Smart Planner

Streamline your marketing efforts—plan, standardize, and execute campaigns seamlessly

Project Overview

Project Name: Smart Planner

Purpose: The purpose of this project was to develop a campaign planning automation solution that streamlined marketing operations by centralizing planning, standardizing processes, automating campaign creation, and integrating financial tracking, thereby enhancing efficiency and visibility across the organization

My Role: Assessed existing market solutions to identify the optimal approach, developed preliminary design and requirements, assisted with the end-to-end product development and implementation process, facilitated user adoption by training marketing teams on leveraging the new solution, and led continued system evolution by further identifying and resolving customer requests and pain points

Context

Background: In today's fast-paced marketing environment, B2B organizations face significant challenges in planning and budgeting. Fragmented tools and manual processes lead to unstandardized data and inefficiencies, making it difficult to align strategies across departments. This complexity often results in poor visibility into actual spending versus planned budgets, hindering effective decision-making. Additionally, the extensive back-and-forth between marketers and marketing operations teams in generating Salesforce campaigns and Marketo programs further exacerbates inefficiencies, consuming valuable time and resources.

Recognizing these pain points, B2B marketing teams are increasingly turning to automation to streamline operations. In fact, 56% of companies currently use marketing automation tools, highlighting a growing trend towards automating repetitive tasks and enhancing efficiency. Existing marketing automation solutions often fall short in addressing these challenges. Many lack the necessary customization and seamless integrations required to align with unique organizational workflows. Moreover, the high costs associated with these platforms can be prohibitive for many businesses.

To address these challenges, we developed Smart Planner—a custom solution designed to centralize planning, standardize processes, automate campaign creation, and integrate financial tracking, thereby enhancing efficiency and providing clear visibility across the organization.

Target Audience: B2B Marketers, B2B Finance Teams

Problem Statement

Problem Statement: B2B marketing teams often grapple with fragmented planning and budgeting processes, leading to inefficiencies, inconsistent data, and misalignment across departments. These challenges are compounded by the extensive back-and-forth between marketers and operations teams required to manually create and manage campaigns in platforms like Salesforce and Marketo, consuming valuable time and resources

KPI Goals:

  • Time Saved in Campaign Creation: Hours saved per day >= 1 Hour

  • User Adoption Rate: >= 70% of Marketing Organization

  • Reduction in Manual Errors: >= 50% reduction

  • Budget Adherence: >= 30% less errors

Approach

Research and Analysis

In addressing the challenges inherent in B2B marketing planning and budgeting, our team conducted a comprehensive research and analysis phase to identify existing pain points and evaluate potential solutions.

Evaluation of Existing Solutions

Our initial approach involved exploring available systems through product demonstrations and consultations with industry peers facing similar challenges. Feedback indicated that many existing solutions were either limited in scope or failed to deliver on promised capabilities. Additionally, the costs associated with these platforms—including service fees, enhancements, and integrations—were prohibitively high, rendering them unsuitable for our needs.

Internal Assessment and Key Findings

To gain a deeper understanding of our organization's specific challenges, we conducted extensive internal interviews focusing on the budgeting and planning process. This assessment revealed several critical pain points:

  1. Siloed Planning Processes: Departments operated using individual Google Sheets, leading to a lack of standardization in planning formats and data inputs. This fragmentation hindered visibility into organizational plans and necessitated time-consuming data consolidation and cleansing.

  2. Limited Interdepartmental Visibility: The absence of a centralized planning repository prevented marketers from accessing and understanding each other's strategies, impeding collaboration and alignment.

  3. Inefficient Campaign Creation Workflow: Marketers were required to plan in Google Sheets and then submit unstandardized ticket requests for campaign creation in Salesforce and Marketo. This process led to frequent back-and-forth communication between marketing and operations teams, resulting in delays and frustration.

  4. Lack of Integration with Financial Systems: The existing workflow did not integrate with Coupa, our purchase order system, complicating the process of linking campaigns to purchase orders. This disconnect required additional support from marketing operations and finance teams to accurately track expenditures.

  5. Inadequate ROI Visibility: Due to the inability to associate campaigns directly with purchase orders, assessing the return on investment for marketing initiatives was challenging, hindering data-driven decision-making.

  6. Overall Process Inefficiency: The manual nature of planning and execution processes led to significant frustration among team members, highlighting the need for a more streamlined and automated solution.

Conclusion

The insights gained from our research underscored the necessity for a tailored solution to address these challenges effectively. Recognizing the limitations and costs associated with existing platforms, we embarked on developing Smart Planner—a custom-built system designed to centralize planning, standardize processes, automate campaign creation, and integrate seamlessly with financial tracking tools. This initiative aimed to enhance efficiency, improve visibility, and foster better collaboration across our marketing organization.

Strategy Development

Vision:

To transform B2B marketing planning by creating a centralized, automated platform that enhances efficiency, standardization, and collaboration across the organization.

Objectives:

  • Integration: Develop seamless connections with Salesforce, Marketo, and Coupa to ensure unified data synchronization and streamline marketing operations.

  • User Experience: Design an intuitive interface that simplifies planning processes, allowing users to input and manage data effortlessly.

  • Customization: Provide flexible options for users to tailor views and reports, catering to diverse roles and departmental needs within the organization.

  • Financial Tracking: Implement robust features to monitor and report on expenditures, linking purchase orders directly to campaigns for accurate budget management.

Strategic Approach:

  • User-Centered Development: Engage stakeholders from various departments to gather insights, ensuring the platform addresses real-world challenges and user requirements.

  • Agile Methodology: Adopt an iterative development process, allowing for continuous feedback integration and prioritization of features to meet MVP deadlines effectively.

  • Scalability and Flexibility: Architect the system to accommodate future growth and evolving business needs, enabling easy adaptation and integration of additional features over time.

Expected Outcomes:

  • Standardization: Achieve uniformity in planning and budgeting processes across all departments, reducing discrepancies and enhancing data reliability.

  • Operational Efficiency: Significantly decrease the time and effort required for campaign planning and execution, allowing teams to focus on strategic initiatives.

  • Enhanced Collaboration: Foster improved communication and transparency among teams by providing a centralized platform with shared access to plans and budgets.

  • Financial Oversight: Gain better control and visibility over marketing expenditures, facilitating informed decision-making and optimized resource allocation.

By implementing this strategic framework, Smart Planner aims to revolutionize the marketing planning landscape, delivering a solution that meets current organizational needs while being adaptable for future challenges.

Solution

Features/Designs/Technologies

Smart Planner was meticulously designed to streamline marketing planning by integrating with key enterprise systems, standardizing data entry, and providing an intuitive user interface. Below is an outline of the features, designs, and technologies implemented:

Backend Infrastructure:

  • Scalable Architecture: The backend was developed with scalability at its core, facilitating seamless API integrations with systems like Salesforce, Marketo, and Coupa. This design ensures adaptability for future integrations with additional platforms.

  • Data Synchronization: By mapping and storing essential fields from Salesforce's Campaign object, Smart Planner centralizes planning data. This approach replaces disparate, unstandardized spreadsheets, enabling users to create budget lines using consistent values directly sourced from Salesforce. It also allows the admin of the system to manage and monitor all fields from one central location, avoiding having to update multiple sheets with the same field update.

  • Automated Campaign and Program Creation: Leveraging the standardized data, users can initiate the creation of Salesforce campaigns and Marketo programs with a single click. The system utilizes predefined mappings between campaign types and cloneable Marketo programs to automate asset generation, significantly reducing manual effort.

  • Automated Integration With Calendar Cloud: Once a Salesforce campaign and Marketo Program is created through Smart Planner, it automatically shows up on Calendar Cloud, providing an automated view of upcoming activities

Frontend Design:

  • Spreadsheet-Inspired Interface: To ensure a smooth transition from traditional Google Sheets, the frontend emulates a spreadsheet layout. This design includes functionalities such as picklists, custom internal fields, activity filtering, and mass cloning for activities spanning multiple quarters.

  • User Customization: Recognizing the diverse needs of marketing teams, the interface allows for the creation of custom internal fields and personalized views, enhancing user experience and efficiency.

Reporting and Analytics:

  • Budget Roll-Up Reports: Smart Planner consolidates individual plans into comprehensive reports, offering organizational visibility into budgeting and planning. This feature aids in tracking expenditures and assessing financial performance across campaigns.

  • Spend Analysis: By linking purchase orders from Coupa directly to specific campaigns, the system provides the ability to gain detailed insights into budget allocation and expenditure, facilitating informed decision-making.

Technologies Utilized:

  • Backend: Developed using robust frameworks capable of handling high-volume data processing and API integrations, ensuring reliability and scalability.

  • Frontend: Implemented with modern JavaScript libraries to create a responsive, spreadsheet-like user interface, delivering a seamless user experience.

  • API Integration: Utilized RESTful APIs to connect with Salesforce, Marketo, and Coupa, enabling real-time data synchronization and automation of marketing operations.

Challenges and Iterations

Developing Smart Planner presented several complex challenges that required innovative solutions and iterative development. Below is an overview of the primary obstacles encountered and the strategies employed to address them:

1. Implementing a Spreadsheet-Like User Interface

Challenge: Creating a dynamic, spreadsheet-like interface capable of handling extensive datasets with functionalities such as drag-and-drop for rows and columns posed significant performance challenges. While the system performed adequately with 10-20 rows, scaling to thousands of rows led to performance bottlenecks, causing delays and reduced responsiveness.

Iteration and Solution: To mitigate these issues, the development team explored various optimization techniques, including:

  • Efficient Data Handling: Implementing data virtualization to load only the visible portion of the dataset, thereby reducing memory consumption and improving load times.

  • Optimized Rendering: Utilizing efficient rendering strategies to minimize the time taken to display data on the interface.

Despite these improvements, achieving seamless performance with very large datasets remains an ongoing endeavor, necessitating continuous refinement and testing.

2. Integration with Coupa for Purchase Order Automation

Challenge: Integrating directly with Coupa to enable users to generate purchase orders (POs) from within Smart Planner was hindered by Coupa's API limitations. Specifically, certain required fields in Coupa did not align seamlessly with Smart Planner's data structures, leading to errors during data transmission.

Iteration and Solution: After extensive troubleshooting and communication with Coupa's support team, it became evident that immediate resolution of these API constraints was unlikely. As an interim solution, the team implemented a semi-automated process:

  • Campaign Synchronization: Once a user generates a campaign in Smart Planner, the system ensures that the corresponding campaign data is available in Coupa.

  • Manual PO Creation: Users then manually create the PO within Coupa, with the assurance that the necessary campaign information is accurately linked, reducing redundancy and potential errors.

This approach streamlines the PO creation process while working within the existing API limitations.

3. Comprehensive Reporting on Actual Spend

Challenge: While Smart Planner effectively facilitated budget roll-up reporting, providing detailed insights into actual spend—including PO amounts, accruals, and invoices—required deeper integration with financial data, necessitating extensive collaboration with the finance department.

Iteration and Solution: To address this, the team devised a multi-faceted reporting strategy:

  • Data Integration: Extracting financial data from Coupa and consolidating it within a centralized data warehouse.

  • Supplementary Data Sources: Incorporating additional datasets from Google Sheets and Smart Planner to enrich the financial data.

  • Visualization and Analysis: Utilizing Tableau to create comprehensive views and dashboards, enabling users to analyze campaign spend and performance effectively.

This solution provided the necessary reporting capabilities for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), with plans for further enhancements in collaboration with the finance team to achieve more granular insights.

Results and Learnings

Results

  • Time Saved in Campaign Creation

    • Initial Goal: Reduce campaign creation time by at least 1 hour per day.

    • Outcome: The streamlined process reduced campaign creation time from up to 8 hours to approximately 15 minutes, significantly enhancing productivity.

  • User Adoption Rate

    • Initial Goal: Achieve a 70% adoption rate within the marketing organization.

    • Outcome: Achieved a 90% adoption rate, facilitated by the decommissioning of legacy systems and strong leadership support.

  • Reduction in Manual Errors

    • Initial Goal: Achieve a 50% reduction in manual errors.

    • Outcome: Standardized data entry and automated workflows virtually eliminated manual errors, ensuring greater data accuracy.

  • Budget Adherence

    • Initial Goal: Achieve a 30% improvement in budget adherence.

    • Outcome: Centralized oversight and collaboration between finance and marketing operations led to at least a 30% improvement in budget management and accountability.

Lessons Learned

The development and deployment of Smart Planner provided several key insights:

  • Prioritize User-Centric Design: Engaging end-users throughout development ensured the platform addressed real-world challenges, leading to higher satisfaction and adoption rates.

  • Ensure Scalability: Early architectural decisions to support scalability facilitated seamless integration with multiple systems and accommodated growing data volumes.

  • Adapt to External Constraints: Challenges with integrating external systems, like Coupa's limited API, highlighted the need for flexible solutions and proactive communication with third-party providers.

  • Foster Continuous Collaboration: Ongoing engagement with finance and marketing operations was essential for refining features like reporting and budget adherence, ensuring the platform met evolving organizational needs.

These lessons have informed best practices for future projects, emphasizing the importance of user involvement, scalable design, adaptability, and cross-functional collaboration.