Tools

Marketing budget explorer: your revenue against the 2026 benchmarks

Type your annual revenue and choose a published benchmark. The explorer multiplies the two to give a marketing budget, then splits that budget the way Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey reports the average marketing organization spending it: labor, martech and paid media, with the AI share shown across those lines. Every share is cited below with its publisher and date.

In-house versus agency: the yearly cost comparison with your own numbers

Enter the roles you would hire and the agency's monthly fee. The calculator loads each salary with benefits at the rate the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports for full-time private-industry workers, adds tools for each person, and compares the total with a year of retainer plus the oversight time you keep on your side. It ends with the retainer at which both routes cost the same.

How many people a benchmark marketing budget pays for

Start from revenue and a share of revenue, take the labor share of the marketing budget that Gartner reports for 2026, and divide by the full cost of one person. The answer is the number of people the labor line of a benchmark budget would pay for. It is a ceiling check on team size, not a hiring plan.

Agency scoring sheet: weight what matters to you, score each shortlisted agency

Weight six criteria by how much they matter to this hire, score each shortlisted agency from 1 to 5 on each one, and the sheet gives every agency a weighted score on the same 1 to 5 scale. The weights and scores are yours: the sheet does the arithmetic and shows how close the result is, so the discussion turns to the evidence behind each score.

The marketing board deck: eight slides and the numbers a board expects on each

Eight slides, in the order a board reads them: the answer, results against plan, where the money went, what worked and what stopped, brand and demand health, the market, risks, and the decision you need. Each slide below says what question it answers, what goes on it and what to leave off. Copy it or download it as Markdown and replace the brackets with your numbers.

A marketing agency RFP that gets answers you can compare

A request for proposal works when every agency answers the same questions in the same shape. This template fixes the headings of the response, asks for named people and their hours, and gives a pricing table every agency fills in the same way. Download it as Markdown, and the pricing table as CSV, then replace the brackets.

Agency contract terms a CMO should read twice

Fourteen terms in a marketing agency contract that decide what you pay, what you own and how hard it is to leave. For each one: what to look for in the draft and the question to ask before you sign. It is a reading list for the CMO, to be used alongside your own legal review, not in place of it.

The annual marketing plan on four pages

Four pages: the goals and the numbers, the strategic choices, the programs with their budget and owners, and how you will measure and adjust. Each page has the headings and tables to fill in. A plan this short gets read by the CEO and the CFO and can be checked against results every quarter.

The marketing scorecard: twelve numbers, their definitions and where each comes from

Twelve numbers a CEO and a board can read every quarter, each with its formula, the system it comes from and how often it moves. Pick the eight to twelve that match how your company sells, agree the definitions with finance and sales once, and keep them the same from quarter to quarter. Download the table as CSV.