🕵🏻♂️ Long-term marketing
How to plan long-term marketing programs while balancing them with the short-term pipeline goals.
In a B2B organization with good leadership (inadequate leadership is another story😂), long-term marketing programs are usually not approved because of one reason.
No, not because they don’t get marketing. But because marketers present vague marketing and brand programs full of marketing jargon.
These presentations get rejected because executives don't understand:
What exactly the marketing team will do
How it helps achieve GTM goals and hit revenue targets
When they can expect to see results
In this newsletter, we’ll cover:
How to plan and present long-term programs that leadership actually approves
How to balance your planning with short-term pipeline goals
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Long-term marketing planning framework.
Here is the 6-step planning framework we use at Fullfunnel.io.
1. Prepare Quarter Sprints Instead of Generic Marketing Plans.
What definitely doesn't work: "For the next year, we'll post valuable content, run brand campaings and launch ABM." No adequate CEO or CFO will approve it.
Instead of generic marketing plan, you need to present focused 1-3 month sprints with clear deliverables.
Sprints include detailed tasks, metrics, outcomes, and responsibilities. They are capacity- and priority-based, not based on wishes.
Sprint Example:
Program: Pilot ABM.
Timeline: 12 weeks
Core activities: Account sourcing and prioritization, 3 LinkedIn posts weekly about ICP challenges, account-based webinar, 1:1 personalized account plans for the engaged accounts.
Goals: 15 engaged accounts, 3 discovery calls booked.
Why this works:
Forces you to think about short-term wins and leading indicators
Changes leadership expectation from short-term revenue to leading indicators that lead to revenue
Enables frequent reporting to maintain stakeholder awareness and confidence in the program
Keeps positive momentum in the team because of constant small wins and feel of progress
2. Prepare 3 Categories of Metrics.
Most teams only track lagging indicators (revenue, pipeline) which don't help when launching long-term programs.
Leading Indicators (Actions): Things completely in your control:
of accounts researched weekly
of personalized connection requests sent
of LinkedIn posts published
of webinar attendees
Break down your leading indicators into weekly pillars: actions everybody involved in the program should perform. You are going to measure them every week.
Positive Signals: Early indicators that prove the program works:
Account engagement (high-intent website visits, content engagement)
Conversations started with target accounts
Webinar sign-ups from target accounts
Response rates to personalized outreach
Lagging Indicators:
Discovery calls booked
Sales opportunities created
Pipeline progression velocity
Revenue metrics
You always must connect your leading indicators to lagging indicators. This way you balance long-term growth with short-term pipeline outcomes.
For example, show how posting 3x weekly on LinkedIn leads to account engagement, which leads to conversations with the buying committee, which leads to discovery calls.
Learn more about measuring ABM here: https://fullfunnel.substack.com/p/how-to-measure-abm-w-report-templates
3. Prepare a Visual Framework
Executives need to see how your activities translate to business results.
Connect the dots: Awareness activities → Account engagement → Sales conversations → Discovery calls → Sales opportunities
Keep it simple and avoid complicated flowcharts. Just show a clear progression that anyone can understand works best.
Below is an example of our post-even playbook.
4. Plan Team Capacity
You might need to involve multiple team members from different departments. Make sure they have enough time to execute specific tasks and that they will own them.
Include:
Clear ownership of each metric and process (avoid multi-ownership)
Realistic capacity planning based on actual availability
Confirmed agreement between teams on responsibilities
Dependencies mapped out to avoid bottlenecks
We often see that the long-terms programs fail because people simply don’t understand their role and the time required to make program work.
Everybody is already busy, hence plan from the worst case scenarion perspective.
Learn more about responsibilities in ABM and who owns what here: https://fullfunnel.substack.com/p/who-owns-abm
5. Create Weekly Program Review Meetings
Plan 30-60 minute calendar meetings to review pillars, define and remove bottlenecks, and cross-share results.
Weekly meeting structure:
Review progress on leading indicators
Share insights from target account interactions
Plan next week's activities
Identify and remove bottlenecks
Adjust strategy based on early signals
These meetings allow you to cross-share wins, keep momentum, identify red flags and solve challenges before the program fails.
Check the episode below where we dive deeper into a meeting agenda:
6. Prepare Monthly Program Reports and Integrate Them with Revenue Metrics
Not every program should be measured the same way. Running thought leadership programs and demand-capturing ads have completely different sets of metrics.
Report structure:
Sprint progress vs. targets for each leading indicator
Positive signals: account engagement, conversations, early traction
Pipeline impact: discovery calls, opportunities, progression
Revenue
Make reports accessible to everybody. Use simple dashboards. Include metrics that accumulate over time to show progress.
Drive pipeline THIS quarter with full-funnel ABM programs.
If any of these challenges sound familiar:
You are aligned in theory with sales but don’t do anything in practice aside from receiving wish lists from sales and sharing with them your marketing plan. In reality, you work in silos and miss the revenue targets and are being pressured by your executives.
You understand that your marketing and sales playbook is broken (mqls, gated content) but despite many attempts you don’t know how to fix it
Your outbound, paid ads and organic pipeline drastically decreased while CAC increased mostly because most of your market is problem unaware and not buying.
You lack brand awareness among target accounts and sales can’t get even a reply.
You clearly see that you're already behind your revenue targets
We can help.
We'll develop a custom full-funnel ABM strategy aligned with your resources, budget and stack and execute it together to drive results THIS quarter.
How to Present Your Program to Leadership to Get Their Support.
Start with Business Challenges, Not Marketing Ideas.
Before creating any presentation, interview your leadership about the go-to-market vision and the challenges they observe. Next, interview your sales team about their challenges and why do you think they happen.
Collect the insights and prepare reasoning. Here is an example.
"Our EMEA sales team told us they have low response rates because prospects don't recognize our brand. When they do get through, prospects often choose 'safer' well-known competitors. This is directly impacting our revenue targets. Here is a program we want to run to solve this and achieve our goal of growing EMEA enterprise pipeline."
Prove Your Statement with Data.
Analyze how the problem impacts pipeline and revenue. Let’s take the above example.
Make a chart or table presenting outbound-generated pipeline to visualize declining trend. Then, calculate current sales pipeline velocity and make a revenue forecase if metrics won’t change.
Here is an example:
"We used to grow double digits every year, but growth slowed in 2025. Sales needs to generate 70% of revenue ($20M) for 2025 but is currently at 20%. Outbound-generated sales opportunities decreased from 25 to 14 per quarter. Marketing generates close to 50% of total revenues, but it's not sufficient to keep the desired growth rate. If not fixed, the company will likely miss revenue targets by $10M."
That's a red flag executives will definitely pay attention to.
Learn more about getting buy-in from executives and sales here:
GET ACCESS TO A NEW FULL-FUNNEL ABM 2.0 COURSE
What's included with the course access:
12 modules covering step-by-step ABM strategy development: goal decomposition, ICP, account list building, ABM team, warm-up and activation playbooks, reporting, scaling ABM and building a cohesive ABM & demand gen function.
Short explanation videos and "how to" examples. We believe it's better one time to see a practical example then listen to the theory hundreds of times.
5 orchestrated and ready-to-use ABM playbooks and a detailed explanation
Report dashboard for 4 types of ABM programs: new revenue, pipeline acceleration, expansion and churn prevention
Live case studies and examples of the campaigns we implemented with the clients of Fullfunnel.io in the past few years
17 templates to simplify your ABM strategy launch: ICP, revenue analysis, intent data tracking, account warm-up cadence, customer research, account scoring and prioritization, ABM budget planning and forecasting, account planning, reports, personalized offers, and many more.
Planning & Presenting a Pilot ABM Program to Execs and Sales Framework
Minimal viable stack recommendation and guidelines on how to use it to avoid ramping up budget and being pressured to show ROI for the purchased $50k software
Present Your Program as the Solution
Prepare a simple deck to present your program to executives.
Slide 1: Why This Program?
Business challenge + revenue impact
What happens if we don't act
Slide 2: Goals We Want to Achieve
Specific, measurable outcomes aligned with business priorities
Timeline with realistic expectations
Slide 3: Visual Framework
How planned activities connect to results
Simple progression anyone can understand
Slide 4: Program Plan and Milestones
Sprint breakdown with clear deliverables
Who does what by when
Slide 5: Leading Indicators and Expectations
What success looks like at each stage
Early signals we'll track
How the program can be scaled in future
Slide 6: Team Involvement and Budget
Resource requirements with time allocation
Expected ROI and impact scenarios
One of the most common reasons why long-term marketing initiatives don't get support from stakeholders and sales is lack of clarity, not because they don't get marketing.
Your marketing plan should be data-driven, not vanity-driven.
Avoid ambiguity and marketing slang.
Present goals and outcomes you want to achieve.
Present sprints with clear tasks and task owners.
Present key leading indicators, positive signals, reports and short-term outcomes.
Explain how these sprints will impact revenue and GTM goals.
BECOME A FULL-FUNNEL B2B MARKETER
Full-Funnel Academy is a comprehensive B2B marketing training and Slack community for B2B marketers who care about revenue and want to move the needle.
Academy includes:
All our B2B marketing courses including ABM playbook, Demand Gen Playbook, LinkedIn Allbound marketing playbook and 11 more courses that aren't available publicly + all upcoming courses.
Private Slack community to answer all your questions
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Learn more and join the academy here.
Listen to Full-Funnel Live - How to plan long term marketing and sales programs.
*If you want to attend the next live episode, sign up here to receive an invite. Usually, we host them every Wednesday at 4 pm CET (Central Europe) - 11 am ET (Eastern Time).
In the new episode of Fullfunnel Live we'll share with Vladimir Blagojevic how to plan long-term marketing and sales programs. Join us to learn and discuss:
How to structure long-term programs and align them with your team's capacity
How to present programs to get leadership buy-in
How to track program performance and what to report on if your program doesn't immediately generate revenue
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