The Complete Guide to B2B Marketing: New Tactics, Tools, and Techniques to Compete in the Digital Economy

11. Budgeting

Unless you’ve been doing budgeting for a long time, it can seem pretty complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. There are some basic guidelines for B2B marketing spending that can help shape your annual planned marketing spend.

Approaches to Budgeting

Here’s what I’ve seen from 30 years in the field: Most B2B organizations budget for marketing as a percentage of sales, and in doing so generally spend somewhere between 2% and 11% of their revenue on marketing. As a guideline, the larger companies tend to spend less, and the smaller companies tend to spend more.

From my experience, I’ve seen most B2B companies fall in the 5% to 10% ...