The Exit Five CMO Podcast (Hosted by Dave Gerhardt)

#197: Strategy | How to Build a Marketing Plan and Get It Approved for 2025 with Rowan Tonkin, CMO at Planful

17 snips

Nov 28, 2024

Rowan Tonkin, CMO at Planful and expert in marketing planning, shares invaluable insights on building a successful marketing strategy. He discusses the importance of aligning your marketing plan with business objectives and gaining buy-in from executives. Rowan emphasizes the need for creativity within structured teams and reframes marketing as a revenue-generating investment. He also dives into the significance of collaborating with finance teams and adapting strategies based on evolving economic conditions, all aimed at driving measurable results.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Importance of Planning

Planning creates essential structures for the marketing team, impacting their entire year. Marketers often lack training in this area, leading to challenges in budget approvals.

ANECDOTE

First Marketing Plan Experience

Dave Gerhardt recalls his first experience building a marketing plan. He initially thought he could just draw from the budget as needed and was quickly corrected by the CEO and CFO.

INSIGHT

Understanding Finance's Perspective

Finance teams act as investors, ensuring sustainable business growth. Marketers must understand this perspective to build effective marketing plans.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

In today's challenging business landscape, marketers face the daunting task of not only crafting an efficient marketing plan, but implementing it quickly, proving its value, and continuously adapting the plan on the fly. The ever-changing macroeconomic environment adds an extra layer of complexity, making success even harder to achieve.

In this episode, Rowan Tonkin, CMO at Planful, and Dave Gerhardt, Founder of Exit Five, lead you through the essential steps to building your plan, getting it approved, and unlocking the full potential of your marketing efforts.

They cover:

Tips to build a powerful marketing plan that aligns with your business objectives.
Strategies to gain plan approval from executives and board members
Best practices and practical approaches to flawlessly execute your marketing plan, turning ideas into measurable results.
Insights into the advantages of scenario planning and how it can prepare your marketing team to adapt to the ever-changing economic landscape.

Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.com
Join the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletter
Check out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/
Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership

***

Today’s episode is brought to you by Zuddl.

We’re halfway through 2025, and one thing’s clear: events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking - you name it. Everyone’s leaning in.

Events are a core part of our playbook this year at Exit Five. So far, we’ve hosted two virtual sessions each month, one large virtual event, one in-person meetup, and we’re deep in the weeds planning our Drive conference coming back to Vermont this September.

Zuddl helps us run a smarter event strategy - from driving registrations, managing invites, automating comms, reminders, analytics, tracking. Their Salesforce integration also makes it simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without pulling in ops.

On top of that, the differentiator with Zuddl is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us - and that’s how we’ve been able to keep the momentum going with 12+ events already this year, with plenty more to come.

If events are part of your marketing strategy, you need to look at Zuddl to see how companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike, and Iterable are using the top event platform for Business events in 2025.

Head over to zuddl.com/exitfive to learn more.