Divide Planning Duties

Marketing budget planning is not only the CMO responsibility. Assign responsibilities and deadlines to your marketing team members.

Marketing budgets require input from multiple team members. Channel owners know their numbers best - their conversion, CPA projections and cost estimations will be always more accurate than yours.

Whenever possible, make your team members line items or even categories owner. This will help you speed up with the process and build the culture of collaborative ownership.

Get rid of multiple planning spreadsheets

The biggest problem faced by CMOs: running budget planning through multiple spreadsheets. One for headcount costs, another shared with finance, and separate one shared with your marketing team. That makes consolidation a nightmare.

Solution: Use a Single Budgeting Tool

Use a single budgeting tool like Etropo that supports collaboration and category access control. Your team members input their numbers directly, with restricted access to sensitive data like headcount costs. Each line item should have the owner and you might have even owners for the whole category (like PPC), where all line items will be automatically assigned.

Give your team specific deadlines for preparing their expenses proposals
Use "line item status" (draft, pending approval, approved, rejected) to manage the internal marketing approval process