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A useful priority decision says what gets resources and what gives way. Three marketing leaders offer examples of evaluating competing demands. Apply them by comparing proposals on the same terms, naming the work each would displace, and recording when a decision should be revisited.
The roadmap is full. Then a promising partnership appears, sales needs a new presentation, and someone suggests a small campaign that apparently requires only a designer, a writer, and several people who already have jobs.
In CMO Huddles Studio, Heather Adkins of Trimble, Will Meier of FM, and Betsy Daitch of Canoe examined these choices. Their examples provide starting points for a more disciplined allocation conversation.
Adkins makes the case for a deliberate balance: “If you only bet on what's proven, you're managing a depreciating asset. We have to innovate, but you can't innovate blindly.” She considers business alignment, time to value, and scalability when weighing opportunities.
Try bringing two competing proposals to a planning meeting in the same format. For each, record the customer problem, the business objective, the people needed, and the evidence you expect to see first. Include the dependency most likely to delay it.
Suppose one proposal develops a new segment and another supports active opportunities. Avoid pretending they will produce the same evidence on the same schedule. Ask what you could reasonably learn from each during the proposed review period, then decide whether that learning is worth the commitment.
This gives the team a way to challenge an assumption without having to argue that someone’s favorite idea is bad. The idea can be excellent and still lose its place in this quarter’s queue.
Meier described adapting sales-opportunity triggers from one FM brand for another. He reported a tenfold increase in opportunities after that low-effort change.
For your own planning exercise, examine whether a proposed initiative contains a smaller, testable intervention. A request for a new campaign might include a broken routing rule, an unclear next step, or a missing asset that could be addressed separately.
Document what you expect the smaller change to affect and what it won't answer. If fixing routing gets inquiries to the right seller, that doesn't establish whether the campaign attracts the right audience. Keep those questions separate so a useful repair doesn't become a sweeping success story.
Then compare the remaining work with the other proposals on the table. You may still choose the larger initiative, but you'll know which part of the investment is doing which job.
Daitch reported that Canoe moved event follow-up from almost two weeks to the next day, with marketing-qualified-lead-to-opportunity conversion rising from roughly 30% to 55%. She credited speed and message relevance.
One way to apply that lesson is to inspect what happens to interest you’ve already generated before requesting another program to generate more. Select a recent event and review a small sample of participant journeys with sales.
Check the elapsed time, the next message, and whether the participant’s question was addressed. If the message offered a generic meeting when the person asked for implementation details, a faster send alone won't resolve the mismatch.
Use those observations to define a bounded improvement. Agree on the audience and measurement window, and compare similar groups where possible. The aim is to make a decision your own evidence supports, rather than borrowing another company’s result as a forecast.
Before the meeting ends, identify the work you’ll delay, simplify, or stop to make room for the chosen proposal. Name the person who will inform affected colleagues and the point at which you’ll review the decision.
Keep paused ideas in a short record with the reason for the pause and a condition that would make them worth reconsidering. Otherwise, the backlog becomes a museum of enthusiasm, and someone has to keep dusting the exhibits.
State the customer problem, business objective, resource requirements, dependencies, and first meaningful evidence of progress. Use a consistent format so competing ideas can be compared fairly.
List the current assignments of the people needed for the proposal. Identify which commitment would move before accepting the new work, then communicate that change to its stakeholders.
Treat it as a reason to investigate, not a forecast. Establish your own starting point and account for audience, messaging, and timing differences when evaluating a change.
Record the constraint that caused the pause and the change that would justify another look. Review it when that condition changes or at an agreed planning checkpoint.
Roles as introduced: Heather Adkins, CMO of Trimble; Will Meier, VP of Marketing at FM; Betsy Daitch, VP of Marketing at Canoe Intelligence.
Bring two competing proposals to your next planning meeting and make the trade-off explicit. Hear the executives’ full discussion on Renegade Marketers Unite.