Post 1 of 7 in a blog series on accelerating growth through strategic business planning.
In our last post, we made the case for why written, cross-functional planning is the first step toward building a growth system rather than just completing an annual exercise. This post gets into what that means for your marketing budget, specifically what to protect, what to cut, and how to make the call without flying blind.
Before you cut, find out which investments are creating qualified demand, strengthening customer value, and supporting profitable growth. Then cut or reallocate the rest, with enthusiasm.
Not every marketing dollar deserves protection. Plenty of them have been on autopilot since before the last planning cycle. But cutting across the board weakens demand, reduces your visibility exactly when buyers are reassessing vendors, and limits your ability to generate revenue at the moment it is hardest to find.
The goal here is not to defend every campaign, channel, or vendor. It is to make better decisions about the investments that help build a durable growth system.
The assumption behind most cuts is simple. Cut a dollar, save a dollar.
That holds for many operating expenses. It does not hold when the dollar you cut was producing qualified demand, supporting retention, or helping sales open and advance opportunities. In that case, you are not saving a dollar. You are trading a known expense today for a potential revenue shortfall two quarters out, and that shortfall rarely announces what caused it.
The distinction worth drawing is between spending that supports a clear growth strategy and spending that has become a habit. One earns its place every quarter. The other earns its place because it was in last year’s budget.
Before you make broad cuts, look at the full picture:
That last question deserves a moment. If the answer is no, the problem may not be your marketing spend, and cutting it will not address the underlying issue. It will just make the shortfall arrive faster.
Untethered marketing is an expenditure. Marketing tied to a business objective and measured against outcomes you care about is an investment. Cost-cutting may be necessary. Just preserve the capabilities and programs that credibly support revenue, margin, retention, and future growth.
You will not have complete data for any of these decisions. You never do.
Colin Powell's rule of thumb is the most useful framework I know for this. Act when you have somewhere between 40 and 70 percent of the information. Below 40 percent you are guessing. Above 70 percent, the opportunity has usually moved on without you.
Most leadership teams fail on one side or the other. Some approve a budget reallocation on a hunch and a compelling story from whoever presented last. Others commission another analysis, then another, and arrive at conviction three months after the decision mattered.
Use the 40/70 rule as a shared standard with your leadership team. Ask what information you need to reach the 40 percent threshold, gather it, and then decide. This applies to every recommendation in this series.
Headcount reductions work. They reduce expenses immediately, predictably, and in a way your board can see on a single slide. That clarity is exactly what makes them so tempting.
They are also a blunt instrument aimed at a complicated problem. A RIF does not distinguish between a team that is underperforming and a team that has been asked to deliver an ambitious number with insufficient resources, an unclear strategy, or a product that lost its differentiation two years ago. It treats both the same way, and then the underlying weakness stays exactly where it was, now staffed by fewer people.
The worst version is the one where the numbers improve for two quarters. The expense line looks better, nobody asks the harder question, and the actual problem surfaces a year later with less capability left to address it.
A RIF should follow a diagnosis, not substitute for one. If you cannot articulate what was wrong and what will change besides headcount, you are managing the expense line rather than the business.
A common assumption is that leads and sales disappear when the economy slows. That assumption is wrong in a useful way.
What actually happens is that customer priorities shift, buying cycles lengthen, and decision-makers demand a clearer business case before they commit. Demand does not vanish. It gets harder to earn. Forrester’s B2B Buyers’ Journey Survey found that close to 90 percent of global business buyers said their purchase process stalled that year, with budget constraints and economic uncertainty cited as the primary drivers.
This is where deliberate marketing matters most. Track how customer behavior is shifting, what competitors are doing, and what needs are emerging. Then make informed choices about your offers, your messages, your targets, and your spend.
Rather than retreating across the board, get specific. Focus on the segments and channels that matter most. Check whether your value proposition still addresses what customers are worried about right now, because a message that worked in a growth market often lands flat in a cautious one. Strengthen the content and sales tools that help a buyer build the internal case for choosing you.
The companies that come through uncertainty in good shape are not the ones that spend the most. They are the ones that learn faster, adjust earlier, and make disciplined choices about where to put their resources.
AI has changed the growth equation, though not in the way most vendor decks suggest. It has not eliminated the need for strategy. It has compressed the distance between customer insight and action, which is valuable when the insight is sound and dangerous when it is not.
Used thoughtfully, AI supports market research, audience analysis, content development, campaign optimization, sales preparation, and performance reporting. It will do all of that faster than your team can, and in several cases better than a rushed human would.
What it will not do is tell you when it is wrong. That job stays with you.
The companies positioned to benefit have four things in place before they buy anything: clear customer priorities, reliable data, defined workflows, and human oversight on any output that touches brand reputation, customer relationships, or a commercial decision. So before you approve another tool, ask your team three questions. What specific business problem should this solve? What data and process does it need to work, and do we have them? How will we know in 90 days whether it improved growth or productivity?
If nobody can answer the third question, you are not buying a capability. You are buying a subscription.
Everything in this post assumes you and your marketing leader can have a productive conversation about money. In many companies, that assumption does not hold, and the budget gets cut for reasons that have very little to do with the budget.
What CEOs can do better. Bring your CMO into strategic conversations, not just budget ones. If marketing hears about the new segment strategy after it is decided, you have hired an execution function and paid for an executive. You will get what you built.
Trust the expertise you hired. Fund ambitious goals at the level they actually require. A stretch number with a maintenance budget is not ambition; it is a setup. Be direct about the metrics driving each initiative, not the metrics you will ask about in the quarterly review, but the ones that actually determine whether something continues. If those two lists are different, everyone will eventually figure it out, and they will optimize for the second list.
What CMOs can do better. Speak in business terms. Impressions, engagement rates, and share of voice are inputs, and inputs presented as results are the fastest way to lose a room. Revenue, pipeline, cost of acquisition, retention, and margin are the language of the table you want to sit at.
Measure what matters, and be willing to say which measures you got wrong. Brand is not a separate country with its own currency. It compounds and shows up in conversion rates, pricing power, and sales cycle length, so it belongs in the plan. But brand in isolation, unmeasured and funded on faith, is what taught a generation of CEOs to treat marketing as an expense.
When marketing performance lives in a monthly deck that only marketing builds, everybody assumes the worst and nobody can check. When the same numbers are visible to sales, finance, and you, on the same cadence, two things happen. Marketing stops being able to hide a weak quarter, and marketing also stops being blamed for a weak quarter that was actually a follow-up problem or a pricing problem.
That transparency is uncomfortable for about a quarter. Then it becomes the most useful thing in the planning process, because arguments start being about what to do rather than about whose number is right.
None of this requires a reorganization. It requires the two of you to agree on what marketing is accountable for, what it needs to deliver, and what everyone gets to see. Write it down.
Seize Opportunities as Competitors Retreat
Uncertainty makes the market quieter. Competitors pull back on marketing, slow their innovation, reduce sales support, and get less attentive to the customers they already have.
That creates an opening, though only for companies prepared to act on it deliberately. The answer is not automatically to spend more. The question is where a targeted investment creates a real advantage. If a competitor has gone quiet in a market that matters to you, if customers in that market are actively reassessing vendors, or if you can make a more relevant case than the alternatives, a well-timed investment can win attention, build trust, and move your position in a way that outlasts the downturn.
Timing matters more than volume here. Share won while a competitor is absent tends to stick, because the customer has already switched and built new habits by the time that competitor comes back.
Watch competitor activity, but do not let it set your agenda. The stronger approach starts with your own high-value customers, your genuine differentiators, and the opportunities that fit where you are trying to take the business.
Cutting expenses provides relief. That relief is real and sometimes necessary.
But when the expense you cut is a capability that creates qualified demand, supports your sales team, protects retention, or builds differentiation, the long-term cost usually exceeds the savings by a wide margin. The savings arrive this quarter and get noticed. The cost arrives later and gets attributed to market conditions.
The better approach is to build marketing investment into a broader growth strategy. Identify the customers and opportunities that matter most. Invest in the capabilities required to serve them. Measure progress against outcomes that mean something. Adjust as conditions change, on a schedule, not in a panic.
Do that consistently and something useful happens. The decisions start connecting to each other. The measures stay in place long enough to show a trend. Your team learns how the pieces fit, and that knowledge stays in the building. The next post in this series shows you how to start that process with the customers you already have, and why that data is probably the most underused asset in your planning conversation.
Full series on strategic business planning: