Vensure Employer Solutions Eliminated Silos Between Marketing and FP&A

Vensure Employer Solutions is a rapidly growing full-service HR solution for small and mid-sized companies.

The company frequently acquires new companies, integrating them as divisions, significantly increasing the overall headcount. This posed a challenge for the marketing department, with about 80 teammates needing to track and monitor the results of their marketing efforts in real-time.

Huyn Kim, the Senior Vice President of Marketing for Vensure Employer Solutions, described the planning process as stressful. He stated, “As a marketer, you have to adapt to a lot of change. Staying agile when changes are necessary can be a challenge.”

“Before we started using Planful, one of our biggest challenges was the delay between when expenses were recorded and when we needed to evaluate marketing efforts. We needed a real-time snapshot of campaign outcomes and efforts.”

In addition, Hyun felt the pain of siloing between marketing and FP&A, particularly in his relationship with his counterpart, Cliff Jones, Assistant Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis at Vensure. Together, they recognized the value of gaining real-time access to his team’s marketing spend.

“Marketing can have one of the largest budgets across the company,” says Hyun. “So, having a relationship with Cliff and the FP&A team is incredibly important. We need to know exactly where our spend is and to be held accountable to that spend with proper reporting.”

The need for deeper insight into marketing spend led Hyun to seek a tool to bridge the divide between marketing and FP&A, allowing both teams to work cross-functionally to manage Vensure’s diverse and dynamic marketing budget.

Hyun worked closely with Cliff Jones, Assistant Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis at Vensure, to choose Planful as a platform to analyze financial data between the marketing and FP&A teams.

Implementing Planful at Vensure involved stakeholders across the organization, including accounting, finance, and marketing. “The implementation process was seamless,” recounts Hyun. “The Planful team did an amazing job and stuck with us the entire way through, adapting their implementation process to fit the needs of our business.”

The Planful platform allowed Vensure to visualize its financial data in customizable ways, like by business units and budgets for different divisions. This ability to customize financial viewpoints gave the organization a more comprehensive view of its marketing outcomes.

“We needed a platform to help us say, ‘Hey, FP&A is here to help your team’ so we can all push the business forward,” says Cliff. “Planful lets us put together uniform financial reports so we can have these discussions with our division heads on a regular basis.”

With Planful at the helm, Hyun and his marketing team now have real-time visibility into campaign performance and can quickly make adjustments when needed.

“We use Planful as a tool to see our cost per outcome across different marketing efforts,” says Hyun. “If a campaign isn’t performing how we need it to, we now have visibility into the reason why. It gives us peace of mind knowing we can make quick adjustments and understand exactly where our money is being spent and the outcomes of that spend.”

Even more, Planful’s seamless platform has facilitated stronger cross-functional collaboration between marketing and FP&A, vastly improving Vensure’s business performance.

”Planful has provided us with an avenue of communication. Now we can have a back-and-forth conversation with different departments and really break down those silos,” says Cliff.

“I would say Planful has vastly improved our ability to talk the same language and view the results within the same platform,” added Hyun.