Get in the Budget Before It’s Written

Nobody told me this when I started selling to businesses, so I’ll tell you.

Whether a client works with you next year usually gets decided before you ever ask. It gets decided in a spreadsheet, sometime between now and Thanksgiving, by somebody you’ve probably never met.

That spreadsheet is next year’s budget.

If your work is a line in it, January is easy. The money’s approved, the conversation is about scope and start dates, and nobody has to go “check with finance.” If your work isn’t a line in it, you’re about to spend the first quarter of 2027 asking people to find money that doesn’t exist, from a pile that was already handed out to whoever showed up in October.

Most operators show up in January, every single year, and then wonder why Q1 feels like pushing a truck uphill.

Let’s fix that this week.

If your clients run on a calendar fiscal year, and most small and midsize companies do, their 2027 numbers are getting built right now. The department heads submit requests in October. Finance squeezes them in November. Somebody signs off in December. By the time everybody comes back from New Year’s, the money has names on it.

And the squeeze this year is real. When Gartner surveyed CFOs about last year’s cycle, 64 percent were planning to grow overhead budgets slower than revenue. That trend hasn’t reversed. Translation: finance is approving fewer new things, and the things it does approve are the ones somebody walked in and defended with a number.

Now, a tight budget doesn’t automatically mean less money for you. It means less money for the vendor who isn’t in the room. Every CFO tightening the belt still has to fund the stuff that clearly makes money or clearly saves it. You want to be clearly one of those, on paper, before the paper is final.

Picture your best contact at your best client. Call him Steve. Steve likes you. Steve’s team likes your work. Steve fully intends to keep working with you next year.

Now picture Steve in a budget meeting with his CFO, trying to justify your line from memory. He doesn’t remember the exact numbers. He forgot the win from April. He describes your work as “they help us with marketing stuff” because that’s how he thinks about it in the hallway. The CFO, who has never met you, sees a cost with a fuzzy story attached and a request to keep it flat or grow it.

You just got cut fifteen percent and you weren’t even in the building.

Steve didn’t betray you. Steve just wasn’t armed. Your champion is only as strong as the ammunition you hand him, and almost nobody hands him any.

So your job for the next eight weeks is to arm Steve. He’s the one selling you in the meeting that decides your next twelve months, and right now he’s walking in with nothing.

Pull every active client and every warm prospect onto one sheet. Five columns:

That last column is where most guys get uncomfortable, because it forces you to write down a number you want instead of a number you’re hoping for. Write it anyway. You can’t defend a budget line you haven’t sized.

If you’ve got more than ten accounts, rank them. The top five by revenue get the full treatment below. The next tier gets the email. The rest get a note in January.

This is the email that changes your Q1. Send it this week to every account in your top tier. Short, plain, no pitch.

Subject: Planning for 2027

“Hey Steve, quick one. I’m guessing your team is starting to put together 2027 numbers. If it would help, I’m happy to put together a one page summary of what we did this year and what I’d recommend for next year, with costs, so you’ve got it ready when you need it. When are your budget requests due?”

Notice what that email does. It asks the only question that matters, which is the deadline. It offers to do Steve’s homework for him. And it positions you as the guy thinking about his year, not your invoice.

You’ll get one of three replies. “Yes please, due the 30th.” Perfect, you’ve got a deadline. “We already submitted.” Fine, now you know, and you ask when it gets finalized, because there’s usually a revision window. Or silence, which means you follow up in four business days with one line: “Want me to send that summary over anyway?”

This is the ammunition. One page. Steve should be able to forward it to his CFO without editing a word, and the CFO should understand it in ninety seconds.

Five sections, in this order:

Section four is where you win or lose the room. Give them a full option and a lean option. CFOs love cutting things, so give them something to cut that still leaves you in the budget. A man who walks in with one number gets negotiated down. A man who walks in with two gets picked between.

Once the one pager is in Steve’s hands, ask for thirty minutes. You’re not pitching in this one. You’re planning his year with him.

“Before you submit, want to grab thirty minutes so I can walk you through the 2027 recommendation? I’d rather you have answers to the questions your CFO is going to ask than get stuck in the room.”

In that meeting you do three things. You walk the page. You ask Steve directly what pushback he expects, and you pre-answer every one. And you ask the question almost nobody asks: “Is there anybody else who needs to see this before it’s final?” If there’s a CFO or a partner who has to sign off, offer to join for ten minutes. Half the time they’ll say no. The other half, you just got the most valuable ten minutes of your year.

Budget season is a twelve week window and you’re running it on top of your actual job. If the follow-up lives in your head, it doesn’t happen. You’ll remember on November 19th that you never heard back from your third biggest client, and their deadline was the 15th.

I run the whole cycle in Make. When I mark an account as “budget email sent” in my sheet, Make waits four business days and drops a reminder in my task list if the status hasn’t changed. When I add a deadline, it builds a countdown and pings me ten days, five days, and two days out. When a deal closes for next year, it moves the row to a “2027 committed” tab and adds the start date to my calendar. It took about an hour to set up, and it’s the reason no account slips through the gap between “I meant to” and “too late.”

If you’d rather run it by hand, fine. Put a fifteen minute block on Friday afternoons through mid December and work the sheet. Use whatever you’ll actually stick with, as long as nothing lives only in your head.

Everything above works even better on warm prospects.

Your prospect who said “let’s revisit next year” in August? He meant it. But “next year” doesn’t start in January for him. It starts the week his department submits its numbers. If you call him in January, you’re asking him to find unbudgeted money. If you call him now, you’re helping him budget for you.

Same email, slightly different shape:

“Hey Mike, when we talked in August you mentioned revisiting this in 2027. If you’re putting together next year’s numbers, I can send a short proposal with a cost range so you can drop it into your budget request. No commitment, just a number to plan around. Useful?”

You’re asking for a line in his budget, and that’s a much easier yes than a decision. Come January, the line turns into a signed deal without you having to sell it twice.

Leading with a price increase. If you’ve got a rate change coming, don’t make it the headline. Bury it in a plan that shows more value next year. A price increase in an email gets argued with. A price increase inside a business case gets approved alongside the rest of the page.

Sending a deck. Nobody in a budget meeting reads a twenty slide deck. They read one page. If it doesn’t fit on one page, you don’t understand it well enough yet.

Waiting for them to ask. They won’t. Steve is drowning in his own planning. He’ll budget for you out of habit, at this year’s number, with this year’s fuzzy description. Unless you hand him something better.

“My clients don’t really have formal budgets.”

Every company with more than about ten people has some version of next year’s number, even if it’s the owner and his bookkeeper at a kitchen table in December. Ask anyway. The question alone tells them you plan ahead, which is a quality they want in somebody they’re paying.

“It feels pushy to bring up next year when we’re still doing this year’s work.”

Pushy is calling in January asking for money they don’t have. Helping somebody plan is just good service. You’re making his life easier during the most annoying month of his year.

“I don’t have great numbers from this year.”

Then you just found out something important, and you’ve got eight weeks to fix it. Go get the numbers. Ask the client what’s changed since you started. Pull whatever data exists. A rough number with honest math beats a confident story with none.

Three things, before Friday:

That’s maybe three hours of work. It’s three hours that decide whether January starts with signed renewals or a hunt.

Wednesday, we’re taking the same idea home. Because there’s another set of plans getting made for your December right now, and you’re probably not in that meeting either.

Refined. Relentless. Unapologetic.

Marcus