10%, what happens? If it improves it by 30%, what happens? So that's why you're making a model where you can change the numbers and see in real time, immediately this number, I changed this number and the revenue number goes to this.

So that's what you're doing with making a model. You're making a dynamic thing where you can put in a bunch of ranges and see what happens. And you're like, you know, and that's when you're like, Oh, to get to this revenue number that came from sales and finance. I would have to have 100 percent growth in all of these areas every month for the whole year.

And that's not possible. So like, you know, you're, you're able to play with it. And that's the point of this. And that's also, what's fun because you can come in here at any time and say, if we increase spend in this month by this, this is what we're going to expect. And that's a powerful thing for prioritization because you're saying I could either do that or I could go to this event.

And if I do the event, this is what I expect. And if I do this, this is what I expect. And, you know, here's the outcome. The one thing I just want to caveat for people that might be, you know, watching this that have done forecasts in the past or be wondering about cohorted versus in month data that this is in month you're this is assuming that everything that starts in this month closes in this month.

There's also cohort reviews, which say. Which help you say like, what's the, what month did the top of funnel originate for closing? That's a whole other thing and a whole other topic, but just know that this is in month.

Vikash: Got it. Okay. I guess that there is so much about

Emily Kramer: forecasting. I might've just made people more confused, but like I can summarize.

Vikash: No, like when you say cohorts, like immediately I can imagine in my, like, the, the first thing that comes to my mind is like that Mixpanel's. Like cohort chart that they have, like, what is the user retention rate, that sort of thing, and I can immediately sort of, Think of like all the complexities that's probably.

Oh, this is me.

Emily Kramer: This is when you maybe start graduating out of a spreadsheet for a forecast and start to go into a BI tool. But basically it's saying, if you have a really long sales cycle, like a 90 day, six month, whatever sales cycle, the things you do in June at the top of funnel don't affect revenue until if you've six months sales cycle until December, and so your forecast.

I'll take that into account, but let's not worry about that right now. For a lot of these businesses where you're, yeah, your ACV and your close time is 30 to 60 days, you can kind of like You know, do it this way. And it's, again, this is a proxy. Like, again, this is a lot of why it's hard for, again, this is another podcast topic and we're running low on time here, but this is why when people are like, should marketing get commissioned to, I'm like.

This is a complex beast. This isn't just like, did you hit the quota? There's so many things going on, both short and long term that you're doing so many long term things you're doing. And so it becomes just like really complicated. Whereas sales is laser focused on like, can I close this and on a revenue this quarter, marketing is focused on again, the short term, the longterm, the efficiency, and so it's just.

There's so much there that it's, that it's difficult to, to measure success in that way. And so that's why I recommend setting all of these types of goals and measuring marketing based on their contribution to all of those things.

Vikash: It's almost like an equation.

Emily Kramer: Yeah. It's like a really complicated equation.

In a spreadsheet like this that gets even more complicated. I have a template for this forecast, a spreadsheet template, a basic one that I made with a company called Recalc, which is a training. Training company last year. So I have a template in my newsletter that you'll be able to find as well.

And so, like, there are places you can start here, but I think it's just helpful to think about. Okay. Well, like, let me back up. What am I trying to do here? I'm trying to say, based on the activities that I have planned for this year, how is that going to. Increase volume at the top of funnel or down funnel, and how is that going to increase conversion rates?

So starting if you're doing inbound, you're starting very top of funnel with web traffic. If you're doing a lot of outbound, you're starting a little bit later down funnel. So that's why. But again, we're not going to go too much into that, but, like, you know, what is the work I'm going to do? How is it going to affect those levers?

Yeah, the top of funnel, the spend and the conversion rates. Back to those four big ways to grow and then feed that into here's what happened in the past. And if I improve it, because I'm going to do those things, what happens? And so that's the exercise. And so if you get stuck in the weeds, it's like, come back.

Here's what happened before. I'm going to do this additional work. It's going to impact these parts of the funnel. Let's put that into the math and see how it maps, you know. So that's like the, the thing is, is like, stop, take a breath, go back. What am I trying to do here? Cause I think you can get lost in the lost in the sauce here and lost in the details and trying to make it overly complicated.

When really, and also I think when you're making this, like, don't be afraid to like, go to the finance person, go to someone on the data team. Like you don't have to sit in a vacuum and get confused about how to do this in a spreadsheet. Look at other examples, like have someone that's amazing with spreadsheets, help you explain what you're trying to do and have them do that.

Just because I say bottom up forecast is done by marketing, it doesn't mean like you have to do this in a vacuum. What's done by marketing is figuring out those assumptions and figuring out here's what I'm planning to do and here's where in the funnel I think that will affect and by how much. And if you need someone to help you in the company, ask for help.

I'm trying to build this bottom up forecast. Here's why. Here's what I know. And like, can you help me build this spreadsheet? Because there are, if you have a finance person, they're going to be able to do this lightning fast. So if you don't have a finance person, you probably have a part time finance person or something like that, who can, who can help you here.

So this is a massive topic. I can talk about this for days and days. People would probably get really bored. I probably wouldn't. I like this stuff. But hopefully this is some of a glimpse of, of what you can do with forecasting. I

Vikash: love this. I love this. I, I love spreadsheets. Like if you talk to some of my colleagues they'll probably tell you that like I, I drown in them sometimes.

Sometimes sometimes just too much. Yeah, that's

Emily Kramer: when you got to come back. Remember what you're trying to do, like what you're trying to do here, which is you're trying to say what's possible. And is this even worth, are these things even worth doing? You're never going to get the number exactly right.

Vikash: Makes sense. Emily. I think this has been great. I want to make sure like I, I asked like one last question. Before we before we wind up the, this episode based on, you know, what you've seen, what you've you know let me back up based on what you've seen when you're advising marketers, right when they're doing the planning, the forecasting and all this stuff I know we talked a lot are there any gotchas that, you know marketers need to think about when it comes to planning?

Emily Kramer: Yeah, I'll just kind of recap some of the ones that I've said. One of the gotchas is you just take that number from finance, sales, leadership, and you work backwards.

From the very top of revenue and say, how many MQLs do I need? Don't do that. That's just like, first of all, MQLs are, have lots of issues because you can kind of just change the threshold for them. But like, that's not how you plan. Like that is check the box planning. That's not going to help you. Know what you need to get done next year.

And that's really the point. The point is, know what I can do next year to help hit the goals that we've set as a company and know what I'm going to do next year to move the needle and make sure I'm doing big bets and focusing on impact and not a bunch of random acts of marketing.

The other mistake I see is the one that we talked about. You make this great plan for the work you're going to do. Like, here's all the work we're going to do. And then you do some sort of forecasting. And like I just said in this one, like, you don't connect the dots. And this is fake, so it's hard to have that dot connection.

But the dot connection is your assumptions. And so remember that. You take your work that you're planning to do, you have assumptions on how that's going to impact your metrics, and then you plug it into a model. If you can't make the model, you can just have that list of assumptions. And say like, here's what we think is going to, you know, like, we think that this is going to cause an increase here, and this is going to cause an increase there, and maybe you don't get a final number, but at least you know what you're trying to impact, right?

And at least you have, you know, have that. And so I think it's really important to list out. These assumptions as part of your plan. So in your plan and saying, like, here's our strategy for the year. Here are our goals. Here's the link to our budget and the number we think we can hit, or the numbers we think we can hit.

But here's also the assumptions that went into it and the budget that went into it and the head count plan that went into it. And then here are our big projects for the year. And so that's like, what I consider being a plan. So the mistake is that you don't include all those things or they don't connect together.

The other mistake is that you get lost in the weeds on planning or I'm following a company wide process that doesn't lead you to actually think about how are we going to win on marketing? How are we gonna make a big impact versus just doing a list of things that other teams requested that we do, which again, I call random acts of marketing.

So you want to be saying, well, what are the biggest things we can do to stand out? Not going to copy what other companies are going to do based on our company's unique strengths. What can I do to set us up for the biggest, best, greatest growth year ever? Right? So that's, that's what I see most often.

Vikash: Makes, makes a lot of sense. I think one last thing that I would that I probably wanted to. It just hit me while you were talking. I think attribution is sort of going to become like a big topic. I know when I, when I start sharing this on LinkedIn and I'm sure people on LinkedIn are going to be like attribution is important and all that stuff.

So I hope people figure out the attribution side of things and then come over here. I

Emily Kramer: purposely dodged that, you know, I tried to say a little bit about like, well, this is the marketing part of the funnel and this is the sales part. And we're making this simple with basically just inbounds. Attribution is a big piece here and adds a lot of complexity.

And so the best way to handle a lot of that is one of marketing's big impacts is, yeah, maybe there's directly sourced pipeline from inbounds. Or maybe they're helping with outbound now using various, you know, automated outbound techniques. Maybe they're involved there and there's direct marketing source pipeline, but marketing is a catalyst.

Like marketing is a catalyst throughout the entire funnel. If used effective, if marketing is used effectively, it's a catalyst throughout the entire funnel. So it's not, where did this come from? It came from, you know, the person that, so it's where it's not, where did it come from internally really to me?

It's like. Everybody's like marketing is supposed to be catalyzing growth. So there's the marketing source pipeline, and then there's the marketing influence pipeline. If you're really trying to break it down, which is like, what are all the touches that happened? But a lot of that's really cumbersome. So I think there needs to be this recognition that marketing's only contribution isn't marketing sourced pipeline.

Marketing is a catalyst. And so that is a larger internal problem that you have to get across. So even if attribution isn't perfect. This is the forecast. So this, I'll say this one more way. And then we're just so everyone knows we've, we're now 30 minutes over. That's how like stoked I am on this topic and excited to talk about it.

And there's so much to learn, but the forecast should not be used to set people's compensation. That's a different exercise altogether. Planning quotas and things like that is different than this. This is a bottom up forecast for the purpose of saying, it's not for the purpose of saying like, whose attainment is what it's, it's for the purpose of saying what's possible if we do these things.

And so then again, I talked a little bit about how I think tying marketing to anything, but top line revenue is really complicated, but like the attribution here doesn't really matter to me. I'm not using this to say, I mean, yes, maybe I'm using this to say like, here's what marketing can help with, but I'm using this as a business at like a high level to say what's possible if we do a lot of these great things.

And so what happens is these become mired in attribution conversations. And yes, you have to look at historical data somehow, just make sure you're looking at historical data in some consistent way that you've used attribution consistently, and that you understand how it was used. But this isn't about like, if, if your forecasting becomes about territorialism and who's contributing, what you are missing the point.

And the point is like, what is possible if we do all of these things and are these things going to get us where we need to go and then later on, you can then finesse this if, you know, there's compensation needs for sales and others. And so that's. I don't know. That's probably an oversimplistic way of saying this, but like, be consistent about how you do attribution and recognize that marketing is a catalyst to everything that goes on in the market side and your company will be in a better spot.

Vikash: Amazing. Emily, this has been amazing. Thank you so much. I know we, we are like way over time.

Emily Kramer: Oh, it's fine. Like I said, I'm having fun and I didn't have another meeting for a little while. So this is, you know, this is what I do for fun. So, you know, here we are. I do other things for fun. Don't worry.

Vikash: Amazing. Thanks a lot, Emily. It's, it's been great. I learned a ton. I hope our viewers and audience listeners also learned a ton just like I did. Thank you so much.

Emily Kramer: Thank you for having me.

Ep10 - Marketing Planning & Forecasting with Emily Kramer - Part 2

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