Thao Ngo and Emily Ward explain how revenue teams use budgeting as a growth engine through shared financial literacy and cross-functional alignment. When everyone understands the ROI behind experiments and can access the budget in real time, teams pivot faster during downturns and earn a seat at the finance table. Regular data-driven meetings led to a shift from account-based marketing to account-based strategy.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
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I always try to press upon my team that financials is important, and I actually say a team that budgets together stays together. Very corny, but if you're on my team, you're forced to understand budgets, and it's something that I train everybody on the team on, from interns to managers, from demand to design, everybody knows the basics, everybody has access to the budget at any time, and they understand the value of spending the budget wisely on programs and tactics that are going to deliver pipeline. And we continually refine and optimize that budget as well, so you can stay on top of your numbers, so you have answers without waiting for finance. You have to be able to articulate articulate your strategy and story behind why you're experimenting here or spending there. By having that solid understanding of your budget, you'll have clarity to make changes and pivot when you need to. So when you talk about pivoting, you know, if there's a recession and you're gonna have to cut from areas of your budget, you already have that scenario built in. You already know where you're going to make those changes, so it's not a ramble. And when I sit down and meet with my financial analyst each month, I open up the budget, which they also have access to. And then, we have a meaningful conversation about optimization and changes and not about why my numbers are wrong. So, I think the more comfortable you are speaking the language of finance, the more comfortable that seat at the table is going to feel. And this is where you can shed that arts and crafts reputation and be more data-driven, ROI-driven, a marketing leader. And this time, at this point, I've talked a lot about collaboration from finance, but of course this session is about collaboration with the rest of the revenue team as well, which is critical for success.
Yeah, I mean, I love what you just covered. I mean, it really is about being able to have a conversation that's rooted in data and numbers. that could be so much more meaningful. So rather than just kind of ticking through what we spend, are we over, are we under, right? Why, why are we there? What do we need to hit our goals? How do we tie this into organizational objectives? I mean, all really great stuff. So thanks for sharing that. And so, I mean, we come back to the idea of collaboration and how that's critical for success, right? So marketing, sales, and RevOps really need to function as a unit. figuring out the strategy for driving growth together. So I've spent— and finance, I mean, I shouldn't leave them out, right, based on our conversation. But I've spent a lot of time reviewing and analyzing data with my counterparts, extracting actionable insights as a group. I mean, there are multiple meetings a week. Sometimes they're really short, sometimes they're really long, and we're really diving into the data. But the point of this is we're all aligning on what's happening and trying to solve for why. Right. Right? So, and it's all again data-driven. So this has resulted in a lot of key initiatives at my organization, such as the complete reconfigure of the lead funnel, right? We were trying to solve for some issues that we saw around conversion where folks might have been getting stuck. And so we actually completely overhauled it to make it a little simpler for folks to understand, to bring clarity to the process around what's happening at each stage of the funnel. And there are other various work streams that have emerged that are dedicated to improving how we function as a business, or more importantly, how our customers experience us as a business. I think that's really at the center of a lot of our conversations is what can we do to make this a more delightful— I know that's an overused term when it comes to customer experience, but a more delightful experience for our customer. So the time together helps ensure alignment amongst us and buy-in on key initiatives. And also helps us to demonstrate and come to the table with a united front when it comes to the C-suite. So I will say here, leadership will make or break how the units should be working together. So we should be functioning as that single revenue motion and not in silos and being enabled to stay focused on strategy instead of being pulled into separate and potentially conflicting objectives at times. is absolutely key here. So we want leadership buy-in, we want complete alignment. That's how we stay focused on strategy.
Yeah, well, I'll throw a different word in outside delightful, and that's empathy. So one of the things we want to do is put the customers at the center of everything we do. And I always talk about empathy when I talk about the customer experience, you know, putting ourselves in the shoes of that customer, what's in it for them, How can we make their jobs or even their day just easier? And if you start thinking about the value that you as a revenue organization can provide, then it moves away from this is what I'm selling to you to this is the pain I can help you with. And people are much, much more open to that approach as well.
Yeah, and I will definitely agree with that. And I see we have a question in the chat, Tal, just a heads up. But really quickly, You know, it's really critical for marketing to understand the sales perspective in order to form the revenue motion together. So, this is where we're looking at pain points again, but this time, not the ones of our customers, but really of our colleagues, right? Where are they getting stuck? Where are they feeling friction in their process so that we can know and intentionally craft that customer experience from start to finish with the goal of reducing friction? Another point that I wanted to make here is, you know, we're all talking about ABM or account-based marketing, right? And I would just encourage you to consider flipping to— it's a small tweak in terminology, but account-based strategy or ABS. So when you're thinking about ABM, right, the onus is on marketing. So what we know is the most successful execution is going to involve a tag team approach. Right? So hence that shift from marketing to strategy. So this moves us away from that Hail Mary reactive one-off activity that ultimately is going to get us nowhere. So, you know, as they say, teamwork makes the dream work. Lots of fun clichés. Slow and steady, please also methodical, will win the race. But, you know, these are all really tried and true kind of testaments. And the more that you can work in partnership And stop just relying specifically on one function to do all the heavy lifting, the more successful it's going to be. And then the last point before I want to hit this question in the chat is around LDR, BDR, RDR. So lead development representative, business development representatives, revenue development representatives. There are so many different names for these types of roles and ways to position them. But whatever you do, It's about making sure that the responsibilities are clear, the handoff is also clear and seamless, and that the customer is really, again, benefiting from that experience and it's enriching what they're going through instead of providing frustration. And so, Tal, what I'm seeing in the chat, and I think you were hitting on the finance piece, if you wanted to kick off with this, is what are the main numbers you look at when you work to aligning with finance?
Right. So I think there's, for me, 2 parts. So there's the simple part of actuals and forecasts. So the plan that you talked about, did you actually spend according to that plan? How far off are you on the different cost centers? What was your spend strategy and what was actually the case?
Mm-hmm.
And the other part of that is, okay, you said you would spend this and contribute this in pipeline. What happened? What areas worked? What experiments worked for pipeline? What did not? And then, what are you going to do about those insights that you have as well? So, that's what we do when we sit down together. We look at just the pure numbers of where we are in forecast and the results that we gained from pipeline there. And then, the changes that we're going to make the next quarter as well. So, we do budgeting on a monthly quarterly basis as well. So we're always agile and we can make those changes. So it's never fully baked in for the year. And if you have that budget investment, as I said, lined up with NetSuite or your ERP system and lined up with your CRM system, you can see the contribution of your investment all the way down to revenue as well.
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