I've been in business at a senior level for a long time, so I understand how other members of the C-suite view the chief marketing officer. No one sits as far across the table from the CMO as the CFO.
It's not difficult to understand why. Because marketing is expensive, creative, and difficult to quantify. CFOs control the purse strings and like numbers that line up neatly.
And all smart people (and CFOs usually are) seem to think that if they're given a marketing job, they can do it too.
So start by liberally leveraging the Dunning-Kruger effect, mix in a little right-brain versus left-brain conflict, and you've got the CMO-CFO relationship. It is ready to negatively impact the entire business.
Here's what CFOs need to understand: CMOs are full of personalities, and it may seem like they don't have enough rigor or reporting discipline. But what we're actually seeing is that the reason marketing can't connect to dashboards the way they want is because the technology is broken. It's a patchwork of tools built for different purposes and strung together in spreadsheets.
In fact, CMOs often struggle to track how budgets translate into the scant GL code that finance departments use to track revenue. A recent study by Gartner found that only 52% of senior marketing leaders are able to successfully demonstrate their team's contribution to business objectives such as revenue growth, and 40% cited the CFO as their primary adversary.
Measurement remains one of the biggest pain points in marketing. As you sift through the endless dashboards of the technology frankenstack looking for proxy metrics to justify or protect your budget, there's one thing every CFO should understand: That said, the shortcomings of marketing data have little to do with discipline and everything to do with design.
How we got here
As Software-as-a-Service took hold in the early 2000s, companies rushed to reorganize around the cloud and invest in their online presence. Marketing, long treated as a cost center and left out of strategic discussions, is suddenly thrust into the spotlight as digital storefronts become central to success. CMOs were invited to high-stakes meetings, but marketing teams were still rooted in traditional creative-focused advertising and lacked cross-program data, insights, and analysis to speak to real authorities.
Looking back, that was a turning point. Prior to this transition, marketing's data needs were modest and highly siled into specific functional areas. No one had built a standard enterprise system for this functionality, so when SaaS providers arrived ready to integrate, there was nothing to plug into.
CMOs had no real standards for what they should look for in these platforms to make an impact. It was the first time my company hired technical talent in its marketing department and expected them to think like engineers.
As digital tools advance, companies increasingly focus on performance marketing, the first subfield of marketing that can deliver quantifiable results in real time. Although marketing mix modeling (MMM) was pioneered in the 1970s, it remained cumbersome to maintain, required PhD-level expertise, and provided only retrospective insights.
After all, every marketing tool only revealed a piece of the picture, and CMOs were left to unravel the confusion that followed.
Eventually, marketing operations and revision operations teams were established to take data pressure off creative, but much of the analysis is still done manually in spreadsheets. The models do not leverage machine learning, are often 1/4 behind, and account for perhaps 40% of the total work. This is the only part most CFOs see.
The result is today's cluttered landscape of point solutions. This is a complex layer built for manual interpretation because marketing didn't have a true platform of record.
And you can't just add AI, as some have suggested. For AI to actually reduce the load, it must be trained on a foundation that doesn't yet exist. In fact, AI is increasing complexity rather than solving it. For many reasons, especially marketing. can The metric is website traffic, which is now flooded by AI agents. So it's no longer the signal of live audience engagement that it used to be.
Future direction
Let's go back to Gartner's research. CMOs who are able to communicate their company's value from a holistic, long-term perspective appear to be more valued for their contributions. (Of the 41 percent who said they did, more than two-thirds reported such affirmations).
But that's easier said than done. Marketers can't tell the big picture if they don't actually have the big picture. And even if analysts manage to make it exist, the data is rarely maintained because it becomes skewed in the process of shoehorning omnichannel campaigns into a small number of GL codes. As a result, CFOs have become even more skeptical.
All of this points to the need for a new kind of enterprise marketing platform that can integrate bi-directionally with all the systems in your business. Today's technology stacks add work, not less.
Marketers need a platform that is sophisticated enough to lighten their load and help them understand the entire marketing landscape without having to change the way they work. It should be built with purpose. AI-driven. Answer questions and get instant insights. With access to the backend, you can pull data from all core functions to get a truly holistic view of impact. (Pro tip: This is not a design software vendor's job.)
Partner with CMO
CFOs need to see certain things to have confidence in their marketing, and CMOs must be able to provide performance metrics and KPIs that align with what the CFO expects. These numbers should be more closely tied to the metrics other teams track, especially sales. Because marketing performance is almost always judged based on sales results, whether fair or not.
CFOs can empower CMOs by helping them design codes and taxonomies that are structured to reflect the realities of omnichannel marketing campaigns. Co-designing these frameworks gives you the opportunity to align metrics, account for different time periods, and better integrate KPIs across teams. CFOs tend to focus on metrics related to customer acquisition and loyalty (CPA, ROI, ROAS, etc.), so these are a natural starting point.
Marketers are the world's most creative problem solvers, but they insist on maintaining a historical perspective. Because that's something they have to work on. CMOs, more than anyone in the C-suite, want to be able to back up their investments with more than just intuition.
So having a single source of truth that governs all your marketing data with deeply integrated measurement will give you the ability to peer into your back office and understand in real time what's happening across your business and how you need to adapt. Only then can marketing become truly forward-thinking and give CFOs a clear path to becoming partners in building the right platform of record for their business.
We've traditionally used a combination of shoelaces and duct tape to maintain this highly complex functionality. Imagine what our executives could do with 20 years of real-time data insights. be careful.
