The season of planning and budgeting sales and marketing for the next year is upon us. It’s quite a stressful activity which requires serious consideration, analysis, and research to ensure smooth growth in the next year.

There is no better time to revisit some great advice on budgeting sales and marketing from a strategic perspective in a previous Cerius post – Is Your Marketing Budget Allocated Strategically? For companies with complex sales cycles here are a few tips for getting the plans aligned strategically.

Sales and marketing budget tip #1: Consider the proportions

What percent of the marketing budget and other resources are being devoted to these strategic areas? Does the mix make sense considering the maturity of the market and your sales strategy?

1. Environmental marketing – those programs aimed at building brand awareness; the “air cover” tactics.
2. Demand generation marketing – those tactics and programs devoted to obtaining and nurturing leads.
3. Channel readiness – those programs and materials that enable the sales force (direct and channel) to sell effectively.

Sales and marketing budget tip #2: Know the cost per lead

Calculate the costs per lead and cost per qualified lead from historical data. If you know how many leads and qualified leads are required for a Win you have a way to determine, roughly, what the demand generation budget should be. This assumes you also know how many Wins you need to achieve your revenue target.

Sales and marketing budget tip #3: Share data

Historical sales and marketing conversion data should reveal how many leads and opportunities are going to be required to meet the revenue target. Next step is for Sales and Marketing to negotiate who is responsible for generating those leads. In most companies, the lead generation responsibility will be split between Marketing, Sales, channel partners, and strategic partners. Many market and budget factors can prevent Marketing from generating all the leads that will be necessary.

Sales and marketing budget tip #4: Get serious leads

Are you using valuable Sales resources to nurture leads? If a buyer has stalled – stopped progressing through the buying process – Sales should disengage and recycle the prospect back to Marketing for further nurturing until the buyer is ready to get serious.”

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