How Juniper Networks transformed its marketing budget management
Juniper Networks identified marketing budget management and reporting as one of the top issues. They choose Allocadia’s SaaS tool. Seven years later, marketing has closed every quarter within 1% of target.
At Juniper Networks, we exist to solve the world’s toughest networking problems. Today, complexity is at the heart of these problems. Simplicity is our obsession. And yet, our marketing teams faced the complexity of managing multiple marketing budgets maintained in multiple disparate spreadsheets around the world.
This resulted in a lack of real-time visibility into the performance of our marketing investments, which made it difficult to identify which activities should be reallocated to better align with strategic imperatives.
Marketing budget management and reporting as main issue
In addition, a key finding for the marketing organization from the 2011 employee survey identified marketing budget management and reporting as a major issue for the business.
By describing our experience of identifying and implementing a point solution for marketing performance management (MPM), I hope to share some useful information about the process and key considerations for other specialists to keep in mind. marketers who are considering a similar shift in their tech stack.
At Juniper Networks, we have a robust yet agile martech management process. Before trying to solve the problem, we always start by documenting the business requirements.
Business Requirements for a Marketing Investment Planning Tool
For this assessment, the requirements included, but were not limited to:
- Gain real-time visibility into global marketing investment plans with the ability to review details by team, campaign, and attribute
- Create a seamless link between marketing investment planning and detailed budget management to include plans versus actuals
- Enable planning and reporting for OPEX and MDF in a single application
- Identify a SaaS, easy to use and intuitive application that could be quickly implemented and easily adopted by marketers worldwide
- Simplify reporting and create meaningful insights for marketers and our funding partners
- Realize an increased return on your marketing investments through increased visibility and collaboration
Technology landscape review, assessment
Our CMO challenged our Global Marketing Operations team to identify and recommend a single tool that could solve budget management issues and plan operational expenses and market development costs.
After conducting a review of the technology landscape, we consulted SiriusDecisions, which highlighted the Allocadia MPM points solution.
After a thorough evaluation of several potential solutions, we determined that Allocadia successfully met the requirements for efficiency, ease of use and functionality with the added benefit of a short deployment time.
Business results of Allocadia implementation
By working closely with Allocadia’s Customer Success team, we were able to define the requirements and fully implement the platform in 60 days.
Just five weeks after deployment, we were using Allocadia to manage over 170 OPEX and MDF budgets for over 100 users worldwide.
It was seven years ago.
Since the implementation of Allocadia, there is increased visibility and alignment of marketing investments with strategic initiatives, increased collaboration between global teams in support of campaign planning, and continued visibility of plans against to reals.
All of this helped marketing end the quarter within 1% of the last 29 quarters target.
Nancy Weintraub is vice president of marketing demand, analytics and insights at Juniper Networks
