Securing budget in marketing and HR

I recently spent nine months helping a 30-person startup shift from selling complex SaaS solutions into SMBs to selling them to major enterprise accounts. I enjoy the pace of startups and the impact that I can have on leadership of the business. Over the course of the last fifteen years I have had the privilege of doing the same for a number of young companies. The target profile of prospects for my last company was senior leaders in the Marketing organization – typically C-level. I found unique challenges selling into marketing, many of which I experienced selling in to HR.

Every major enterprise account allocates budgets at the beginning of the year, including budgets for HR and marketing spending. One would like to think that once the budget is set, the leaders of those teams would have the roadmap necessary to prioritize projects and allocate spend. My experience has been that the leaders of these teams feel empowered to prioritize and make decisions, but often need to go back to the well to rationalize significant purchasing decisions against the overall list of priorities and budget. As part of that process, those budgets are balanced against other enterprise-wide priorities and progress against the revenue and profit target. HR and marketing budgets seem to be the first to be reduced when profit targets are at risk.

The best strategy I have identified to combat this is to gain cross-functional support for the proposed project early in the sales process – hopefully during the front-end of the needs analysis process. See this post on gaining cross-functional support.