Natalie Myers

Office Politics Pre-Budget Meeting: Make a “Mind Map”

December 16th, 2008

During my quest to find best practices about how marketers should defend their 2009 marketing budgets, I came across some useful information that didn’t make it into the special report.

Franke James, editor and founder of Office-Politics.com, contributed the idea of making a “mind map.” Her advice is to take out a piece of paper pre-budget meeting and map out the relationship between you and key decision makers (the people who will be in the budget meeting).

Draw lines connecting you to them. Then write down what each person’s vested interest is next to the person’s name. What are their goals? What projects are they pushing for? How could they possibly knock down your marketing objectives?

It would help to have built healthy relationships with the decision makers beforehand so that you have an idea of what’s on their agendas.

Franke goes on to say that once a marketer has studied the “mind map,” he or she should think of ways to sell the marketing objectives for 2009 to decision makers prior to the budget meeting. The “mind map” should help in formulating how to do that.

Natalie Myers

About Natalie Myers

Natalie Myers writes for MarketingSherpa’s Great Minds and Content Biz newsletters. She covers a broad array of topics for Great Minds, regularly interviewing thought leaders and experienced marketers about innovative or highly successful marketing strategies. For Content Biz she focuses specifically on online subscriptions models, including anything you pay for to read, listen to, watch, rent (as in Software as a Service models), etc.

She writes blog posts about topics relating to her beats, including useful information from interviews that doesn’t make it into an article.

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  1. Dale Underwood
    January 22nd, 2009 at 18:32 | #1

    This is good advice for many situations, especially for marketing. It’s classic sales. I think if marketers did “mind maps” for their customers, they would be more effective and might not need to defend their budgets so aggressively. It seems marketers spend too much time on the internal sale when what they should focus on is what the customer needs; and use it to engage them.

    Thanks for the post.

    Dale

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