Free Tools for Creating Marketing Budgets and Forecasting Revenue

I have been reading Professional Services Marketing by Mike Schultz and John Doerr of the Wellesley Hills Group off and on for the past several weeks, and I finally got around to checking out the two free Excel spreadsheets that they created to accompany the book.

These spreadsheets, which are available for download from the Wellesley Hills Group website, address concepts that are explained in detail in the book, but there are also some instructions within the files, so you could get some use from them even without having read the book.

The first file is a pretty straightforward monthly budget template, which isn’t anything groundbreaking, but it will save you some formatting time, and the included sample is informative if you haven’t had much experience with marketing budgets. The second file, however, is much more interesting. It can help you to better understand how your sales pipeline works (i.e. how prospects move from being a lead to a customer), and what levers you can move to get more customers out of the end of the pipeline.

In addition to trying these tools (especially the second one), I would also strongly encourage you to take a look at the book. I initially assumed that it would be aimed primarily at firm principals or sole practitioners who practiced marketing on the side, as opposed to full-time marketing professionals. As it turns out, however, I have found a huge amount of useful information, especially in big-picture areas like forecasting, planning, and achieving buy-in from other stakeholders within a firm.

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