Bookmark these 10 templates for your next Growth or Marketing leadership role

1. PQL & MQL Pipeline Forecast Templates - Bottoms Up & Top-Down

The challenge I faced

Anytime a Product-Led Growth (PLG) motion is attached and supplements a sales-led motion, it becomes harder to track ARR or Enterprise revenue. It was my job to own PLG-influenced ARR, which mostly comes down to generating PQA (or PQLs) from self-serve accounts.

However, I constantly struggled with communicating how self-serve PQA expansion could be forecasted to influence the pipeline. It was meeting after meeting after meeting where I couldn’t accurately forecast or clearly communicate the impact.

How this template helped me

My solution? I made a big spreadsheet that used data to get my point across. Then, I took all that work and boiled it down into a template.

This template allows you to plug in your targets, conversion rates, and assumptions to hit your ARR goals. Use the MQL numbers to fine-tune your marketing plan and budget, and the PQLs to align your product growth team on activation and conversion.

Now, you have a foolproof way of communicating, forecasting, and, more defensibly, proving how your PLG motion adds value to your sales-led motion.

2. Kevan Lee’s Marketing Budget Template

The challenge I faced

As a marketing leader or a director of growth, I am always faced with the question of how much budget I need for the year—how much money for headcount, performance marketing, contractors, etc. It’s not easy to get it right, nor is it perfect. Ask any CMO.

For me, I didn’t want to overthink this for every job I had. Templates like these make it so we don’t have to spend a ton of time reinventing the wheel.

How this template helped me

Kevan Lee’s marketing budget template became my secret weapon for balancing growth, efficiency, and marketing spend. If you’re not a CMO like me, you can easily reduce this template into what you directly manage and add things to make it work for you.

Track your spending and projected costs across teams, tools, ads, and other key investments to make sure every dollar is actually pulling its weight.

Each granular tab on the spreadsheet pulls into a high-level view that calculates the pacing of your overall budget, your CAC and efficiency. Enjoy.

3. ABM Creative Examples

The challenge I faced

I’ve managed, launched, and scaled digital and performance marketing. I’ve spent $10k/month to $1M/month on ads. But the one thing that will make or break your performance, especially with ABM (account based marketing) is creative. Platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok are creative dominant platforms. 70% of the performance can be crap with bad creative.

I was looking for new, high-performing examples when building out a new ABM motion. I found what I was looking for.

How this template helped me

Influ2’s creative playbook became my cheat sheet, and I hope it becomes yours, too. These templates are perfect for every decision-maker in the funnel. They’re packed with real-world examples to help your content reach the right people at the right time in the right way.

4. MKT1’s GACC Marketing Brief Template

The challenge I faced

Marketing teams spend a lot of time wasting their resources and efforts on things that should be repeatable and scalable.

In this case, setting up a campaign with stakeholders and cross-functional team members. Over the years, I kept getting frustrated about how many different ways we were launching campaigns. Half the time, we launched a campaign, but it was always missing something, especially when the campaign should be an integrated campaign.

It was either the audience, the goal, or even the channel strategy that would cause me problems.

Do you know how many times I’ve seen a campaign get greenlit without knowing which channel we were going to use to launch it? These are how campaigns fail.

How this template helped me

Created by MKT1’s Emily Kramer, the GACC marketing brief template zeroes in on the essentials—goals, audience, creative point of view, and channels/distribution. It provides prompts and examples to get you started and will be your go-to for keeping teams aligned and campaigns on point.

I now share this with every new team I join. If anything, I’ve been able to influence marketing executives to think differently about how to go to market with an idea. It’s also a bonus for me because I love the fuel/engine framework Emily created that molds well with this.

Fill it out before your next launch to set yourself up for success!

5. Elena Verna’s Conversion Decline Diagnostic Process

The challenge I faced

There is one thing that has kept me up at night, given me bad dreams, and created stress the moment I woke up. What is it? A North Star growth metric.

Whether it’s your VP of Finance, your COO, VP of Product, etc., I’ve been asked every week, “Why is that metric down?” or “How are we going to increase the metric to hit our forecast?”

Half the time…I don’t know. Not because I don’t have the intellect or knowledge to figure it out, but what has always been missing is a framework or template for approaching problem-solving against key metrics.

How this template helped me

Luckily, my mentor and hero – Elena Verna has a solution.

If your conversion rate is down, use Elena’s conversion rate decline diagnostic process. Broken metrics can quietly tank revenue, waste time, and shatter trust.

This decision tree helps you pinpoint and fix dips in any of your KPIs across acquisition, monetization, and retention to get you back on track.

Save the flowchart and make it part of your daily KPI review. Should alarm bells go off, you’ll know exactly why, and what to do about it.

I’ve also cloned this template and created another decision tree for ARR.

6. My GST: Goals, Strategies, & Tactics Template

The challenge I faced

As a growth leader, you develop comprehensive and detailed strategies and plans. Those details are necessary for you and your team. But when presenting or sharing with executive leadership who aren’t growth experts, I’ve learned the hard way on how bad this hurt growth.

I’ve struggled with mapping out how growth is going to influence pipeline, increase MRR, or figure out how to get everyone aligned on the same page.

How this template helped me

My GST template eradicated this problem for me. The GST borrows from Andrew Capland’s framework to help you map out goals, strategies, and tactics in a simple visual format that gets stakeholders on board and plans into action.

I use this template within the first 90 days of any role to help communicate how we are going to work as a team to meet our goals.

7. Ben William’s PLG Geek Experiment Template

The challenge I faced

I’ve launched a dozen experiments in the last few years, and I find myself always using a different template.

When I don’t have one handy, I tend to miss something in the experiment setup, or my team isn’t empowered to exhaust all tradeoffs around the core performance metric. You’d be surprised, but I’ve seen experiments set up with no hypothesis!

How this template helped me

Ben William's experimentation template, as the PLG Geek himself, is wonderful if you need a solid backbone for any successful growth test. It saves you time, cuts down on risks and execution errors, and keeps your team aligned. It's thorough because it needs to be. Complete it with the detail it deserves, and you can rest easy knowing you’ll be able to learn from, apply, and leverage results to drive growth.

Early-stage teams can use it to build a strong foundation for testing, while established teams can sharpen and level up their process.

8. Kate Syuma’s 5-Step Growth Flow Review

The challenge I faced

Analyzing product flows holistically to identify growth opportunities was often fragmented within product and growth teams. A unified approach or an alignment on what problems we were solving were two big missing pieces to growth opportunities. This made it difficult for me to align user experience with business goals effectively.

How this template helped me

Kate Syuma’s 5-Step Growth Flow Review provided me with a comprehensive approach to mapping and analyzing user journeys against emotions, behaviors, hypotheses, and success metrics. This holistic view enabled us to identify and optimize key growth opportunities within our product flows. The template was instrumental in conducting effective team workshops and refining our user experience to drive growth.

If you need a 90-minute workshop on growth opportunities, bookmark this!

9. Yaakov Carno’s Valubyl Onboarding OS

The challenge I faced

Activation is by far the most important metric, user experience, and PLG concept that can make or break your retention. Onboarding, aha-moments, and activation are all challenging problems for any company to solve.

I’ve tried shipping new experiences, experimenting with new flows, and introducing tools to help improve activation. Many of them have failed.

For me, I am constantly looking for resources and community learnings to expand my knowledge on activation. I am consistently challenged with ensuring there is a product-led retention motion in PLG.

How this template helped me

Yaakov Carno’s Valubyl Onboarding OS provided structured exercises to drill into user needs, define unique value propositions, and map out critical 'aha' moments. This comprehensive approach enabled me to design and optimize self-serve onboarding journeys that significantly improved user activation and retention.

Whether starting from scratch or refining an existing flow, this template will require you to really dig in so you can design and optimize the best self-serve onboarding journey that converts users into smiling, loyal customers.

10. Roman Pichler’s Product Vision​ Board

The challenge I faced

When I lived in Sweden in 2018, I had the dream of opening the first donation-based yoga company in the country. The problem I faced was that I had tons of passion but nowhere to start!

How this template helped me

Roman Pichler’s Product Vision Board provided a structured framework to articulate the big picture, including goals, target audience, user needs, key features, and business objectives.

Using this template, I created a vision that not only inspired and aligned my team but also delivered tangible value. For instance, it was instrumental in kickstarting my yoga community in Sweden, ensuring a focused and cohesive approach to building the business.

Here’s how I used this template to build Lund Yoga Community.

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