Sales budget planning for customer support

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Create a customer-based budget that your CFO will love! But Budgeting is NOT fun. There never are enough dollars and resources. So how do you get the budget you need? It’s based on the customer journey aligned to business goals. Here is the four-step process. First – document what you’ve historically spent for every line item such as advertising, tradeshows and digital software tools. Then, allocate these dollars as a percentage to each stage of your customer-journey. In this example, there are 4 sales funnel stages for customer acquisition and retention. Notice we spent 60% for advertising on the awareness and 40% generating leads. Do this for all your line items. The second step is allocating people’s "time. This is a GAME Changer! Everyone thinks budgeting is just actual dollars spent, but that’s not the full picture. You must also count the time staff spends on customer acquisition and retention. Include all customer-facing departments such as sales, customer service - even technical staff and the executives. Once you have percentages by department, your CFO can convert the salaries to one number. Now you have a total view of time and dollars spent on each customer-journey stage! It shows you are "NOT" spending enough on customer retention. Step three is determining your revenue goal for every business segment. Is the growth plan for each of your businesses to either maintain, Break Even, or grow significantly? Then define your budget percent to revenue such as a range of five to 25% shown in the example. Step four brings it all together – your historical spend, staff time, what your revenue goals are, what you should be investing and your gaps. This example shows under-investing by three thousand dollars, especially in customer retention. You probably won’t get the "full amount, but now you can have deep conversations about prioritization. Instead of saying "I need more money”, you now say – "in order for me to bring in x number of leads, it will cost this much, but I can’t get there with this amount." It’s now a give and take resource allocation discussion. Do you need help creating a customer-based budget? Give us a call!