How to pitch an experimentation budget to your CEO when you can't promise specific returns. The key is framing it as a percentage of total budget rather than a guaranteed outcome, and showing how it balances immediate revenue goals with future growth.
You have to allocate some of your budget to say like, hey, this is an experimentation budget and I think where marketers struggle is how do I convince my CEO that I need like this budget and we're not really going to expect results out of it.
Percentage is important because I have found that they don't care. If you say like oh yeah, we're going to do a bunch of like random stuff with podcasting, then it's like okay, but like where are you spending that money from and how much time is that? But if you frame it, if we just take the Kyle Lacy number, if we say it's 30% or 20%, we're going to say hey, 80% of our people and budget and time is going to be spent on doing this stuff that is meant to hit our goals today. I need 20% to ensure that we're going to hit our goals tomorrow. That's how I would think about it.