Finance teams increasingly recognize the need to engage business partners in financial planning and analysis (FP&A). But there is often a disconnect between the metrics tracked by the finance team and the metrics that matter to the business, so much so that some business functions have turned to their own tools to track budgets and plans. Planful, a financial performance management (FPM) company, took steps yesterday to fill one of these gaps by announcing the acquisition of marketing performance management service provider Plannuh.
During a pre-press briefing, Planful's CMO Rowan Tonkin briefed me on the reasons for the change. Marketers want to adjust the costs of campaigns and activities in real time, but personal data based on vendor invoices arrives weeks late. Tonkin explains:
Plannuh programs have the ability to connect to many common platforms that marketers spend on: Google, AdWords, Facebook, LinkedIn and other related programs, content aggregation platforms, media broadcast platforms. When we spend, I know that I have spent today's money that I will see in my expenses only in 40 days, depending on when they close their books. With this plan, I can see him today or tomorrow. I know how much I spend each day and I can adjust accordingly.
Without tools like Plannuh, many marketing teams rely on spreadsheets and other solutions to track their daily spending, but that rarely gives them the ability to further streamline operations and improve ROI. Nor do they provide their finance departments with accurate cost, accrual, and profit data. Tonkin thinks.
What we do is know financial processes very well, financial intelligence and bring financial IQ to companies. It's just another department that we think we can help in a unique way.
The relationship between marketing and finance.It started in 2019. Plannuh has built a growing global customer base. Your employees will join the Planful team and the Plannuh app will be integrated with the Planful platform. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. In a prepared statement, Plannuh founder and CEO Peter Mahoney, who has joined Planful as CEO of marketing performance management (MPM) solutions, said:
I created Plannuh because I saw a need for flexible budgeting and planning tools that meet the unique needs of marketers by connecting those marketing concepts with financial results. We've spent the last several years building systems that deliver best-in-class marketing results that are communicated in the language of business. Planful is a natural partner in connecting our approach to broader financial planning and analysis processes, further strengthening our clients' strong relationships with their colleagues in the CFO's office.
One of the reasons marketing performance management has evolved in isolation is that most financial products were produced before most of today's marketing spend existed and cannot deliver on the details required by marketing. marketing function. Tonkin explains:
No sensible accountant would want to have the level of cost center that the marketing department really wants. So there's this whole negotiation between finance and marketing to say, "Oh, we want to follow this, we want to follow that." And they say: I don't want to accumulate all this in my book.
So you end up doing marketing and then you go and plan the way they want because they have to. This is how they are directed by their management team, their colleagues. They need to know what companies they are working for. You can't lead a marketing department if you don't know you have that understanding.
Tonkin and Planful CEO Grant Halloran have a background in marketing resource management (MRM), a broad category that Plannuh falls into. But Tonkin argues that using financial tools like Planful is a way to bring financial expertise that marketing teams can take advantage of. He says:
Now sellers sound like that. “This company, Planful, is a provider of financial solutions…tools for CFOs. So now it comes with a unique marketing proposition that makes it easy for marketers to have a conversation with CFOs.
Extend financial skills to companies.Many Planful customers have extended their use of Planful to other areas, such as trade promotion planning, sales and operations planning, or detailed planning at the SKU level. But while it's all based on Planful's dynamic planning platform, it's especially interesting to have a custom solution like Plannuh that can be implemented quickly and already includes its own data source connectors. Tonkin says that Planful will check if the dynamic platform is sufficient for these other use cases or if it makes sense to add additional solutions. he added.
Financial planning is different from sales planning, and marketing planning is different from operational planning. If we look, for example, what can we do with our main platform? So what is the best plan? This is where we will go and explore some of them. We have one of the best workforce planning solutions on the market today. And now we believe we have one of the best marketing planning solutions on the market today. And adding to that stack over time would certainly be smart for us.
This acquisition supports Planful's broader goal of providing finance teams with the tools to communicate their expertise to partners across the company. Tonkin said:
No graduate with a master's degree in finance and business economics will stop at analysis of variance... I'm always looking for collaboration on this new opportunity, thesis on how we grow the business. How do we do business? How do we see the different scenarios? ...
There are a lot of CFOs, a lot of companies that are trying to get to, trying to get to that Nirvana that we always talk about, where it's about business partnerships, it's about consultants, it's about working with these cool things. Who are you with? you go to MBA school, but you can't do it. You do this when you're stuck on analysis of variance and just stuck working with spreadsheets.
But it's not just about having the right tools. The finance team should also make sure their business partners know that they are now available to offer further strategic advice. Tonkin explains:
Sometimes it's not natural for a financial professional to be the friendly person who walks up and says, "Hi, I'm Fred from finance, you know?" Rowan, I want to help you with the next ROI project you see. "Or," Let's optimize prices "or" Let's work together on a marketing mix model "...
Technology will only do what technology does. It will sit and theoretically work just fine. But nobody in the business will come and manufacture this technology because they don't understand the value that it can create and create. Funders need to be much more proactive... They get stuck doing little things that aren't that important. Once opened, they must understand. “Oh, I have to go and change my way of thinking about business, because business will not stop and disappear one day; You understand, finance is more strategic after all." You really have to go talk about this...
If you can go and do that and send a message to the company, the company wants to help. I won't turn down a very smart and experienced person with a high financial IQ to help me with financial optimization or marketing mix modeling or whatever. I will accept this help. Anytime.
I takeEven more finance teams are saved from spreadsheet hell.