Cvent Transformed Its Marketing Budget with Planful

Cvent is an industry-leading meetings, events, and hospitality technology provider. Cvent’s event marketing and management platform supports event organizers and marketers for online event registration, venue selection, event marketing and management, virtual and onsite solutions, and attendee engagement.

Cvent managed its extensive budget through spreadsheets alone, an unsustainable obstacle in a cloud-based world.

The company sought to increase revenue by utilizing its suite of products to streamline and simplify event management for its extensive customer base of 22,000. Among its list of needs was a solution to manage the organization’s budgets in nine locations integrated seamlessly into its spend approval system, or ERP.

Alongside the Marketing team, Christine Kelly, Manager of Marketing Technology and Automation at Cvent, also needed better visibility into marketing’s finances. To achieve scalability and manage the complexity of her team’s operations, she required an easy-to-view snapshot of Cvent’s operations, budget, and campaigns.

Cvent sought to invest in a core source of truth for marketing budgeting, planning, and ROI, like Planful, to manage campaigns and budgets and make accurate forecasts across different regions and personas.

When Cvent began its journey with Planful, the marketing organization managed over 50 disconnected, offline spreadsheets exchanged through email. These spreadsheets lacked synchronization with Cvent’s spend approval system and ERP, creating a fragmented landscape that hampered access to real-time data and impeded their capacity to forecast and monitor marketing expenses accurately.

Cvent sought to invest in a centralized platform to manage campaigns and budgets and make accurate forecasts across different regions and segment owners.

The organization turned to Planful to manage the complex needs of its marketing team and operations. Specifically, Cvent trusted Planful to manage:

• A cloud-based, secure data management solution to provide a single source of truth.
• Centralized spend management to gain visibility into budgets, track progress toward goals, and identify potential areas of overspending.
• Ad integrations to give the organization insight into its paid ad spending across multiple channels, like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and LinkedIn Ads.
• Real-time access to data to improve team agility and prove the ROI of the marketing team’s efforts and campaigns.

Cvent felt the positive impact of rolling out Planful, including gaining a single source of truth for budgeting data and centralized spend management, ad integrations, and real-time access to information as needed.

“By operationalizing our marketing plan in Planful, we have set the foundation to measure ROI and prove the value of marketing via data,” said Christine. “Planful has increased efficiency in forecasting a large complex budget every month. Now budget managers can easily forecast based on real-time data.”

Cvent seamlessly integrated its budget management, spend approvals, and ERP systems to gain a centralized spend management system. Christine and her team saw unprecedented visibility into their full marketing budget, equipping them to track their marketing progress.

With Planful in place, Christine, along with all budget managers, now has real-time access to data within each campaign. She can also sort campaigns to determine if the total registrants or leads generated were enough to drive performance. This helps her effortlessly access up-to-date information, empowering them to make well-informed decisions rooted in real-time data insights.

As a result, Cvent now boasts the flexibility and agility to adapt to an ever-evolving economic landscape. This has helped the organization break free from the confines of unwieldy spreadsheets and gain a comprehensive view of campaign ROI.

Because Cvent’s finance and marketing teams have equal access to view the campaigns and budget, these teams have seen improved communication and collaboration.

The investment in Planful has saved Cvent an impressive 30 hours per month in budget planning. The transformation has also propelled the organization to scale and shed inefficiencies and discrepancies that once hindered its progress.