Show notes

TheNextCMO’s latest podcast is with Scott Todaro the co-founder and CMO of Plannuh. Scott has over 28 years of marketing experience, has managed hundreds of marketers, and taught marketing at the University of Lowell. This podcast discusses why a marketing plan is the most strategic document a marketer will produce all year, common mistakes marketers make when building a plan, and where to find the ultimate marketing planning template.

Useful links

Scott Todaro – https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-todaro-744a3/
The ULTIMATE Planning Template –https://info.plannuh.com/building-marketing-plans-that-win
For more info about Plannuh, check out our website 

Full Transcript

Kelsey Krapf 0:00
Welcome to the official podcast of the next cmo hosted by a Plannuh. The next cmo is a thought leadership podcast for those that are CMOS or want to become one. My name is Kelsey Krapf and I’m the senior marketing manager.

Peter Mahoney 0:16
And I’m Peter Mahoney. I’m the former CEO of Plannuh and welcome to the next cmo podcast.

Kelsey Krapf 0:37
This week we have planned his very own co founder and cmo as our guest. His name also happens to be Scott Peter. I think that’s our third Scott in a row here must be a marketing thing. I think

Peter Mahoney 0:48
so I think we’re gonna get a full house or something if you have three in a row or is that a different thing?

Kelsey Krapf 0:54
I don’t know. But Scott has over 20 years of marketing experience has managed hundreds of marketers, including myself, and as even a professor that taught marketing at the University of law. How’s that for an intro, Scott?

Scott Todaro 1:09
accurate?

Kelsey Krapf 1:11
Well, we really appreciate you taking the time. We know your time is very valuable. So wanted to dive into marketing planning. I know you just wrote a blog series on marketing planning. And we wanted to know why marketing planning is so important.

Scott Todaro 1:27
Well, I mean, it’s the most important thing you’ll be doing all year long. And you know, it’s interesting because, you know, having been in marketing for 28 years, you create that marketing plan 28 times over the course of your life. And you start to realize that if you don’t build it properly, your whole year will just be a bunch of rudderless marketing. You’ll find yourself just doing aimless campaigns and activities, and you really won’t have a full grasp on achieving your goals and so on. When you create your marketing plan, the most important thing is you start with your goals and you build everything that you are going to do over the course of the year in order to achieve those goals. And if you do that, and you house it in a in a document where everybody has access to it, and you refer to it constantly and you measure against the performance of that document, then that’s when you have a lot of success and it doesn’t mean that you won’t have to make changes over the course of the year there going to be a lot of economic and and you know, environmental things that will change the way that you’re approaching your your plan. But in order to start things out and align to those goals, it is absolutely critical that you build out a comprehensive plan.

Peter Mahoney 2:43
It’s got one of my favorite things that happens is when I asked a marketing professional to share their marketing plan with me and they share me their budget and get in I think people confuse the things right they think a budget is a plan of course it is Isn’t that and we’re gonna get into that sort of what’s inside a plan a little bit earlier. But but that may be one of the things that causes people to kind of D focus or not put enough emphasis on on their plan. But what do you think are the real reasons why people aren’t paying enough attention and putting enough a focus focus on the whole planning process?

Scott Todaro 3:26
Well, I mean, if we take it down to a practical level, Peter, and you know, I know you’ve been a CMO many times, the same thing happens, right? So if your calendar year type kind of company, you know, you start to roll into that September timeframe. And someone says, you know, we got to do planning for next year. And what ends up happening is that there are a bunch of tactical activities going on in marketing, and everybody’s very busy getting those tactics done, and all sudden, you know, the time starts wearing away and you have an executive team meeting that’s coming up in three days and before you know it, you will If everything into a PowerPoint deck, so you can go off to your executive team meeting and show that you’re going to do something for the next year. And a lot of times, what happens is that really the thought processes input into building that plan properly. So you there’s a lot of pressure on marketers, and because they do it quickly to satisfy a specific pain, which is that executive team meeting of that board meeting, they don’t have faith in it or trust it, which is why they don’t even go back to it after they roll it out to their team. The other thing is, they usually don’t collaborate with all the team members and they probably don’t do a healthy situational analysis. A lot of times they’ll start with last year’s plan. And so, you know, it’s really kind of a painful process to watch. You know, marketers kind of stumble through the most important activities they can do over the, you know, to set up their next year and get the team involved and get the team organized and unified around a set of goals. With strategies, they’re going to help achieve those goals. And you know, the legwork just doesn’t get done. And you know, this is why, you know, it’s important to be measuring things every year. So you can refer to them. It’s important to do a situational analysis really understand what you did well, what you didn’t do well, what you would like to accomplish. And a lot of teams just don’t do that they dive right into what campaigns am I going to do. And so they pull out the campaigns from last year. And to your point on the budget piece. Well, a lot of those campaigns, they were budget items associated with them. It’s all in a spreadsheet that said, your copy, paste, let’s redo that. Let’s add another 20%. You know, a budget to it. And so we’ll do a couple more campaigns, we’ll do the campaign’s bigger because we have additional budget to it done. And let’s move on to start going back to our tactical activities. It’s just it’s a recipe for disaster and you’ll find yourself in a lot of times, you know, marketers will come and CMOS will come into companies There’ll be a lot of pressure for lead gen, and not building that plan before you start doing a bunch of activities to create leads, really will lead you to not look at your target market properly, not look at the right messages that you need to get to that target market. And then think about what are those vehicles you’re going to use to generate those leads? Make sure that you’re generating enough, right making sure those goals are there and then measuring them properly. Yeah. It’s it’s amazing how little gets done, just because of the pressure and you know, the timeframes that people need to actually do this, right. I totally

Peter Mahoney 6:40
just had PTSD listening to that, Scott. And in some of it, especially when you talked about the idea that people put a lot of effort in trying to publish that document that like you said, it’s usually for some executive review or something like that, and I’m gonna date myself but back in the day It used to end up in a white binder somewhere sitting on top of a filing cabinet. And it would stay there for the whole year. Right? If you you literally codified this thing and print it out in paper. And and it would show up there. And every once in a while, you’d say, Hey, what did we say we do in the marketing plan, and it just wasn’t a living living document. And my theory is the reason why people point to their budget, when you say, Show me your plan, is that it’s the one thing that feels like it’s a little bit more dynamic, and interactive. It’s at least on the spreadsheet, in most cases, versus their marketing plan, which is typically a PowerPoint deck, or worst case is it’s it’s it’s printed out and paper in sitting in a white binder and someone’s empty office in the middle of a pandemic right now.

Kelsey Krapf 7:54
Scott, you mentioned one of the most common mistakes or I guess one of the mistakes is people know gold back to their plan, they don’t revise their plan, especially during you know, something like a pandemic. What are some other common mistakes that people typically make when they’re building their their marketing plan? And

Scott Todaro 8:10
I hate to say this because it sounds so incredibly obvious. But I can’t tell you how many plans I’ve seen where there are no goals like this, there are no goals like it. Like the they have not started to say, oh, what do we want to accomplish as a company? What is marketing’s responsibility to help achieve those company goals? Because usually, if a company sets six, seven goals over the course of the, for that following year, usually at least four of the marketing has to support right, whether it’s revenue or perception or something along those lines, marketing is gonna have to support those. So you start with those goals, and then you build your set of goals associated with it. And if you don’t have those goals, I don’t know how you assign a strategy. And if you don’t assign strategies, then what do you do then I guess you just doing some campaigns and if you do The campaign’s they could be comprehensive in nature and pull some of those strategies in by osmosis. But you’re not going to have the right number of campaigns in order to execute that strategy. So it’s a, it’s amazing that people don’t start with the goals. The other thing is that a lot of people, as Peter mentioned, will think that the, you know, if they list out a spreadsheet of all the things that they’re going to be doing over the course of the year, go to these 20 trade shows, and we’re going to launch we’re going to do 4000 tweets, and we’re going to do this and all these other things they write down on their spreadsheet, so they have their nice little checklist of activities. They think somehow by doing all this stuff, that eventually they’ll end up on top. And, you know, that’s kind of rudderless. I mean, it’s almost frightening, that you would manage yourself that way. I mean, I hope that every day when you get out of bed, you have some goals that you have for your life, that should translate into the marketing plan. So you know, the other thing is that You know, people will a lot of cases will not take into account their target audiences in the messages that need to go to those target audiences. That’s part of your plan. You can’t just say, I’m going to we’re going to do start with vehicles, like a lot of people say, well, we’re going to do this and because that’s the way the budget structure, right, that’s where the spend goes. So this is how much we’re spending in sem. Right? This is how much we’re going to be spending and trade shows. And because those align items, they put the budget against it. They say, Okay, well, how many of these can I do? Instead of thinking about it? What do I need? Who do I need to talk to? What do I need to accomplish with them? What do I need to say to them to get them to act? And then let’s, let’s figure out okay, what are the logical places where those people are, you know, now let’s use those vehicles to communicate those messages to get them to do what we need them to do. And we should say to Scott that I know we’ll reference it later, but I know we’re talking about all the problems there is a solution here and Meaning that you’ve done a really good job putting together some a guide on how you actually think through and build a winning marketing plan. And we’re gonna have a link to it in the show notes. So you’ll you’ll hear us whine about how not to do things here over the next few minutes. But be comforted in the fact that there is a good solution Scott has built over, you know, with his experience over the last few decades, and written it all down for us so, so make sure that you you take a look at that, in one of the things that you were just talking about here, Scott was, was strategy. And and I think people kind of confused things. And so we should just define some of these terms. So tell us about what what a marketing strategy is and how does it relate to your plan?

Yeah, so you know, a marketing strategy is just one of the elements of your plan. Right? Once you’ve established your goals, you need to be able to To set strategies to achieve those goals. Okay, so a strategy, a common strategy would be a lead generation strategy, a thought leadership strategy, a promotional strategy, if you’re in the b2c world, what is your promotional strategy? What’s your distribution strategy, all of these strategies now will morph and try to achieve the goals that you’ve set for yourself. Now, these are these are your approaches. That’s what a strategy is, it’s an approach to achieve the goal. And then you build your campaigns, you know, do your campaigns leverage these, you know, these strategies and build off these strategies. So that’s the difference. Your plan is your document. It’s your guide. It’s pulling everything together and creating consistency for it, and providing a roadmap for execution over the course of the year. It’s tying lots of elements into it. And so, you know, I think if you if you start to confuse what my marketing strategy is, that’s, that’s fine. But you know, Have you really well, that strategy is in place, why to achieve what goals? And then what am I going to do from a campaign standpoint in order to achieve to make sure that those that approach is implemented correctly?

Peter Mahoney 13:12
Yeah. And it’s actually I think, really useful to help people with maybe a couple of concrete examples. In the couple that I think of a lot are, you know, many people know of HubSpot as an example local Boston based company in the CRM and marketing space. In they have, you know, their goal is, of course, to drive growth. Their strategy to achieve that is to use content marketing, and what they term is inbound marketing to drive that growth. That doesn’t mean it’s the only thing they do, but that is their their general approach their thesis for how they should be driving growth. And if you compare that to someone like Asana, right, so Asana is a product lead growth company, knee and you’ve been hearing about them in the news lately, because they’re doing all sorts of exciting stuff. And they, so they have a very different strategy. So that means that their list of tactics are going to be quite different from the list of tactics and in HubSpot, and but I think putting some concrete examples out there. Some people may have an ABM strategy, they may have a brand strategy, they may have a customer hospitality strategy. But the point is that you can have multiple ones. But those strategies should be defined as the generalized approach the agreed upon approach that you’re going to use to achieve your objective. And without agreement of the strategy, people tend to go all over the place that that tends to be the problem.

Scott Todaro 14:48
Yeah, and you and the great thing is Peter, you brought up some a great example in HubSpot. Their strategies changed from year to year. I mean, their first strategy originally was a database generations strategy, right? They came up with the great like Raider was even before they had a product, and they just had all these people go in and give them their information. And they built this enormous database before they even came out with the book inbound marketing, which now became a thought leadership strategy. So your strategy each year can change. And, you know, companies, you know, as they evolve, you know, they may have multiple strategies, multiple product lines, different levels of maturity for those product lines, you know, services, things along those lines. And so you just, but you have to look at your business really understanding your business at its core and doing that situational analysis, looking at where you need to go as a business, those core goals and then figuring out how does that work? What is that strategy that will help us target the specific audience we want to go after? And what are those messages we need to help cap that off and pull them in? So that’s, that’s the essence of that upfront part of that plan. That’s the strategic element of it.

Kelsey Krapf 16:00
So when should you start, you know, building your marketing plan? I’m sure your sales today are rockin for about 2021 approaching very, very soon. But, you know, when when should you start building out your marketing plan? How far in advance?

Scott Todaro 16:15
Yeah, you honestly if you really want to do a correctly, you got to give it four months. Right? And and I think you know, people don’t they it’s all sudden it’s December 15. And they need to get a plan out the door, you know, they’re pitching it to somebody and you know, they’re working all weekend and they finish off 10 PowerPoint slides, because that’s about all an executive team can stomach and then they show their PowerPoint slides to their team. The reality is that you should be starting to do the situation analysis in September. You’ll get that point you have eight months of data over the course of the year. Most companies will have established what their goals are going to be for the following year already right because his plan that are being done. The finance team is already setting, you know what the budget parameters are going to be, you know, the CEO most most likely has already got a firm grasp on what they need to accomplish, based on board discussions that are going on. And so you need to get those goals from the CEO, you need to start having discussions with the CFO to make sure that they’re not going to give you you know, a light budget because otherwise that could change your strategy. You don’t have enough money to generate the leads or other things along those lines, you’re going to have to use, you know, mediums that are low cost, and that change the strategy, how you approach things that may be more, but thought leadership strategy, developing content as opposed to an advertising strategy. So there are a lot of ways that you you can approach it, but you should be starting at least four months in advance. You should be including all kinds of people on your team that have a stake in it and have them provided Their input, if they do, then they’re more apt to refer to the document. If you present it to them once, nobody will ever see it again, you can post it on the walls and then walk right by it. So it’s unfortunate, but you tend to find that a lot of marketers do not go back and look at their plans after they launch.

Peter Mahoney 18:19
So one of the things that would be helpful to frame out for people, Scott is just some of the major chunks of things. What are the big elements in a best practices plan that people should have and should be present? So as they’re thinking about framing this data together, what are the pieces do you want them to include in it?

Scott Todaro 18:38
Yeah, it you know, it’s interesting. It’s a very linear approach, and people don’t really look at it that way. But when you’re building out your plan, it’s very linear. Right? And I know you had mentioned that there’s a template that hopefully people can go back. I’m not gonna go through all the elements of it, but you got to start with your situation. You know, take a look at what are the numbers of how you perform This year with the resources you have, not the resources you thought you were going to have, but the resource you did have, because we all know we’d love to say that, you know, we hired everybody on time, and they were all star performers. And they all worked as well as they possibly could. So you’ve got to take the human element into it as well. So, you know, what did you have? And what you know, and what did you get as a result of that? And once you start looking that do some market research, what are the parameters without those external parameters that are associated with your planning? Is your competition starting to search? Is there a, you know, a market correction is your product starting to get to a level of maturity where you’re on the back end of a lifecycle for it and really bring all those elements into play? So you understand exactly what’s going on. You really can’t make decisions and you around goals and strategy unless you really understand your surroundings. Right? Once you have that information in get the Get those goals from the company align your marketing goals. And then once you have those in place now start building out your strategies. How do I achieve those goals? As I mentioned before target audience, you know, do a positioning statement every year is always a good activity to make sure it still has that alignment, you know, and build out your supporting messages. It’s a good app, if you have four months to do it. It’s a good activity to make sure that you’re really honing in on what’s working. And you can go back and look at the metrics to see which messages work best. And then really look at your product and service direction. Are you making sweeping changes? Are you launching new products? Are you launching new services associated with your brands or other things along these do a brand launch? All of these things have to be taken into account as far as your direction as a company, really do a deep competitive analysis, understand where the competition is? And what how they’re moving general direction Try to get input from external audiences to what they’re seeing and work on your packaging and pricing. I know a lot of marketing organizations don’t think that they own packaging and pricing, they do. And it’s really important that this becomes a marketing activity, you can’t really create your strategy if you’re not owning how you’re going to define and communicate the product, and how you’re going to price it. And so, I mean, how do you work back your, your numbers, if you don’t even know what your average deal size is based on where you’re pricing things? So that has to be an active discussion, there’s a lot of work that needs to go into pricing, you got to take in competitive factors, you got to take into profitability margin rates. So you got to talk with lots of people in order to get that information in. And then you know, you got to align with the sales strategy, right what’s what’s your distribution strategy, what’s your selling strategy? Are you doing indirect are you doing a direct strategy, like which which is All right, and then how does that all align with what you’re trying to accomplish from from a goal standpoint, and, you know, um, you know, I think then you just build out your campaigns. And you know, you’re not going to probably be able to build out all your campaigns. And you know, usually when people build out their plans and budgets, they will leave money for opportunistic marketing, things will pop up. Over the course of the year, you win some awards, you know, you, you stumble on a new market, you find a new use for your product. They’re all kinds of things that will happen. And there are two ways to approach and this goes back to your, your approach to your plan. If you want an attack strategy or reading react, right? If you do attack, then you know you line up every single dollar and when something better comes along, you cancel something that you don’t think is going to perform as well. And you can you supplant it. If you’re going to do reading react strategy, you build a baseline framework, you have your standard campaigns that you need to run in order to function. And then you watch to see how things materialize over the course of the year. And then you are agile, right? You make those adjustments as you move through it. So those are kind of the key things. And then

Peter Mahoney 23:19
the next thing he thinks, oh my god, Scott, you’re making me nervous. There’s a lot of work here.

Scott Todaro 23:24
It is a lot. It’s a lot. But you know, I mean, you, you got to be thinking about, you know, you timeframes for launching. And so this should be a calendar and you got to get your budget fit into all of these things. And then what are your metrics? What are you looking to accomplish and all those things go into a plan, you know, that is a well crafted plan. And it will help you communicate that to your team as to what they need to do in order to help you achieve it. So it’s a lot that’s why you need four months. Absolutely. And hopefully nobody’s scared. But you know, this is the hard work you put up front which will give you the results on the back.

Kelsey Krapf 24:03
Hopefully we have that meeting on the calendar then Scott to get that planner up and running. But um, I guess, when it comes to building the marketing plan, we talk a lot about marketers, you know, doing empty calorie marketing or you know, very tactical tasks, and who should be involved in building this marketing plan? Why should every marketer be thinking on a strategic front? And I guess, does everyone contribute to to building this out? Yeah,

Scott Todaro 24:32
yeah, you get everybody that has a stake in it to contribute. And you know, that sometimes that can be dysfunctional, because you want to give members of your team the opportunity to create their activities. The problem that you have those a lot of marketing organizations is set up by function, as opposed to being set up by strategies or campaigns or things along those lines. That would give us give you more visibility. So, you know, this is where, you know, if you’re a head of marketing, you’ve got to figure out how you pull this all together, whether you have somebody on your team that pulls it all together, or whether you are that linchpin that looks across each one of the functions and pulls the plant to get, but there’s got to be a common thread. And they all have to be building their plans off of a set of goals so, and strategies, they can come up with what they think are going to be the necessary tactical elements and any strategic ideas that they have that you know, could complement achieving those goals. But like I said, it has to be communicated from the top. Everybody has to be involved. They all have to, you know, provide their plans. And it all has to be stitched together to make sure you get maximum output.

Peter Mahoney 25:48
I should just say now, Scott, that obviously we do this podcast because we love to talk about this stuff, but we’re also in the business of communicating the cool stuff that we do in our value and And one of the things that we do end up doing when we engage with our customers is we help them through this process. So if you’re, you’re, you’re scared or quivering in the corner, shaking right now realizing all of this daunting stuff in front of us in front of you, it is certainly something that we, we help with people with a fair amount as they go through implementing our platform for for planning in in budgeting. So, just that brief commercial interlude. I do also want to ask a couple of questions about sort of operation once you get this up and running. So what one question is, how often should you be reviewing and tweaking and refining a plan in in the real world, Scott?

Scott Todaro 26:45
Yeah, all every day, every single day, you know, and I think the problem is you there’s no one place to store all this information, you know, today and so what ends up happening is you have your plans in a PowerPoint deck, you got your budgets in a spreadsheet, you’ve got ROI metrics spread across all these different systems. And you know, that really creates a lot of dysfunction. So you have to figure out a way the organizing it. And what I’ve traditionally done is once a week when we have our marketing team meeting, and I’m getting together with my direct reports, you know, we’ll sit down and we’ll walk through elements of the plan. We always start with the goals and we say, Hey, this is what we’re looking to accomplish. And now what progress did we make against those goals? So we take a look at the metrics, we see what campaigns we have coming up, and we see if those are still valid, you know, to help us achieve the goals, and that’s how you need to do it. You got to keep referring to that plan. And so it’s not easy to do. It’s, it’s people get busy and they lose focus on it. So you have to Bring them back to center on it otherwise gets lost. But it is amazing. If you keep going through that you’ll find that the people on your team will start to buy in, oh, why are we doing that that’s not the goal that we’re looking to achieve. And they’ll start policing everybody on their team as well as each other, to make sure that you always stay on course,

Peter Mahoney 28:20
I wanted to comment there to Scott that you talked about the fact that it’s a lot of work. And it can be a little bit tricky, but the reality is, if you’re a leader in a marketing team, it is literally your job. Your job is building and executing a plan. Now, sometimes that means you’re going to do some individual elements of work, but the overriding thing, the thing that you’re on the hook for is building and making sure the plan gets executed so that you achieve your objectives. It’s kind of that simple. So I know it can seem like a lot of work, but it is the central part of your job. That’s important. Also, we should just ask, I know the idea of having This agile approach to planning that you’re advocating is probably helpful when you’re dealing with pandemic land that we’re all in right now. But is there anything unique about this time that you would offer some specific advice for to marketers about how to deal with it? And maybe it’s a pandemic? Maybe it’s some other, you know, major change going on? How do you deal with a significant significant event or crisis? When you’re building a plan and trying to manage it?

Scott Todaro 29:33
Yeah, yeah. There are so many things that can derail a plan. It can be, as you mentioned, it could be a pandemic, it could be an economic crisis, the CMO may leave, right? You could have major turnover and your team may not be able to hire people at the right time. And those all impact the success of your plan. And so what teams need to do is they need to do scenario planning. And that is really Looking at what is your best case scenario? What’s your worst case scenario? And then what is the plan that you think will help achieve the goals? So, you know, if you find yourself blowing all your numbers away, and, you know, obviously marketing has a huge hand in driving growth, you know that money might come back to the marketing team saying, hey, look, continue to supercharge the business here and you may be able to take advantage of it. And on the flip side, you may have a situation where you may have some tough economic conditions coming up and you want to make sure that if it really starts to take a downturn, that you were agile enough to follow the new plan to at least get to your lowest common denominator. But I think when you look at you know, today, especially with COVID out there, you know, vaccine could come out tomorrow, and all sudden, everybody’s like, All systems go hit 50 or let’s go we gotta go. You know, we could get news that you know, there’s no vaccine on the No anywhere in sight and you know, we may be in for a long, cold hard winter. And that’s in that case, you have to figure out how you’re going to, you know, gear down, right? So it’s a, you have to be agile you have to be looking at. And this is why when I talked about those economic conditions, that situation analysis, just because you did it at the beginning of the year doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be looking at your situation every three months, you know, what’s changing, you know, depending on your industry could be quite a bit. So you got to keep your eyes open to see what those indicators are, and make sure that you’re reacting accordingly.

Peter Mahoney 31:38
That’s, that’s really great advice, Scott, really appreciate it. And, Man, I wish someone wrote a book about this because that would be really amazing. Seems like there’s a need in the marketplace, in a software platform would be awesome. Almost like a marketing leadership platform. Gosh, I wish someone would do that. So both of them Peter, exactly. So we’re I know we’re running out to the end of our time and we always leave. Kelly’s favorite question for last. So Kelsey, why don’t you ask our last question here, Scott, see if we can stump the band.

Kelsey Krapf 32:15
Yeah, Scott, I’m lucky enough to listen to you every day. But I’m sure listeners really appreciate the advice on you know, CMOS and those that want to become one what what advice would you give to them to get better at their job?

Scott Todaro 32:29
Well, first of all, that was some quality sucking up. And, you know, that would be fantastic for you. It definitely this week is going to be very nice to you. So as far as advice with with with the planning piece, you know, look it, I think, I think the most important thing for CML when you starting to look at planning is is take control of it. And I think this is really important. I think this goes to leadership. And you know, if you don’t Do not create a plan, you do not communicate that plan. The people on your team will not view you as a strategic element and, and, you know, instrument to help them do their jobs. So, take charge, pull in the information, understand the information, talk to lots of people, you know, get to this. You don’t have all the answers you think you do, maybe but you don’t. And so look at pulling as much information as you can. And then start working with your team on it, giving them guidance and leadership so that they can start to execute effectively. And you know, that’s that’s the most important thing with the planning piece because it is the strategic the most strategic elements of your business, right? I mean, you start talking about, you know, your messages, your your, your, your pricing, your packaging, your distribution model. All of these things are incredibly strategic to the organization. And you need to be thinking about those things, too. Have your seat at the table with the other executives. If you get pushed, if you don’t do these things, you’re going to be known as the lead gen person. And people are just going to ask you questions about how many leads you created last week, if you really want to be strategic, and have that voice at the table, you need to start to look at how does this impact the overarching business and build your plan to achieve those business level goals?

Peter Mahoney 34:25
Well, that’s great advice, Scott. And I agree that not only is building the plan, the most important thing that you can do as a CMO for your company, but it’s also probably the most important thing you can do to for your career as a CMO to be known as the person who can build and drive successful marketing plans. So appreciate your advice and your input as usual, Scott, and I think that’s our time for today. So Kelsey, wanted to take us home.

Kelsey Krapf 34:56
Yeah, thanks so much, Scott. Really appreciate your your time and I’m sure listeners appreciate all the insight on why planning is, you know the most important thing as a marketer to create. You can find the ultimate planning template in our show notes below. that’s included in our ebook and make sure to follow the next cmo and planner on Twitter and LinkedIn. If you have any ideas for topics or guests, you can email them to the next cmo planner comm Have a great day everyone but no

Peter Mahoney 35:25
more Scots, we’ve finished talking to Scots three in a row is enough. Anyone who’s not named Scott is welcome on this podcast. Thanks, Scott.

Unknown Speaker 35:34
Thanks, guys. We’ll see you

Unknown Speaker 35:36
talking

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