What did a global Consumer Packaged Goods do to provide their stakeholders with much improved campaign spend insight and more accurate marketing campaign spend forecasts?

They leveraged TekLink’s Marketing Spend Solution for Anaplan. Our solution was the perfect answer to the shortcomings of this global CPG’s current processes.

Problem Statement

Our customer – a global Consumer Packaged Goods company (CPG) ran thousands of marketing campaigns to bring awareness to their various consumer goods. The CPG’s current process did not address the needs of their marketing team and led to poor performing marketing campaigns and inaccurate forecasting. More specifically, the marketing and finance decision makers faced delays in receiving actual and forecast campaign information to make timely decisions, they received various versions of the forecast creating confusion and often, the forecasts were in accurate.

Root Causes

The company’s prior use of Offline Excel Worksheets which were created between the various marketing and business units did not allow for real-time updates driving the lack of timely information.

These same Offline Excel Worksheets drove confusion as there were questions on which Excel file was the most up to date and correct version to use. This disconnect in information detracted from the credibility of the forecasting process.

Further, the lack of a systematic and standard business process made it extremely challenging for the marketing team members and the finance team running the forecast/budget cycles to collaborate in an efficient and timely manner. This included tracking changes, adding comments/feedback and requesting adjustments to the plan data.

One last symptom arising from the use of Offline Excel Worksheets is user access. It is very difficult and tedious to manage Offline Excel Worksheets in a systematic and secure manner. Even using a SharePoint or similar platform, this can become challenging and time consuming.

TekLink’s Marketing Spend Solution Overview

The TekLink Marketing Spend Solution resolves all the problems stated above by bridging the gaps existing between all of the stakeholders. This solution ensures the new process works smoothly across all users and the decision-makers by leveraging a single cloud-based solution with global security rights and real-time data. This new solution keeps the stakeholders always involved throughout the entire process, thus making the system more efficient.

The Marketing Spend Solution has three broad main activities:

Proven Benefits of TekLink’s Marketing Spend Solution

Our CPG client found that the Finance team’s workload was reduced by 15%.

It further eliminates the use of offline excel and increases collaboration between teams:

• Availability of Executive Reports in Anaplan with the Marketers making real-time updates to them
• Work-flow based forecasting and built in approval process
• Real-time, cloud-based reporting to the business eliminating the manual delays from the previously used Offline Excel files
• Daily updates available as compared to the once a month
• Increased visibility to the marketing team in their own business terms
• Marketers can directly input plans on a campaign to campaign basis
• Bridges the gap between Finance and the Marketing teams
• Higher visibility into the allocated expense for the campaign

Join Us for Our Upcoming Webinar on Anaplan’s Marketing Campaign Spend Management

April 23, 2020 at 11 am PST (1 pm CST / 2 pm EST)

Learn How Kellogg’s Leveraged Anaplan to Optimize its Marketing Spend

Contact Information

Seth Rudin | seth.rudin@teklink.com | +1(512) 672-9713