Company
As marketing managers responsible for managing multi-million dollar marketing budgets, we experienced budgeting challenges first-hand. We wanted to make budgeting friendly and stress-free.
Budgeting was a painful process—whether it was fiscal year planning or ongoing tracking and re-forecasting. Spreadsheets and finance systems weren't helping. This was especially true in large marketing environments. When we started our own marketing services company, we kept seeing the same problem across our client sites.
We felt that budgeting shouldn't be so challenging, especially considering it was a core component to our roles.
At about the same time, we realized that our complementary skill-sets were a perfect match for developing a web application like Allocadia (even though we are twins, really, we never planned it this way!), and so we decided to do something about the budgeting problem, and we launched Allocadia™ in February of 2009.
The budgeting challenges we saw as marketing professionals
- The difficulty in answering basic budgeting questions
- The lack of visibility into in-depth budget information
- The difficulty in sharing budget information with other budget stakeholders
- The long and cumbersome planning process to get budget approval and buy-in
- The inevitable run-around to collect budget data in order to make informed decisions
- The lack of best-practices, clarity, and efficiency in the overall budgeting process
Allocadia was built on these beliefs:
- Budgeting shouldn't be painful, it should be friendly + stress-free
- Being accountable to your budget should be easy, not painful
- You need to spend less time budgeting, and more time implementing campaigns
- You shouldn't have to chase people around to gather budget information
- The budgeting process shouldn't be long and cumbersome, it should be straightforward
- It should be easy to share your budget with anyone who has a vested interest
- You and your company should have access to a cost-management solution
- Everyone should be on the same page in terms of how to budget and budget status
The market
Allocadia is part of a fast-growing market space selling to corporate marketing departments. Finance and Sales departments were the first wave of corporate departments to have mass enterprise technology implementation and adoption, and now, Marketing is joining-in and is at the fore-front of technology adoption. Marketing can experience huge transformational benefits with the help of marketing technologies, with the ultimate goal of being to maximize the impact of marketing dollars spent in any organization.
Allocadia can best be described as part of the "Marketing Resource Management", or MRM, market space, which Marketing Performance Management and Strategic Planning & Financial Management are sub-sets of. This is also categorized as the "CRM Marketing Applications" space. A closely related market that represents a key go-to-market link with Allocadia is the growing Marketing Automation market.