Bridge the Gap: Elevating the Marketing Value Conversation with Your CFO
About a year ago, I wrote a blog article on the challenges present in the CMO-CFO relationship. If you’ve sat in a corporate marketing seat, it probably does not come as a surprise that there’s often tension between the finance and marketing departments. This tension is caused by a variety of factors, including misaligned success metrics, a perception of marketing as a cost center versus a growth driver, measurement and accountability challenges, and communication gaps.
A recent EMARKETER report quantified this tension, reporting that senior marketers feel CFOs are the most skeptical of their value, followed closely by the CEO.
Image source: EMARKETER
I felt this skepticism and pressure throughout my corporate marketing career. Over time, I got wise to the fact that when starting a new role, I needed to build a relationship and engender trust with my finance counterparts early on. I made it a point to proactively share my marketing objectives, ask pointed questions about the forecast and revenue targets, and discuss how I thought about success in my marketing program.
I learned that in order to earn trust with finance stakeholders, I must:
Be transparent
Articulate my marketing knowledge in a way that makes sense to others
Be open to being challenged and receiving new information
[As a quick aside, whenever I speak with marketing students or early-stage marketers, my top career development advice is to gain financial literacy to facilitate this trust-building.]
Evolve the Marketing Budget Planning Process
The annual budget planning process is a period that can challenge even the strongest marketing-finance relationship. When getting to know your finance stakeholders, make it a point to discuss the budget planning process so you’re aware of the milestones and input requirements. This will help you earn a seat at the planning table and be a more proactive partner to your finance stakeholders.
You may also find yourself in a situation where you need to evolve the marketing budget justification conversation from a short-term (e.g. in-year) ROI-based justification to a long-term growth justification. In my corporate marketing experiences, I found that organizing my marketing budget ask and proposed allocations in a spreadsheet wasn’t enabling me to tell the full story around the need (or opportunity). So, I shifted the conversation from a one-way presentation (marketing to finance/leadership) to a collective dialogue.
I took the marketing budget proposal from Excel to PowerPoint, but more importantly, provided context in a narrative format to articulate the marketing strategy and add context to the budget ask.
In annual budget planning exercises for both Disney and the NFL, I defined the strategic marketing pillars required to support the long-term revenue growth of the business. Each pillar was rooted in a tangible metric or customer insight to justify its need, and I worked to evolve the conversation from evaluating marketing impact in terms of return on ad spend (ROAS)–even though that metric was paramount to my finance counterparts–to talking about holistic health metrics like brand sentiment, market share, competitive differentiation, customer experience, and customer lifetime value.
It can be difficult to have a collective conversation on long-term marketing impact when the budget planning exercise is focused on fiscal year spend and fiscal year outcomes, but through storytelling and inclusive discussion, you can start to evolve the conversation to discuss the long-term jobs marketing needs to do.
Learn More
If you are looking for guidance on how to approach marketing budget justifications and deepen your relationship with your CFO, you might benefit from our Marketing Advisory Session.
