Sellforte MCP Use Case Library

Ask Sellforte MCP: How should we split next year's media budget?

Written by Juha Nuutinen | Nov 12, 2026, 10:01:22 AM

Welcome to the Sellforte MCP Use Case Library. Each post takes one question that marketing teams really ask their AI assistant through Sellforte MCP, which is now in general availability and accessible to all marketers worldwide. It strips out anything customer-specific and walks through what the assistant does with it, step by step. We run every question on our demo account so the numbers you see are illustrative, not anyone's real results. The idea is simple: steal the prompts, try them on your own model, and see what you get back. We hope you find this series inspiring!

-Juha, CEO at Sellforte

Turning a fixed media budget into next year's channel split

Every autumn someone gets handed a number: "here's next year's media budget, tell us where it goes." It's usually the marketing director or head of media, and the plan has to survive a CFO review. Last year's split plus or minus a bit is easy to write and hard to defend, so you want the model to do the first draft.

What you ask

How should I allocate media for 2027 if I have $17 500 000 for media? Start from what we spent and earned over the last 12 months.

What does the last 10% of budget actually buy us?

What Sellforte MCP does

Starts from the last 12 months

First the assistant pulls the marketing mix model's results for 2025-11-02 to 2026-11-01: spend, incremental sales and ROI by media group. On the demo account that's 17 492 953 in spend and 66 492 139 in incremental sales, an ROI of 3.80. So the budget in the prompt is roughly a flat year.

Media group (illustrative demo data, USD)SpendIncremental salesROI
Cross-network5 397 86723 788 2644.41
Paid Social3 216 23717 413 1635.41
Direct Mail2 005 7148 375 1774.18
Email1 737 6923 442 6201.98
TV1 690 9842 354 9611.39
Paid Search1 452 5044 815 9663.32
All media groups17 492 95366 492 1393.80

 

That's history, though. Average ROI tells you where money worked on average, not where the next dollar goes furthest. For that you need the optimizer.

Proposes scenarios and asks before saving them

Next, the assistant suggests two optimizer scenarios for the year: a business-as-usual plan with every channel locked at its current spend, and an optimized plan at the same total, planned by advertising channel and country. Creating scenarios saves them in your Sellforte account, so the assistant confirms the setup with you before it runs. In this demo run we stopped at that point and didn't create new ones.

If you have a sales goal rather than a fixed amount, the optimizer can also plan to a total sales target, an incremental sales target or a target ROI. You give it the figure to reach.

Reads saved plans at different budget levels

To show what the answer looks like, the assistant read three plans already saved on the demo account for the Q4 window (2026-09-27 to 2027-01-09). It flagged all three as stale: they were created before the model's latest refresh, so a real plan would start by re-creating them.

Saved plan (illustrative demo data, USD)SpendIncremental salesROI
Business as usual4 276 23220 044 3534.69
Optimized, same budget4 276 23120 155 6744.71
Optimized, 10% less budget3 848 60918 423 0174.79

 

At the same budget, the optimized plan adds 111 321 in incremental sales (+0.56%). It gets there by cutting Direct Mail by 107 247 and TV by 46 003 (both about 22% down) and moving the money mostly into Google Performance Max (+68 720), Google YouTube (+17 853, almost 20% up) and Meta Sales (+10 555). Email stays where it is, because it's locked in the plan's limits.

The follow-up is where it gets interesting. Going from the 10%-smaller plan to the full one adds 427 623 in spend and 1 732 657 in incremental sales. The total ROI dips slightly, from 4.79 to 4.71, which is what you'd expect: each extra dollar earns a bit less than the average one. On these numbers the last slice of budget still returns roughly 4 dollars of incremental sales per dollar.

Why it matters

An annual plan really has two questions in it: how big should the budget be, and how should it be split? The same-budget comparison answers the second one. The step between budget levels answers the first, because the difference in incremental sales between two levels is what the extra money buys. That's the number your CFO actually needs.

It also pays to know how much of next year's sales will come without media at all, from the baseline and promotions, before you argue about the media line. And keep the optimizer's limits in mind: it plans by channel and country, not by campaign name, and it can't set a separate growth target per sales channel such as online versus stores.

Try these follow-ups

  • Create the same plan at 90%, 100% and 110% of the budget and show what each step adds in incremental sales.
  • Which channels does the optimized plan grow and cut, by country?
  • What budget would we need to reach $70 000 000 in incremental sales next year?
  • How much of next year's sales does the plan expect from the baseline and promotions, without media?

Related

Try it yourself

Want to see it on your own model? Book a demo, or read how to connect Sellforte MCP to your LLM client. New use cases land in this library regularly.