Maison Mirabeau Uses Planful To Fortify Global Marketing Performance

Maison Mirabeau, a certified B Corp, was founded in 2010 by Londoners Stephen and Jeany Cronk, who relocated to Provence, France, and set out to make a world-class rosé wine. Its wine and gin products are now sold in more than 40 markets and have won numerous awards and acclaim. As its fast-growing international business outpaced its manual, spreadsheet-based marketing processes, Planful for Marketing enabled increased visibility and accountability, ensuring that marketing spend translated into business growth.

When Maison Mirabeau was smaller, tracking marketing spend in spreadsheets was a simple, manual task. However, as the company grew and expanded internationally, the spreadsheet-based process became increasingly time-consuming and inefficient.

“Our marketing budgets for events and advertising were getting bigger and being split across different countries, and we’d try to update the spreadsheet as the invoices arrived,” recalled Tessa Henderson, the company’s CFO. “But, doing it manually, you’d miss one, we’d expand to another country, someone would input a vendor’s name differently, and then nothing would match. It just became so time-consuming to manage that spreadsheet.”

As its marketing team focused on running campaigns and events, it leaned on Finance to handle much of the manual budgeting and invoice reconciliation. But, as marketing success fueled business growth, Finance had less time to manage Marketing’s budgets.

“Since the spreadsheet wasn’t up to date, we’d be accruing for invoices we’d already received, and Marketing’s numbers didn’t match Accounting’s numbers,” Tessa added. “We were constantly double-checking everything. We needed real-time knowledge of what was being spent.”

Maison Mirabeau initially moved marketing budgeting to the company’s operational software, but that didn’t provide Marketing with the required granularity at the campaign and event levels. It then deployed dedicated budgeting software, but after a few months of trial and error, it abandoned that solution as well. Amid the COVID pandemic, and with a keen eye on company-wide spend, Maison Mirabeau chose Planful for Marketing to bring clarity to its marketing spend.

“We focused on budgeting, planning, and tracking marketing spend initially,” explained Aleks Jaworska, Global Brand Manager at Maison Mirabeau. “At the beginning of the year, we use Planful to define our total marketing budget, then split it per country and market, and then get into the detailed plans for each market’s events, activities, and campaigns.”

The company integrated Planful with its operational systems to automate invoice processing and reduce the manual effort of data entry and reconciliation—something spreadsheets couldn’t support. With Planful, Aleks approves invoices as they arrive to keep track of marketing spend in near real-time.

“We can quickly see whether we’re over or under on marketing budgets,” added Tessa. “But, even better, Planful lets us track committed and uncommitted spend, so if our plans or forecasts change, we can adjust or move uncommitted spend. It’s fantastic to have instant knowledge of those numbers.”

With marketing plans, budgets, and spend captured in Planful for Marketing, Maison Mirabeau has a trusted, accurate, and up-to-date resource for understanding marketing spend and performance as it happens. Planful is the marketing team’s source of truth to inform annual budgeting and planning based on prior year performance, and it gives the finance and accounting teams increased confidence in the numbers as the company continues to scale.

“The visibility we’ve gained from Planful is crucial because we can see the details for every market and marketing activity, analyze where we’ve overspent and why, where we’ve overbudgeted, and more,” Aleks said. “For annual budgeting, we can take those learnings into the next year, and that’s a massive advantage for us. Regularly during the year, we then work more closely with Sales and Finance to see what’s planned and adjust marketing activities as needed.”

Aleks added that Planful also improves decision-making with increased visibility into planned versus committed spend, comparing year-over-year spend across countries and markets, and tracking results based on marketing spend. And, compared with how it previously tracked marketing spend in spreadsheets, Aleks said Planful saves the company a few days monthly that used to be consumed by data entry and error checking.

For Finance, Tessa pointed to this newfound visibility as bringing increased control over marketing spend: “With Planful there’s more control over what the budgets are, what the spend is, and why there’s a budget for certain items. This has been massive in terms of being flexible.”

Better visibility also helps Maison Mirabeau’s marketing team make more confident decisions throughout the year.

“Planful brings accountability and ownership that we didn’t have prior,” Aleks explained. “We need to spend money to grow the business, but Planful helps us track how that money is allocated—what we’ve spent, what’s been committed, and what’s still available. That visibility makes it much easier to analyse our activities and adjust as needed. It’s been incredibly helpful.”