Planful, the financial performance management cloud software vendor, is to acquire Plannuh, the marketing performance management vendor. The acquisition will extend the Planful platform with a solution tailored specifically for marketing leaders. It will enable CFOs and CMOs to work together better as they develop and track budgets and plans. Neither party disclosed the terms of the deal.
Planful’s CEO Grant Halloran commented: “Marketing is an increasingly important and large investment area for many businesses, yet there is huge friction in planning and tracking investments at granular levels. The Plannuh team has solved this problem in such an impressive way. We fell in love with the technology and the team and are delighted to welcome them all to Planful and our mission.”
Founded in 2017, Plannuh received $4.1 million in its first venture capital round led by Ripple Ventures in 2021. In total, according to Crunchbase, it has raised $8.1 million. Its other investors included GlassWing and Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund.
What is Plannuh
Plannuh is an Operational Marketing platform that enables marketers to build, execute, measure and improve their marketing plans. It enables the marketer to set up plans, track expenses against each campaign and then measure their performance against key metrics. The overview dashboard provides a wealth of metrics to see which campaigns have performed well and how the overall budget is managed. The solution takes less than a week to implement and integrates with solutions such as Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Adds, HubSpot, and Salesforce. Automated invoice processing is provided through a third-party solution, Budgie. While the solution can automatically import Excel expense transaction reports from finance and ERP systems, it does not appear to have the same integrations that Planful has. It will prove useful for the solution once the acquisition is complete.
The company has attracted customers across four continents and is priced based on marketing spend rather than users, though integrations are priced separately. Customers include Bullhorn, ESET, Synopsis, Nuance, and Sterling National Bank. Mark Geremia, VP of Marketing at Nuance, commented: “Working with Plannuh has been awesome! It is easy to set up, and my teams found it simple to use.”
Plannuh eliminates the necessity for the spreadsheets that marketing teams have historically used to track budgets. The press release noted the following advantages of the platform:
- Easily build agile marketing plans that consolidate goals, campaigns, budgets, and performance metrics into one view
- Automate marketing budget and expense management by leveraging AI
- Import and configure budgets for full alignment and tracking across regions and functions, with pinpoint accuracy for confidence in budget reporting
- Prove and improve the business value of marketing by calculating cost-per-outcome (CPO), return on investment (ROI), and lifetime value (LTV) in real time
A new stage of growth
CEO on Founder Peter Mahoney brought Plannuh to market in 2019. Mahoney explained why he created the company saying: “I created Plannuh because I saw a need for agile planning and budgeting tools that address the unique requirements of marketers while connecting those marketing concepts to financial outcomes. We have spent the past few years creating a system that delivers best-in-class marketing performance that can be communicated in the language of the business.”
In a recent interview, he also described the solution’s benefits: “Plannuh takes messy, disorganized data in marketing plans and budgets and packages it in a way that helps our customers make better decisions about their marketing and proves the value of their team.”
As part of the acquisition, Mahoney will become the General Manager of Marketing Solutions at Planful. He added: “Planful is the natural partner to connect our approach to broader financial planning and analysis processes, further solidifying the strong relationships our customers have developed with their counterparts in the Office of the CFO.”
His team, mainly based in Boston, will also move across to Planful.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Ultimately, Marketing plans need to align with those held by finance. This deal gives Planful a marketing-centric budgeting tool that can help to wean marketers off their spreadsheets with something that tracks the marketing metrics, not just the financial metrics of what they are doing. The solution will be sold both standalone and as part of the Planful platform in the future.
The company already has joint customers, and Mahoney was interviewed back in March 2021 on the Planful podcast, so the relationship goes back some way. Mark Horne, Chief Marketing Officer at Pindrop Security, commented: “As a customer of both Planful and Plannuh, we have seen immense value in the ability of both solutions to help us remain agile through changing market conditions, allowing us to confidently plan for the future. We look forward to working even more closely with Planful to increase collaboration and business-wide planning across both our finance and marketing teams.”
R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO of Constellation Research inc, noted: “Financial performance doesn’t exist only in the Office of Finance. It’s key to every business users’ ability to drive success across the organization. Especially in times of uncertainty and volatility, financial rigor is critical. Organizations are seeing a significantly increased need for business-wide planning, and increased visibility and collaboration across finance and marketing.”
