Marketing request intake process flowchart (form to backlog review)
Marketing request intake flowchart template: request form, completeness check, triage against priorities and capacity, accept, defer or decline with a reason, estimate, scope change and acceptance.
What the marketing request intake process flowchart (form to backlog review) process is
Marketing teams rarely have a shortage of requests; they have a shortage of a shared way to say yes, not yet or no. Without an intake process, asks arrive by chat, email and hallway, the loudest sponsor wins, and nobody can show what was turned down. This chart draws the front door: the requester submits a form, marketing ops checks that it is complete, and the lead decides against stated priorities and real capacity.
What makes this different from a delivery or approval process is that the important decision comes before any work starts, and it has three outcomes. "Does it fit priorities and capacity?" can accept, defer to a later planning cycle or decline with a reason and an alternative. The chart also makes scope change a decision of its own, "Has anything changed since the date was agreed?", so a late addition is either absorbed deliberately or re-triaged as a new request. For the work that follows acceptance, see /templates/campaign-launch-process and /templates/content-approval-process; for a handoff from the sales side, see /templates/sales-handoff-process.
Four lanes keep the roles apart: the Requester who owns the need and accepts the result, Marketing ops (intake) who keep the queue honest, the Marketing lead who makes the capacity call, and the Delivery team who estimate and do the work. Treat the thresholds, such as the lead approval limit, as placeholders to replace with your own, and keep the form short enough that people actually use it.
What this flowchart covers
In this template
- Four swimlanes (Requester, Marketing ops (intake), Marketing lead and Delivery team) across five phases: submit, triage, plan, deliver and review
- A completeness gate, "Is the request complete?", that sends gaps back to the requester before anything is scored
- A three-way triage decision, "Does it fit priorities and capacity?", with accept, defer and decline paths, the decline carrying a reason and an alternative
- An approval threshold, "Is the estimate over the lead approval limit?", so small work does not queue for the lead
- Mid-delivery control: "Has anything changed since the date was agreed?" and "Does the change fit the agreed capacity?", plus an exception path that flags a slipping date
- Acceptance and learning: "Does the requester accept the result?", recording actual effort and a review of the backlog, deferred items and decline reasons
When to use this template
- Sales, product or regional teams send marketing requests through several channels and nobody can see the whole queue
- Marketing says no or not yet informally, and requesters want the reason and the criteria written down
- Projects keep growing after the date was agreed and you need a visible scope-change step
- You are introducing a request form and need to show who checks it, who decides and what happens to a decline
- Leadership asks what marketing turned down and why, and there is no record to show
How it works
Rename the lanes to your team
Replace Requester, Marketing ops (intake), Marketing lead and Delivery team with your own roles. In a small team one person may hold two lanes; keep both lanes so the decisions stay separate from the doing.
Design the request form
List the few fields triage needs: goal, audience, deadline, what success looks like, and who is asking. Keep optional fields out; every extra field lowers the number of requests that arrive complete.
Write the scoring criteria
Define how requests are scored against current priorities and capacity, and who owns the answer. Put the criteria where requesters can read them, so a decline can point to a rule.
Set the decline and defer rules
Decide what a decline must contain, such as a reason and an alternative, and how long a deferred request waits before it is re-scored. Without a revisit date, deferred means forgotten.
Set your own thresholds
The approval limit and any days shown are placeholders. Put in your own limit for lead approval, your usual response time and the working days allowed for clarifying an incomplete request.
Decide how scope changes are handled
State what counts as a change, who logs it and what happens when it exceeds capacity. Link it back to triage so a large change is treated as the new request it is.
Run it on last quarter's asks
Take ten past requests and trace each one through the chart. Note where it waited or was argued about and adjust the form, criteria or lanes.
Frequently asked questions
What is a marketing request intake process?
It is the defined route by which other teams ask marketing for work: a request form, a completeness check, a triage decision that accepts, defers or declines, an estimate and assignment, and tracking through to acceptance. Its purpose is to make demand visible and to give every request a reasoned answer.
How is this different from a campaign launch or content approval process?
Those cover how work is made, reviewed and released. This covers whether the work should be taken on at all, and when. The chart ends its decision phase before delivery starts, then hands over to the delivery team. See /templates/campaign-launch-process and /templates/content-approval-process for the work itself.
How should a marketing team decline requests?
With a written reason that points to the criteria, and an alternative where one exists, such as a template, a smaller scope or a later cycle. The chart's decline path sends both to the requester so that the decision is visible rather than implied by silence.
What should happen when scope changes after acceptance?
The change is logged and its impact estimated. If it fits the agreed capacity it can be absorbed deliberately, and if it would displace other committed work it goes back through triage as a new request. That is what the chart's scope-change decisions draw.
Where this process fits
In most operations this process hands off to Campaign launch process flowchart (brief to post-campaign review).
It is one step in Campaign delivery.
Step 1: Marketing request intake process flowchart (form to backlog review) You are here
Marketing request intake flowchart template: request form, completeness check, triage against priorities and capacity, accept, defer or decline with a reason, estimate, scope change and acceptance.
Step 2: Campaign launch process flowchart (brief to post-campaign review)
Marketing campaign launch flowchart template: brief and sign-off, parallel creative and channel builds, pre-launch QA, go/no-go gate, first-week monitoring and a review that feeds the next brief.
Step 3: Email campaign QA process flowchart (build to post-send report)