146: Jim Williams: The strategic role of marketing ops in annual planning

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Jim Williams, CMO at Uptempo.

Summary: Forget version control spreadsheets and stale budgets, Jim’s take on marketing planning is about putting purpose behind every dollar. Instead of throwing darts at a board, focus on creating a blueprint that connects goals to actual business impact. For him, goals shouldn’t be handed down from the top like a royal decree but hammered out together with practitioners so they’re ambitious… but you know, grounded in reality. Marketing Ops pros are the unsung heroes, bringing sanity to the madness with data and KPIs that keep every piece aligned. Plus, AI’s set to take over the boring bits—updating data, tracking budgets, making sure no dollar gets lost—leaving marketers free to do what they do best: make real magic happen.

About Jim

• Jim started his career in PR and Product Marketing before spending 7 years at Eloqua as Sr Dir of Product Marketing and helping the company rise from 15M ARR to 92M and IPO. 
• He later moved on to Influitive – the popular advocate marketing platform – as VP of Marketing where he helped grow the company from pre revenue to 12M in ARR
• He then moved over to the DNS world as Snr VP of Marketing at BlueCat where he led all facets of marketing
• He then became CMO at BrandMaker which has since rebranded to Uptempo, the leading enterprise marketing operations software that helps marketers plan better, spend smarter and execute with confidence.

What Is a Marketing Plan

Jim dispels the idea that marketing planning should be like “throwing darts at a dartboard.” A marketing plan isn’t a guessing game; it’s a strategic framework for how teams tackle the future. One of the most common mistakes Jim sees? Dusting off last year’s plan and rebranding it for the new year. This tactic, he argues, is the quickest way to stay stuck. In a world that demands fresh thinking, relying on past strategies doesn’t cut it.

The old-school concept of a “pivot” has taken on a new life in marketing. It’s no longer about just one big strategy shift but about building in constant adaptability. Jim suggests that, unlike traditional yearly plans, today’s marketing requires continuous recalibration. The best teams aren’t just agile once—they’re agile all the time. That flexibility to assess, pivot, and refine isn’t a luxury; it’s the core of modern marketing planning.

Another common pitfall Jim highlights is the habit of dividing up the budget before solidifying a game plan. For too many teams, budget allocation is seen as the end goal rather than just a piece of the puzzle. Getting the numbers in place is just step one, not the entire strategy. A plan isn’t simply a breakdown of costs; it’s the strategic “why” and “how” behind each dollar spent. Without defining the intended outcomes, budgets lose meaning.

Jim makes an essential distinction: budgets support the mission, but plans set the course. The budget tells you what’s possible financially, but the plan clarifies what needs to be achieved. This separation between resources and goals keeps marketing teams focused, providing a framework to measure success rather than just track expenses. With a clear strategy in place, budgets go from static numbers to dynamic assets driving real outcomes.

Key takeaway: A budget is just a set of numbers; a marketing plan is the vision behind those numbers. By keeping intent at the forefront, teams can transform budget allocations into impactful actions, staying adaptable and ready for whatever’s next.

Building a Marketing Plan That Aligns Top-Down and Bottom-Up Goals

Jim dives into the complexities of planning in a large organization, pointing out that it’s not a matter of simply setting goals at an offsite retreat. At the enterprise level, planning is a detailed, phased, six to nine-month process. Yet, he notes that surprisingly few accessible resources break down this method. For many marketers, planning seems shrouded in mystery—a skill they’re expected to learn on the job, often after they’ve already taken on leadership responsibilities.

Jim explains that marketing planning often starts with annual, top-down forecasts. This approach provides broad company objectives, which interlock with a bottoms-up plan in later stages. Rather than seeing top-down and bottom-up planning as opposing methods, Jim views them as stages in a coordinated approach. At Optempo, they’ve formalized this method in a seven-step “blueprint for marketing planning” to guide teams through each phase. This blueprint begins with setting overarching company objectives—determining whether the focus is on market expansion, product launches, margin improvements, or even mergers and acquisitions. Until these objectives are set, marketing teams can’t start defining specific growth tactics.

Once top-level objectives are clear, Jim explains that the marketing team distills them into a focused “plan on a page,” a roadmap outlining how marketing will support each objective. This document serves as a communication tool, clarifying what marketing intends to achieve and aligning these goals with company-wide expectations. According to Jim, defining these specific objectives—whether they involve selling to new buyers, entering fresh markets, or optimizing existing processes—is foundational for cohesive planning.

Jim also breaks down the budget allocation process, which directly follows the plan on a page. This is where marketing teams work with finance to divide funds, categorizing costs into programmatic and non-programmatic expenses, as well as campaign-based and non-campaign-based spending. By grouping expenses into clear, high-level “buckets,” Jim explains, teams ensure their budgets align with strategic priorities and company-wide financial targets.

Key takeaway: A successful marketing plan balances top-down objectives with bottom-up execution. Begin with high-level company goals, then translate them into actionable steps and align budget allocations accordingly. This approach ensures that both strategy and resources are directed toward achieving meaningful impact.

Why Marketing Goals Need to Be a Two-Way Conversation

Jim counters the misconception that company goals are simply handed down from a closed-door board meeting, with marketers then left scrambling to hit those targets. He clarifies that in most forward-thinking companies, the setting of financial objectives isn’t a secretive, top-down affair. Instead, it’s a dialogue involving senior leadership across all departments—including marketing. When the ownership of a business, be it public shareholders or private investors, establishes financial ambitions, these aren’t randomly assigned numbers; they’re set with input from an executive team that includes the CMO or head of marketing.

Jim explains that technology companies, for example, often focus on maximizing valuation. The board or ownership group typically benchmarks these goals using standards like the “Rule of 40”—a common framework in SaaS that blends growth rate and profitability. But these objectives are usually part of a larger, multi-year vision, not just a single-year target. Once these broad metrics are set, the board works backward to define the current year’s objectives. From there, it’s up to the executive team, including marketing leadership, to devise the most effective strategies to meet these targets.

Jim emphasizes that marketing isn’t just a passive recipient of goals. Marketing leadership works closely with other executives to determine how marketing can help hit specific benchmarks. It’s at this stage that the conversation turns practical. For instance, if a company needs a particular level of market penetr...