Case Study: National Instruments achieves data‑driven marketing planning and investment transparency with Allocadia

How National Instruments Drives Alignment and Accountability Within its Marketing Organization and Boosts its Credibility in the Process

National Instruments (NI), a $1.3 billion engineering‑focused technology company with hundreds of marketers across corporate and regional teams, was hampered by fragmented, spreadsheet‑based planning and a consensus‑driven process that made it difficult to link budgets to results. Without a single system of record, the global marketing operations team struggled to operationalize plans, gain a high‑level view of activities, or determine which initiatives were driving value.

NI shifted from product‑centric planning to a solution‑focused, campaign framework (adapted from SiriusDecisions) and deployed Allocadia alongside Salesforce and Eloqua to centralize budgeting and planning. By assigning campaign‑level targets and using Allocadia’s Alignment Score and cross‑region reporting, NI gained transparency into spend, improved alignment between plans and budgets, empowered global campaign roles, and moved conversations with business leaders from costs to marketing ROI — enabling better efficiency and performance tracking.

National Instruments

Helena Lewis

Chief-Marketing Operations & Technology