Bertrand Etienne never walks into a budget meeting with a single number. He brings 3, named after coffee strengths: Espresso, Decaf, and Cappuccino. It is one of the sharpest budgeting ideas I heard while interviewing 3 B2B marketing leaders for this post.

Frida Ahrenby shares metric definitions with her CFO from day one. Stefania Casciari Carter treats her budget as a conversation that continues long after board approval. Each of them builds a budget differently, and each process is worth borrowing from.

Fixed percentages of revenue are a popular starting point, but they overlook company stage, sales motion, and strategic context. The leaders below rely on a repeatable process that aligns finance, product, and revenue goals and adapts as markets shift. I asked them how they approach budgeting, what their process looks like, and which tips they would share with anyone in budgeting season right now.

Frida Ahrenby, why shared numbers with finance win C-suite trust

Frida is CMO at Rillion, leading a lean marketing team across EMEA and the US.

"Build your data foundation early, so tracking is never something you fix later. When you talk ARR and pipeline, you spend less time defending marketing's seat at the table and more time planning growth.",

Q: How do you structure your annual budget planning, and who are your key partners?

Frida: Our budget work starts in September and ends with board approval in December for a January start. We begin with the company’s growth ambitions and EBITDA targets. From there we break it down per region, into revenue targets and cost targets. Marketing doesn’t plan alone. I model OPEX and marketing acquisition spend together with our CRO and CFO, so the plan holds up from the first draft and we don’t have to defend it afterwards.

Q: How do you handle the trade-off between headcount, working media, and new market expansion?

Frida: We run a lean team with no extra management layers. We only hire when the workload is too big for the team, or when there is a clear strategic gap no one covers. In an expensive market like the US, we don’t put big money into paid channels. We do smart things that give a lot back for little money: search content built to show up in AI answers, executive presence and targeted link building. We try to out-think competitors rather than out-spend them.

Q: How do you track performance and adapt when market conditions change?

Frida: We judge marketing on revenue contribution and ARR, not vanity metrics. ARR is a lagging indicator, so every week we also look at demo bookings, pipeline generation and hand raisers. That tells us quickly if a dip is seasonal or if something is broken. We use one dashboard and one definition per metric, the same one finance looks at. That took us longer to get right than I would like to admit.

Frida’s one rule for B2B budgeting

Agree your metric definitions with your CFO before you ask for a single budget line. When marketing and finance read the same number, budget becomes a choice about growth speed rather than a fight about cost.

Bertrand Etienne, why framing budgets as coffee-menu scenarios shifts finance conversations

Bertrand is SVP of Marketing/B2B Lead at Epidemic Sound, where he oversees B2B performance, growth, and brand strategy across global digital channels.

“Present finance with trade-offs, not single numbers. When you frame budget options around business risk and output, you shift the conversation from cost reduction to growth appetite.”

Q: How does your budgeting process work alongside finance and product roadmaps?

Bertrand: Our process begins in late August, coordinated closely by finance through a long-range plan looking at a multi-year trajectory. In September, we lock in our Annual Operating Plan (AOP) to ensure complete alignment for the upcoming year. Because product roadmaps often only offer full visibility for 1–2 quarters ahead, any requested spend increase must be lower than our projected revenue growth rate, proving that marketing is driving increased capital efficiency over time.

Q: How do you structure spend allocations and negotiate budget with leadership?

Bertrand: We split our budget into working media (paid marketing) and non-working media (agency retainers, tech, and consulting). To negotiate effectively, I use a three-tier scenario framework named after coffee strengths:

• Espresso (high budget, high risk, aggressive growth),
• Decaf (conservative budget, low risk, baseline output), and
• Cappuccino (the balanced middle ground).

Presenting these distinct options forces the C-suite to consciously choose their risk tolerance rather than simply trimming a single proposal.

Q: How do you justify spend on long-term brand awareness and hard-to-attribute channels?

Bertrand: We combine simple qualitative signals with structured experimentation. On the simple side, self-reported attribution (“How did you hear about us?”) captures non-linear journeys like podcasts and events. On the advanced side, we aim at running geographic split-testing, comparing regions with heavy performance spend against regions with high brand-awareness investment over 6-month horizons.

Q: Bertrand’s one rule for B2B budgeting

Never submit a single budget number. Always present t3hree structured scenarios with clear risk-and-reward trade-offs. It changes the CFO’s job from cutting your budget to selecting your growth trajectory.

Stefania Casciari Carter, why the best budgets are built through conversation, not benchmarks

Stefania is our CMO at Precis, where she leads our central marketing team that supports country teams across the Nordics, the UK, Italy, and the US. Her answers come from the agency side, which shapes how she allocates spend.

“Budget is not something you can do in a silo. It takes alignment, a lot of conversations and the right questions about ambition, plus a very critical eye on every line.”

Q: How do you structure your annual budget planning, and who are your key partners?

Stefania: Our cycle starts in September and ends in November with board approval. Precis has a central marketing team that owns a global budget for the most scalable work: brand, design, content, webinars, paid media, SEO, and AEO. Alongside it, each country lead owns a local budget, mostly for events and field marketing. We design those local budgets together, so there is plenty of back and forth to align them with both company-wide ambitions and each market’s growth potential. We anchor on revenue growth, then work top down and bottom up: where we want results to go, which activities move the needle, and what they cost.

Q: Why don’t generic benchmarks work for you, and how do you allocate spend?

Stefania: The classic 5–10% of revenue benchmark for established companies is built for a different kind of business. As an agency, much of our growth comes from word of mouth and referrals, so marketing has to support that as well as win new business. We are also in a fortunate position: we can plug into our own specialists for paid media, SEO, AEO, creative and data. What would be a hard cost for another company is a service we can use in-house. That frees budget for upsell support and events, which don’t require massive spend. In new or untested markets, we deliberately keep things lean.

Q: How do you keep the budget relevant as the year unfolds?

Stefania: The biggest thing I have stopped doing is treating the budget as fixed. We forecast revenue and cost constantly and adjust marketing spend to match. That takes good hygiene: allocating costs to the right months and making sure budget isn’t lost along the way. It also means planning ahead for growth, because asking for more budget mid-year is usually much harder than reducing it.

Stefania’s one rule for B2B budgeting

Never build your budget in a silo. Treat it as an ongoing conversation with country leads, finance and leadership. Ask what the ambitions are, challenge every line with a critical eye, and keep revisiting it as the year unfolds.

What this means for your B2B strategy

3 principles show up across all 3 approaches, whatever the size of the team or the stage of the company.

1. Anchor spend to revenue metrics

Frida builds her plan from the company’s ARR and EBITDA targets, and Stefania anchors on revenue growth before working out which activities move the needle. We would add CAC payback thresholds and pipeline coverage requirements to that starting point, because they give finance a way to test the plan. Speaking the financial language of EBITDA and ARR contribution moves marketing from cost centre to predictable revenue driver.

The same logic applies to how you split spend. Bertrand separates working media from non-working costs such as agency retainers, tech, and consulting, and Stefania’s in-house specialists turn what would be a hard cost elsewhere into a service. The right ratio depends on your execution model, so work it out before you submit.

2. Model scenarios and let leadership choose

The strongest budgets come as a set of options. Build 2 or 3 scenarios, for example conservative, balanced, and growth, and spell out what you expect each one to deliver in pipeline and revenue, and what you give up at each level. Bertrand’s coffee-menu framework is one way to do it.

If you have the data, use it: historical conversion rates, cost per opportunity and pipeline velocity make each scenario far more convincing to finance. If you don’t, build the scenarios anyway. Stating your assumptions openly shows leadership exactly what they are buying, and gives you a clear baseline to adjust against once real results come in.

3. Treat budgeting as an ongoing conversation

None of these leaders builds their budget alone. Frida models spend with her CRO and CFO from the first draft and shares one set of metric definitions with finance. Bertrand plans inside a finance-led, multi-year view of the business. Stefania goes back and forth with country leads until the global and local plans line up. And the conversation doesn’t stop at board approval: regular forecasting and reallocation keep the budget tied to what is actually happening in the business.

The implementation step: a 4-point budget audit for your next cycle

Before submitting your next annual or quarterly budget proposal, evaluate your plan against this checklist:

• Scenario check: Have you prepared clear trade-off scenarios (e.g. conservative vs. growth) that outline what gets sacrificed if funding is reduced?
• Data foundation audit: Can you trace top-of-funnel engagement through CRM stage progression to pipeline value?
• Reallocation protocol: Is there a formal mid-year or quarterly review cadence to move capital from underperforming initiatives to high-performing levers?
• Non-working ratio: Is your split between operational overhead, agency retainers, and working media realistic for your execution model?

Ready to refine your growth plan?

If you answered no to two or more of these checks, that is a good place to start a conversation. Our B2B team can help you build and model your scenarios, connect spend to pipeline, and find where in-house and specialist support fit best. Get in touch with the team and let’s talk through your next cycle.