Budget Battles: Navigating Cuts with Creativity

Don’t let the number just dictate all your ideas. Yeah. We can’t go nuts. No. We can’t afford to advertise at the Super Bowl. So we have to have some realm of reality. But I have found that if you box people into a number, again, it’s kind of like what I was saying about team morale. So I do give them, like, guidance, but I do say I would like to hear from you guys what those ideas are. And even if they don’t necessarily fit in the budget, go a little bigger because we may decide that we’ll find a way to execute that program over another because we feel like it could really drive efficiency. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by Six Cent, investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Hey, Saima. We are back again as always. As always, I’m so excited to chat with Ashley Deibert today. She is the CMO of Piano, and she has so many interesting things to talk about, particularly around kind of today’s climate of cost cutting budgets. She’s got a really interesting perspective too because she’s done these different growth trajectories from the sort of the very small revenue all the way to, you know, larger and just seeing scale in different places. And scale in different places leads to very different ways of doing things and dealing with the budgeting and the finance process. And we even, of course, we dive into AI because why not? Because, of course. Well, if you had to give this episode a title then, what would you give it? I would say it’s like navigating the world of budgets with creativity. You know, I don’t wanna say navigating all about cuts because she gets into the collaborative process of building your budget and your plan. And we talk a little bit about the cold, hard truth of things, but more about just how you can be creative, keep your teams motivated when there are times of, hey, we gotta get really, really efficient with our dollars. I think that’s probably where I would land the title. Well, guess what? We’ve all faced that at some points in our career, so let’s do it. Ashley, thanks so much for joining us. I’m really excited for the conversation. We’re gonna get into some nitty gritty on dollars and cents and all sorts of things in between. So we’ll just dive in. And you’ve got this experience in different bands of companies and scale and growth and start ups and much larger organizations and in the world that we’re in today and budget cuts and dealing with it. I think just the first question off the bat, when you’re in a situation where someone’s saying, you know, look at your budget, you gotta make cuts, like, how do you start to figure out the efficiencies, the inefficiencies, what’s necessary? I mean, this is, like, thirteen questions in one I’m asking you. But, like, what’s that process like? Because I think we’ve all been through it in some form or fashion. And, like, in some cases, it’s like Excel doesn’t have a random function. I wish it didn’t. Yeah. In that sense. It’s like, how do you start that for you, that process? With anything, it’s like making a marketing plan. It has to be about collaboration. I don’t think it does anybody any good if I just sit in a silo and look at a spreadsheet and go, that’s gone, that’s gone. I mean, you might have a few obvious things that you can go, okay. Maybe we don’t need that freelancer or we don’t need to do four of those dinners for clients. We can do two or whatever. I don’t think those move mountains. And I think it’s all about going, if we are in a position where we have to figure out how to be more efficient with the dollars that we’re spending, it’s focused on, for me, what has brought success in the past and is that success in the past what we need to enable the future success of our marketing programs and our sales pipeline, as well as, I think, just deep collaboration for me with my peers. You know, I sit down with the CEO, the CRO, the head of client success, the CFO, you know, all those people to go, here’s my recommendation. And when we make these cuts, here’s what we’re losing, but we’re able to be more efficient in these areas. Do you agree? Do you disagree? So to me, it’s all just about the alignment rather than looking at things as good or bad or necessary or not. That’s usually where I start at a high level. And I think that that can be deployed whether you’re in a budget cut or whether you’re just dealing with a different sort of makeup of a budget. As you mentioned, I’ve been in multiple different types of organizations selling multiple different types of software, and I don’t come in with a playbook and say, this is where the dollars should always be spent. It’s always gotta be aligned to the plan and also using, I think, some of the past to inform the future. Yeah. Takes a village. Yeah. It takes a village. And it’s also, I think, just good practice regardless. Like, I love that you added that because at the end of the day, we should be looking to see what’s working, what’s not working, and doing more of the things that are working and doing less of the things that aren’t. And then secondly, just doing it by gaining the alignment with the CRO, the CFO is, again, so smart because, you know, inevitably mid year you’re gonna be asked about, what about that event and why aren’t we on there and you can always remind them. Yeah. It never happens. Remember at the beginning of the year we decided we weren’t gonna do that. To your point, you also, I think, have to build in some room for agility and flexibility because things change. I don’t think many of us work in a business where we can just set something on January first and expect that it’s gonna go exactly the way that it’s gonna go. Quite the opposite. Right now, with my team, we are exercising kind of that same practice. We’re going I saw at the beginning of the year to say, this is where I see the dollars being allocated. I more or less got buy in because I worked with the people we just outlined to do so. But there have already been some changes that have come up. And we just keep repeating that process to go, okay, let’s take a look again. And if we want to do this, then this is gonna have to give, this is gonna have to change or whatever. So I don’t think that it has to, for that reason, be thought of as kind of a negative exercise. I think it’s really easy to actually turn it into a positive collaborative process. And I think for marketing leaders, only helps you just get more goodwill with your peers when you operate that way. Absolutely. What are some of the more creative ways you’ve seen implemented to streamline costs and streamline operations, but maintain the quality and the productivity of the team because it’s just you can’t sacrifice that. Well, recently, like, thank goodness we’re in the age of AI because that has actually leveraging tools to change the way we operate. So as an example, on my team right now, I have one amazing content marketer, but I have a global team to execute programs for. So she is only one person and cannot be writing every single email, every single piece of top, mid, and bottle of soil content, every social post, etcetera. And however, she was, like, really worried when when we were kind of making some of these changes. I was like, no. No. We’re gonna use AI to kind of enable our team because we have formulas. Right? We know what a good email looks like. We know what a good social post looks like. And so in this instance, with my field team, I said, you guys are the ones that are responsible for promoting your webinars, your events, your local campaigns. Use our formula of successful emails, social, whatever post before, and use chat GBT to shape it into language that is on brand. And it hasn’t been perfect, but it has certainly been really easy, I think, for us to get more done with less. We unfortunately had to reduce our spend on some kind of freelance copywriters. But I haven’t, like, noticed anything. And I’m like, woah, it’s so clear that we don’t have a total army of fabulous copywriters anymore. Something that we’re also doing is leveraging Six Senses conversational email. You know, we did have a reduction in the number of business development associates that we have on the team, but we still have a Salesforce that’s expected to deliver. And we are using this tool now to kind of fill in the gaps of when they are not able to respond to every inbound, because we do drive quite a bit of inbound traffic. AI picks up where they can’t be. And we were able to leverage somebody on the team who has that experience. So she’s the one kind of training the bots on what to say, but she’s one person that was a team of fifteen. I actually think it’s really cool. I’m like, this is a really interesting use of people’s skills now that they didn’t traditionally have to deploy, and I think it makes them think a little different. And I love that you’re replicating, like, your best person. So you’ve got a great copywriter, a great person enabling the BDRs. Why not just copy them? Yeah. Exactly. And scale it. And it’s one of those things too. Like, I think a lot of people and this is probably starting I don’t know if it’s fading, but the thought of AI coming for people’s jobs. Now in this case, we’re talking about efficiencies, but it’s coming and creating new jobs. Right? So now you’ve got somebody who’s sitting in that role, who’s the AI whisperer, who’s giving that insight. I And we’re all creating new roles every day, which is it’s the AI economy. I don’t know if anyone I’m sure someone’s coined that. If not, I’m gonna go hoign that in trademark. But again, like, we’ve talked to a bunch of people about AI. We talk about AI internally, probably a little bit too much, but and so that’s the thing that’s so great about it. It’s just changing the role. And one of the things one of our previous guests talked about, like, you look at our job description from ten years ago, it used to say, like, proficiency with Microsoft Office and Excel and Power. I know it. And now I would go write a job description and say proficiency with AI tools such as Chat g b t whatever. Right? So it’s just Or you would have Chat g b t write you a job description. Right. And even that that’s actually one of the great use cases as well. I’ve we’ve done that. I mean, it’s great. Right? It’s just because how annoying can it be to write the job description? Like, here are my requirements. Here’s a good one. Go do it, and you’re eighty percent there. But what you said is true about, like, people having this fear that AI is coming for their jobs. And I have to admit, when I first heard about chat g b t, I kind of just put it in the back of my head, and I was like, no way that some bot is gonna be able to do these things. And I resisted it for a long time. And then I fired it up one day and had it help me professionalize an email. And I was like, okay. This is like my new best friend. You know, there’s obviously, like, multiple use cases for it. And I think what I’m getting at is you’re exactly right. When people see how it can empower them to just do something faster or look at it from a different perspective than they would have or even help seed some ideas. It’s not a replacement at all. In fact, I see it more as a partner to scale. When I think of the way that we go to market, everybody is competing for airspace and needs to go as fast as possible. But I still think that you need a human behind some of those things because otherwise, it gets pretty obvious that you’re using. But, like, nothing that comes out of that that we don’t then massage a little bit and make it fit our brand. So that’s why I wholeheartedly agree with you. But it certainly has helped us in leaner times feel like we can still achieve what we need to and not have people go, well, I guess we’re just gonna be able to only do half the things that we had planned on because we lost that resource. Yeah. And I would imagine, like, going into your next planning session next year, well, I guess it’ll be towards the end of this year. Right? Like, this probably changed what you’re thinking about in terms of, like, what head cap am I gonna ask for? Or where am I gonna prioritize human capital versus now AI capital? You could use the AI to help drive your budget process itself. And the next thing, which I don’t think you would wanna use AI for yet, vendor negotiations. Right? So Just for writing nicer emails. Yeah. Well, I actually would use it for writing nastier. No. I’m kidding. So just talking about, like I mean, obviously, there’s we’re all in the space of software sales, but this is not just a software issue. Right? Vendor negotiations, vendors are getting hit hard. Like, everything is just sort of on the table. Right? CFOs are involved in transactions even in the smallest of transactions more so than ever. What are some of the things that you kind of take into account when you’re are negotiating vendor contracts that are maybe a little bit different or you find have been especially helpful? Yeah. For me, I think it’s really just about being really open and transparent about why you’re going through this process, what has gone well, what has not gone well, and what you’re looking to achieve. When I’m buying anything but specifically software, because you’re not just buying a piece of technology, you should be buying kind of a relationship that you’re entering into with that organization over time. I really like to be just transparent as I can and say, this is exactly what we need. I like to lead the horse just a little bit, but to let them see how they will respond to that. That. And so it’s not so much for me in those situations about always getting costs down or getting the most that I can for the cheapest price. I’m really looking, can they bring the value to the table that I would then put my stamp on internally and go to the CFO and the CEO or whoever I need to to say, we need this solution or we need to renew this tool or we need to add these things or take away these things because they’ve given me the most confidence in the value that they’re providing. And so for me, I understand we all have deadlines and signed by this date to get this discount. Like, that doesn’t hold much weight to me. I would rather negotiate on a shared understanding of, I have a challenge that I’m trying to meet. Can you help me meet it? And can we do this in the most efficient and effective way possible for long term growth together? They have no problem paying a vendor what they’re worth as long as they’re providing that value. Easier said than done sometimes. Yeah. And it’s always, like, they’re trying to sell you on their timeline a lot of times. Right? It’s like some of the worst vendors are like I think the point of, like, the shared relationship when we’re doing something together, like, yeah, you’ve got a deadline, but my deadline may be different. My process is different. Like, let’s share. I’ve also been in the fortunate position, which I know not everybody is, where I haven’t had a procurement department between me and the vendor because I do feel like there’s a bit of an emotional art to this where, where, again, if you’re developing a relationship with somebody, I don’t want somebody who is just there to get the best lowest price to the best contract possible. Of course, there’s always room for that, but I do feel like establishing the relationship. Look. I truly believe people buy things from people that they trust and like doing business with, just like we all probably want clients that are good to us and a good partner to us. Like, we don’t need to have a headache with with bad clients all over the place just to meet our goals. I have actually firmly believed that. It works both ways. So, Ashley, you know, we talked a little bit about cutting costs and adjusting budgets. How do you maintain your team’s morale when you are going through a cost cutting initiative? There’s emotions involved. There’s a little bit of loss involved, Right? People wanna try net new things innovate, and all of a sudden they’re told no. So how do you keep your team motivated and engaged? Yeah. It’s kind of the same answer I have with vendors, which again is just being really transparent. I think I’ve always maintained as much transparency as I feel is appropriate with my team because I feel like when you tell somebody that something is going to happen, it could be bad, it could be good, whatever, and they don’t understand the decision process or the rationale or the reason behind it, it’s very easy for people to just draw conclusions, which can sometimes be negative or the wrong conclusions about why these decisions are being made. So I always start there. I like to be fully transparent and tell them, here’s what’s going on. So therefore, here’s what’s going to happen. But then the part two to that is going, okay. How are we going to go forward from here? So instead of me coming up with all the ideas and saying, well, this is the only things that we’re spending money on this year. And if anybody asks you outside of that, you just tell them no. Like, that’s already very negative, and I’m putting everybody in a position to essentially go to war internally, which is not the environment we want to create. Instead, I say, so I would love to hear ideas from all of you on how do we do this differently? What are the inefficiencies that you have seen? I’m the CMO. I’m across all of this, but you guys are actually the ones doing the work every day in the details, in the systems, in the documents. And so I have found that combination of transparency and empowerments to keep morale pretty decent. Like, I think there’s a difference between when you’re losing when people when companies go through reductions in workforce versus reductions in budget, those are two totally different scenarios. But I think that the company also has a responsibility, not just me as a leader, to providing also that commentary on what’s happening in the business and why and where we’re going from here. So I do think it’s a shared voice that leadership has to perpetuate. They can’t all just come from one person or one source. Alright, Ashley. Can we nerd out a little bit on the actual budget setting process? You know, we’ve all just gone through it at the start of the new year. Tell me how you like to run the process. Are you starting top down with giving everyone an envelope and asking them to come up with their ideas, or are you having the team come to you with their wish list? I’ve seen it done both ways. I have a preference, but I’d love to hear your thoughts. It’s actually a little bit of both. So, I mean, obviously, I’m usually starting with a top down exercise with my management team because, you know, we’re just doing kind of larger budget exercises across the organization. So, also in that process, do my own bottoms up, but also getting a top down. So then I kinda take that to my team and give them, like, a top down. But I’ve said this so many times if you’re in my team meetings. Don’t let the number just dictate all your ideas. Yeah. We can’t go nuts. No. We can’t afford to advertise at the Super Bowl, so we have to have some realm of reality. But I have found that if you box people into a number, again, it’s kind of like what I was saying about team morale. If you tell them things a certain way in a certain negativity, you’re going to get a negative response. So you’re going to get a thinking more about what we can’t do versus what we can do. So I do give them the guidance, but I do say I would like to hear from you guys what those ideas are. And even if they don’t necessarily fit in the budget, go a little bigger because we may decide that we’ll find a way to execute that program over another because we feel like it could really drive efficiency. And the other thing that I do is I empower the whole team to be a part of that process. It’s kind of how I’ve always managed my teams. Yes. We have people who are in specialty areas, field, digital content, product marketing, whatever. But I’m like, we’re all after the same goal, and you never know when you’re gonna get a good idea from a marketing operations person might have a fabulous idea for an event. An event person might find an inefficiency in our process that they should bring forward. I’d like to do the budgeting process the same way, which is to also empower that whole team to bring forward their bottoms up. So it’s kind of a little bit of both. What’s your preferred way? Similar. I I like to start top down just to put some boundaries around the hopes and dreams and wishes of the team. Right? If we rooted in some form of reality and then, of course, give everyone the freedom to come up with the great ideas is what makes our marketing so great. Exactly. We actually went through that process, and Saima did not directly smash my hopes and dreams. There were other people involved in smashing I crushed them, Adam. I’m sorry. Well, I mean, that’s why we’re doing this show. But that was just for fun. You know, just to see how you’d react. That wasn’t Well, it’s just for Simon does it for sport, I think, is really what what it is. You mentioned earlier, you talked about the collaboration. You talked with CRO, CFO. I wanted to dig a little bit deeper. You know, marketing sales relationship obviously has gotta be as tight as it could be alignment. You know, that’s you could talk all day about that. But the relationship with your CFO, and that can take on well, you could have not have a relationship with your CFO, which obviously would be awful, but that can take on so many different forms. Right? It can feel like the CFO is the HMO who doesn’t talk to your doctor and just refuses your treatment, or it’s the CFO that you work closely with. Talk a little bit about that in terms of how you approach that. What are some of the different kinds maybe of relationships you’ve had, both good and bad, and maybe some cautionary tales on all of that? I’m sitting here smiling because I will never forget my very first job out of school. I was definitely afraid of the CFO. I was like the scary guy who sat in the corner office, and I’m like, he seems mad about money all the time, and I don’t wanna ever talk to him. Of course, I was very junior in my relationship. But I have had definitely a variety of relationships with the CFO. Again, I think some of this is the environments that we’re working in. I would like to focus on kind of my current role. I’ve had very good relationships with my CFO, but I think that was my doing where I said, you know what? This person has to understand the business and what we’re driving towards just as much as anybody else. We shouldn’t just look at these individuals as the numbers guy. You know, they’re really the strategic motivator within the business. And so I have again found that by establishing what are the things that I can share with you that will help you enable whatever you need to enable, whether it’s making decisions at the board level or just helping your team get vendors paid quicker, you know, and and everything in between. A CFO oversees, just like the rest of us, a lot of different areas. So in my recent relationships, I have taken more time to help them understand the plan, the thoughts behind the plan, and therefore, how the dollars connect to that plan. It’s like in any situation I feel where you have to enable somebody to sell something on your behalf when you’re not in the room. And that’s how I look at the relationship with the CFO. Because what I have found is if you don’t help them understand, and again, this is just anybody, but if you don’t help them understand, then they don’t. And it’s too easy for that line item to go, oh, we could make some changes there. It’s easy to turn off those ads. It’s easy to do less events. It’s easy to do this and that. And that’s where I think some marketers get caught in bad situations because that relationship wasn’t there. And therefore, that understanding of why we need to fund these programs, and therefore, they’re really susceptible. So I really think that that’s what it’s all about. And I also learned to kind of talk their language a bit more. You know, if you’re in a situation where you have a company who is privately backed and you’re going through maybe an investment rounds, you know, that CFO is going to be deeply involved in that whole process and understanding what they’re going through. And I feel like I’ve asked more questions in recent jobs about, like, what the process looks like and how can I help bring yourself into their world, I think, has also just helped have that mutual understanding of how we will work better together? One of the I’m gonna say the worst. Is that too much? But, like, how can that go bad? Like, have you seen that go really bad where maybe it was not by anyone’s fault by approach, but, like, kind of how has that played out when is it purely just, like, their doctor know all day long? That’s really it? Or I mean, I had one particular job many years ago where I just didn’t develop a relationship with the CFO even though this individual sat in every Monday morning executive meeting, and we were talking about a lot of numbers and pipeline and and everything in between. And when I reflect on that and, again, I actually was hit with quite a bit of budget setbacks at that organization and some reduction workforce, including myself when push came to shove, was that I didn’t do a good job of noticing that I don’t think he really understood what those metrics meant. As we all know, like, all of us can come up with metrics all day long that tell us how the business is doing. If there’s a shared it wasn’t there. And I didn’t try. It wasn’t developed. Yeah. It wasn’t developed. Yeah. And therefore, again, when push came to shove, I and my group went to the top of the list of expenses to cut because the relationship was actually held with the head of sales. So in his mind, I think it was, well, sales can drive all of this without the marketing support. They’re the ones that are driving the numbers anyway. Lesson learned. We’ll make that we’ll make the same mistake twice. No. Definitely not. Ashley, we ask every one of our guests the same question at the end, and that is what is the most ridiculous thing that you’ve been asked to do in your career? Well, I’m sure it’s been more than one thing, but the one thing that comes to mind, I had joined an organization to help them sell an enterprise product. And a few months in, realized that things weren’t going very well with the company and that they were going to sell the product to SMBs. And so the bright idea from management was that we should create a bunch of Squarespace microsites that we would promote the product on, and they would use these microsites to send them out to these small companies that would be personalized. And I, I was asked to not only create the microsites, okay, fine, get my hands dirty, but I received a phone call one early morning after submitting all these sites telling me that I needed to go back through them and change all of the URLs from dots to dashes and, like, the how it went between the words. And I was, like, yep. This is ridiculous. This is not a CMO level job, and it has no strategic implication on us being successful. So I didn’t stay at that company very long after that. It was one of the more ridiculous things that I can recall in recent years being asked to do. There is the known correlation between dot dash and pipeline. Clearly, you missed that one, Ashley. So that’s that’s entirely in my strategy for next year. I just haven’t put into it yet. We’re not teaching this in the universities, and everybody is just gonna come out of there not knowing. Seriously. We gotta keep the secrets. Right? Well, Ashley, thanks so much. This was awesome. Great conversation. Summarize by saying, like, this is a thing that happens constantly. We’ve all been through it. The best that we can do is learn how to literally take those budget lemons and turn them into lemonade. And I’ve been surprised at some of the creative ideas people have come up with, and I think it can really be a positive. So that’s my ray of sunshine for the day. Proceed with confidence. Exactly. Thanks, Ash. No worries. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.