Match Your Budget to Your Market Position

Tech marketers must balance the need for quick results with the challenges of getting the budget to support essential long-term campaigns, all while facing challenges such as:

A leadership team with ideas for marketing that are often not based on metrics or experience.
CFOs who do not understand marketing’s contribution to the company’s success.
Conflicting priorities of both quick-win revenue strategies and pushing to implement scale-building activities.
Being asked to be first to cut budget in times of economic headwinds.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

In the past, marketers might have argued that some marketing activities were too difficult to measure. But today's successful marketers know that there are ways to measure the impact of all their marketing activities, and they use this data to improve their results and justify their spend.

Impact and Result

The blueprint aims to guide CMOs at every stage in their mission to become full participants in their company’s growth. It also provides them with the tools they need to defend their budgets in the face of adverse economic headwinds. The blueprint outlines strategies for CMOs to earn respect and become integral parts of their company’s growth. Successful CMOs speak the language of metrics, set up metric-driven organizations, collaborate well internally, and balance short-term revenue campaigns with long-term brand building.

Match Your Budget to Your Market Position Research & Tools

1. Match Your Budget to Your Market Position Deck – Create a transparent, aligned, and agile budget to build your status as a respected leader and to drive company growth.

This deck helps CMOs review budgets, create forward-looking strategies, prioritize spend, and pivot to low-effort, high-return campaigns. It's the perfect tool for CMOs who want to get the most out of their budget.

2. Marketing Budget Worksheet for Software & Technology Companies – A comprehensive tool that allows you to create a marketing budget based on your annual recurring revenue goals, the size of your company, and your average annual contract value.

Built specifically for SaaS and tech companies, our worksheet lets you create a data-backed marketing budget tailored to your business growth goals. Just input key revenue metrics like your ARR target, company size, and average contract value. Our worksheet calculates your recommended budget as a percentage of ARR based on benchmarks.

3. Marketing Budget Presentation Template – A template to show the budget allocation compared to benchmarks and the alignment of the marketing budget to the company goals and other teams who need marketing support.

With designated sections for company goals, marketing objectives, cross-departmental alignment, budget allocation, and benchmark comparisons, this template provides a streamlined framework to demonstrate the strategic value of your marketing investments.

Match Your Budget to Your Market Position

Build a flexible budget by aligning to business goals and justifying ROI.

Analyst Perspective

To be a successful CMO, speak the language of metrics, collaborate with colleagues, and lead with data.

Shashi Bellamkonda

Principal Research Director
SoftwareReviews Advisory

Marketing leaders of technology companies, regardless of whether the company is a startup, venture capital–funded, or a large multi-billion-dollar company, are successful if they can demonstrate the value of marketing to the company's goals through proper budgeting, data, and analytics.

If a marketing leader cannot demonstrate the ability of marketing to drive revenue and marketing-influenced pipeline, their budget will be challenged and others will lack confidence in them, which could lead to the marketing leader being excluded from board meetings or product and strategy discussions.

To become better C-suite and leadership team members and be recognized as forward-thinking leaders, chief marketing officers (CMOs) who have earned the respect of the CEO, the board, and their peers set their strategy by:

Speaking the same language about metrics and agreeing on revenue influenced by marketing.
Setting up a metric-driven marketing organization and determining the contribution of marketing activities to revenue dollars or retention.
Collaborating well with colleagues, especially the chief finance officer (CFO), and taking the time to do internal marketing so the company knows the real contribution of marketing based on data for credibility.
Becoming seen as a marketing leader who can lead both short-term revenue-generating campaigns and long-term investments in brand-building and scale-building activities.

This blueprint aims to guide CMOs at every stage in their mission to become full participants in their company's growth. It also provides them with the tools they need to defend their budgets in the face of adverse economic headwinds.

Match Your Budget to Your Market Position

Build a flexible budget by aligning to business goals and justifying ROI.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Tech marketers must balance the need for quick results with the challenges of getting the budget to support essential long-term campaigns, all while facing challenges such as:

A leadership team with ideas for marketing that are often not based on metrics or experience.
CFOs who do not understand marketing’s contribution to the company’s success.
Conflicting priorities of both quick-win revenue strategies and pushing to implement scale-building activities.
Being asked to be first to cut budget in times of economic headwinds.

Common Obstacles

The value of marketing to a business is not always appreciated. Leaders in technology companies who do not interact with customers often have inaccurate ideas about the value of marketing and its budget.

The marketing budget gets allocated top down by the CFO and that process is not always collaborative.
There is often a disconnect between the marketing team and the finance team, which can make it difficult to track and measure the ROI of marketing campaigns.
The time spent analyzing marketing results and correlating them to the budget is often limited.

SoftwareReviews’ Approach

This SoftwareReviews methodology and tools will guide you through creating and managing a budget that will work despite adverse conditions.

Review your current budget and create a strategy to optimize it.
Create a forward-looking budget strategy that focuses on target markets and segments with a high yield of revenue.
Pivot to increasing low-effort and high-return campaigns and activities.
Prioritize spend when the budget needs adjustment.

SoftwareReviews Insight

SaaS companies allocate marketing budget in many ways

CMOs: Be data-driven, proactive, and growth focused to secure funding.

Organizations typically follow one of these paths. Large organizations may have all these scenarios.

Type	Responsibility	Company Stage	Marketing Maturity	Product-Market Fit
Top-Down Budget	The CEO or the CFO make the decision on how much budget marketing gets.	Early-stage, boot-strapped	Low. Marketing is considered a service center and has no revenue goals.	Low. The company is still experimenting with the product-market fit.
Externally Influenced budget	CEO talks to peers in the industry, searches externally, and makes a decision without complete context.	Early-stage, boot-strapped	Low confidence in the marketing leaders. Performance is usually not transparent.	Product-market fit is still not achieved; there are symptoms of high churn.
Peer-Led Budget	The marketing budget is influenced by the chief operating officer (COO)/chief revenue officer (CRO)/chief growth officer (CGO)	Early-stage to mid-stage where the CRO/CGO is responsible for revenue. Usually Funded Round A or B.	Likely an outbound sales lead organization with marketing resources highly focused on sales enablement rather than new acquisition.	Product-market fit is achieved, and the company is in a growth mode.
Growth-Based budget	The CEO and the board lay the growth goals for the company and ask the CMO to present a budget request.	This is typical of high-growth mid-stage companies and well-run early-stage companies.	Extremely mature organization and high confidence in the marketing leader.	Product-market fit is strong.

Not getting measurable ROI?

Tightening budgets can result in competition for funding

Marketing executives must manage their budgets with the same level of scrutiny and efficiency as a startup CFO, or they may face challenges:

No metric collection processes or dashboards are in place. Getting metrics is a long process that is not timely.
You are not able to connect the marketing programs and spend to the company’s goals.
Everything is on autopilot. The budget is completely allocated and there is no flexibility to change strategy and modify spend based on data.

“CMOs, while known for nurturing the craft of marketing, must also be champions of disciplined use of data and technology to connect the end-to-end customer journey across business functions.”

– Janet Balis, Harvard Business Review

Follow these guidelines to create a budget that gets results

Transparent
Metrics are tracked and easily visible to enable decision making. They are shared extensively as a dashboard, and all systems are connected.
Aligned
Budget allocation is aligned with the company's goals, with a clear distinction between revenue-generating efforts and experiments.
Collaborative
The budget is discussed with other leaders, and they support it. Trust and cooperation are fostered.
Cohesive
The marketing team is fully engaged, informed, and aware of the budget and objectives.
Agile
Circumstances are constantly changing, so the marketing budget should be adaptable to be reallocated as needed.

Align every marketing dollar spent to revenue

Prove to stakeholders that marketing is an investment that makes money and contributes to business growth.

CMOs who align with the CEO, make data-driven decisions, and measure key metrics demonstrate management prowess and achieve better results.

The leadership team is aligned and supportive.
The pace of getting to scale increases.
Key metrics can be reliably measured.
Management prowess is seen by the board.

“Good marketing is not about winning creative awards or telling interesting stories. [It’s about] delivering customers and sales.”

– Jill Avery, Harvard Business Review (2017)

Marketing budgets should not be opaque or unclear

Ensuring budget transparency and demonstrating the revenue returns generated are crucial for maintaining and growing your investment.

Marketing leaders need to improve budget visibility and accountability and avoid these pitfalls:

Marketing leaders may not prioritize monitoring the budget and may not have a clear view of the marketing expenses and results, preventing them from being able to quickly make changes.
Other members of the leadership team may not be able to articulate a clear understanding of the marketing budget and the results.
In business reviews, marketing leaders hear the words, “I am not sure how Marketing is contributing to revenue.”
Marketing and Finance code items very differently, and a lot of time is spent reconciling the line items

Seek input from other leaders on planning.

Talk to Finance about what you want to achieve in the next year and how you plan to do it before you start developing your budget and plans.
Get the Sales leader's input on marketing-influenced revenue and sales enablement needs.
Learn more about the specific communication needs of Customer Success for onboarding, expansion revenue, and churn prevention.
Partner with the Product leader to ensure that the product roadmap and marketing needs are aligned for next year.
Have a brainstorming session with the Technology team to generate new ideas for marketing stack technologies that can improve marketing efforts.
Have a strategic conversation with HR about employer branding and training needs.

SoftwareReviews Insight

The first job of the CMO is to understand the corporate goals and make sure the marketing projects address the CEO’s vision before proposing anything else. The marketing leader must align with the CEO, considering the CEO’s background – sales, finance, or product focused.

Budget depends on multiple factors

Budgeting is not a one-size-fits-all exercise

Spend in Marketing has the potential to attract customers with a higher lifetime value.

Choose the right set of key metrics

The journey begins by assessing performance against key front-office metrics as a function of startup phase.

Table shows Key Metrics at Early-stage, mid-stage and At-Scale stages. Leaders assess prior startup-phase metrics along with current-stage metrics

See Optimize the Right Metrics to Scale Your Business

A solid foundation helps you grow to a strong superstructure

Track sales and marketing spend ratios and compare to the pipeline created

	Sales and Marketing Spend (% of ARR)	Marketing % of Sales & Marketing Budget	Pipeline Sourced by Marketing
At-Scale $100M ARR	25%-35%	22%	24%
Mid-Stage $10M-$100M ARR	60%-70%	29%	39%
Early-Stage <$10M ARR	70%-95%	42%	42%

SoftwareReviews Insight

Early-Stage: Brand strategy and value proposition are expressed in customer-centric terms. A lead generation engine is in place.
Mid-Stage: Focus is on customer marketing, retention, and continuing to drive ARR.
At-Scale: More growth is driven from existing customers.

Annual contract value (ACV) determines sales and marketing budget mix

How marketing dollars are spent depends on the size of the contract. Here we analyze three models by their ACV.

Marketing Spend Distribution to ACV

	<$15K	$15-$75K	>$75K
Program Spend	52%	57%	33%
Marketing Resources	38%	33%	43%
Other Tech, travel, corporate	10%	10%	17%

Distribution of Spend for Marketing Program

	<$15K	$15-$75K	>$75K
Digital	44%	40%	22%
Content	7%	7%	10%
Events	28%	36%	42%
Other PR, Analyst, Partner	21%	17%	26%

Marketing Resource Allocation

	<$15K	$15-$75K	>$75K
Demand Gen.	52%	59%	52%
Sales Enablement	10%	13%	15%
Renewal	10%	5%	2%
Expansion	14%	9%	9%
Brand	14%	14%	22%

SoftwareReviews Insight

The ratio of payroll to program spend and where in program your marketing dollars go can determine the success or failure of the business. If the marketing team is top heavy and there are less marketing dollars for program spend, that means you will not be getting marketing-influenced contracts, which leads to higher customer acquisition cost.

Planning a Budget: Evaluating Current Needs and Future Goals

	1. Current-State Assessment	2. Future Planning & Optimization
Phase steps	1.1 Conduct a Marketing Audit 1.2.1 Collaboration – Finance 1.2.2 Collaboration – Sales 1.2.3 Collaboration – Customer Success 1.2.4 Collaboration – CIO/CTO 1.2.5 Collaboration – HR 1.3 Create a Model for High-Yield Marketing 1.4 Prioritize Strategic Resourcing	2.1 Build Team Motivation 2.2 Optimize Spend and Resources 2.3 Create a Strategy for Implementing Changes 2.4 Monitor and Reinvest in Successful Campaigns
Phase Outcomes	High-return opportunities identified Alignment with other leaders Identification of key target segments demonstrating stability in difficult conditions	Increased employee awareness of business priorities and challenges Optimized marketing budget to identify high-impact levers for saving Marketing assets, sales plays, and operational capabilities prepared to scale quickly