🍝 The Marketing Math To Get Your 2026 Budget Approved

Hey friend,

It's 2026 planning season, and I need to be honest with you—most B2B marketers are about to walk into budget meetings and absolutely sh*t the bed.

They'll show up with a laundry list of tactics 👇

"We need more budget for LinkedIn Ads, a new website… and I want to test out TikTok!"

But when the CFO asks how much revenue these tactics will generate, they have no clue how it connects to the company’s revenue goal.

And that's why marketing is the first thing that gets cut when times get tough.

Maybe 10% of marketers can actually drive business impact. And out of that 10%, only about 1-2% can waterfall their goals from a yearly revenue target all the way down to cost per click.

That 1-2% are the marketers who will get MORE budget for 2026 while everyone else gets squeezed.

Want to join ‘em?

I'm going to show you exactly how to waterfall your 2026 goals and defend your budget request with math 👇

There are three levels you need to understand before planning your budget:

Most marketers spend 90% of their time tweaking the micro—changing ad bids, testing button colors, and optimizing keywords.

But the macro is where the biggest levers are, so that's where you need to start.

The first question to ask is a two-parter: What By When?

Let's say your company wants to grow from $15M to $20M in 2026. That's a $5M growth target.

If sales contribute through outbound + existing pipeline, and customer success through expansion + retention, what slice of that $5M will marketing be responsible for? 🤔

Let’s say marketing will own 50% of it, so the expectation is to bag $2.5M in new revenue. If the average contract value (ACV) is $50K, then divide $2.5M by $50K.

Marketing needs to generate 50 new customers in 2026, and this is becomes the department’s North Star goal for the year.

Next, break that North Star goal down by quarter and month:

Now, figure out your CAC ceiling. This is the max amount you can spend to acquire a customer while still respecting your gross margin goal. Your gross margin must include the cost to get that lead AND the cost to service that customer, not just marketing and sales costs.

In our example, the CAC ceiling is 25% of ACV = $12.5K.

With these benchmarks, it’s time to crunch some numbers for what budget you need.

Here's where most marketers lose the CFO.

They know they need 50 customers. But they don't know what it costs to get those 50 customers into their pipeline.

Because we just figured out the CAC ceiling ($12.5K), it’s easy to use it to map out annual, quarterly, and monthly budget needs:

Now, when the CFO says "we're only giving $400K to marketing for 2026," you have real math to push back with and say: 

See how that changes the conversation?

You're not begging for budget. You're linking the marketing budget to the company’s revenue goals.

Use your topline budget number to waterfall budget across the buying journey.

If your SQL → closed/won rate is 25% (meaning 1 in 4 SQLs converts), do the math:

Now you know the exact volume you need at each stage to hit your revenue goal, and the maximum cost ceiling at each stage to stay within budget.

Once you have the waterfall math, look at your entire list of marketing investments and see what makes sense.

For 2026 planning, you want a mix of macro, meso, and micro levers. But, the meso levers are where you get the biggest ROI with reasonable effort.

Here are the levers I'd prioritize for 2026 budget planning 👇

Before you build any 2026 campaigns, audit your 2025 data.

Ask the sales team (or jump into the CRM yourself) which customer segments had higher close rates but similar acquisition costs. If Enterprise customers close at 40% vs. Mid-Market at 20%, but you're paying the same cost per lead for both, you should shift more budget to Enterprise to hit next year’s revenue goals.

Example: If you increase your SQL → closed/won rate from 25% to 35% by targeting better segments, you need 28% fewer SQLs to hit the same customer goal.

Crunch the data and include an justification like this in your 2026 plan:

If your lead → MQL conversion rate is 10% in 2025, don't just accept that as a target baseline for 2026.

Audit your conversion infrastructure:

A conversion rate improvement from 10% to 15% means you get 50% more MQLs for the same ad spend.

Here's how to include this in your budget request 👇

Most marketers allocate 90% of budget to paid channels and 10% (or less) to conversion rate optimization. But, if you're driving 40K clicks at $5 CPC (that's $200K in ad spend) and only converting at 1%, you're only bringing in 400 leads.

Double your conversion rate to 2%, and you get 800 leads for the same $200K. If you improve landing page conversions to 2.5%, you’ll end up with 1,000+ leads.

My advice: Include CRO as a line item in your 2026 budget request. Show the math on how improving conversion rates reduces your overall CAC and delivers more customers for the same budget.

📔 A note on CRO: We have a dedicated CRO team at KlientBoost that runs a/b tests, studies conversion funnels, and obsesses over revenue metrics. Here is how we pull this growth lever for our clients!

Sorry, but your CFO doesn't care about your marketing tactics.

They care about one thing: will marketing deliver the customers we need to hit our revenue goal?

Before you can get a CEO or CFO who "gets marketing," you need to speak their language. And their language is math and logic.

Don’t roll into the meeting and say "we're going to scale LinkedIn Ads, launch an ABM program, and rebuild our website." Instead, pitch it like this:

If your CFO pushes back and says "we're only giving you $400K," you have the math. Back up your ask with your numbers around CAC, cost-per-lead, and CRO.

It’s crucial to communicate how you will track progress throughout 2026. Keep it simple with a graph like this:

This graph makes it obvious to boards and C-suite what's happening. You're either winning or you're losing. That's the mindset they think in.

You will either walk into this meeting with a defensible plan backed by math, or walk out with half the budget you need and zero shot at hitting your goals.

Marketers who get funded for 2026 aren't the ones with the prettiest slide decks or the longest list of tactics. They are the ones who can defend every decision to any stakeholder using math.

You can't do it if you're stuck talking through a deck full of vanity metrics to stakeholders who don't respect marketing.

Learn to speak their language and you'll get the respect (and budget) you deserve.

Hope you've found this useful. Catch ya in the next one!

🤘

Patrick

P.S. If you're building your 2026 marketing plan right now and need help with identifying your highest-impact growth levers, I can help. Let's talk.