Finance Leaders 🚨 What’s Your Relationship With Marketing?

When you think of marketing and finance, do you think “dynamic duo” or “double trouble?”

Achieving optimal growth calls for collaboration between the two departments, but building that partnership involves many moving parts. From aligning financial goals with creative marketing initiatives to collaborating on budgeting strategies and communication efforts, there’s a lot that can go right — or wrong.

Together, marketing and finance professionals can usher their organization into a new era of financial gain and campaign visibility. Whether you’re best buds with your company’s CMO or are looking to get to that point, you’re in the right place.

Marketing: An Art and A Science

Marketing is often perceived to be all about the brand: websites, taglines, colors, logos. While that’s an important part of the marketing function, it’s also very much about science and math.

Understanding consumer behavior, evaluating ad spend opportunities, and maximizing visibility opportunities are all just as much a science as they are an art.

If you want to be a finance professional that your CMO loves, acknowledge this early and often.

What Marketers Wish You Knew About Tension in Attribution

Finance and ROI models that depend on attribution aren’t always a marketer’s best friend — because there’s often a lot more than meets the eye that’s hard to quantify.

Enterprise sales cycles can be a long, complicated process, often with a dozen or more touchpoints that occur before a deal even enters the pipeline. While marketers are braced for this, finance professionals often feel frustrated that their first-touch attribution models aren’t seeing the ROI they’d hoped.

There’s a whole world of marketing designed to measure brand-related activities that aren’t easy to quantify –– and the best finance partners understand that nuance and keep their models flexible to account for it. 

Synergy = Success

Marketing and finance professionals have the unique chance to be in lockstep together, moving in synch toward business strategy and interests with a special blend of art and science. Here’s how finance professionals can best support their marketing counterparts –– in service to better working relationships for all.

Let marketing be the experts in the room
Because marketing creates assets that represent the company to the world, it can often seem like everyone in the organization has an opinion on every aspect of the team’s work. Sit back and let them be the drivers of their initiatives, understanding that…

Regular meetings are your friend
Meeting regularly about the performance and outcomes your CMO and their team can reasonably control is key to ensuring the team is delivering on promises made –– and that they’re doing so aligned with budgetary resources. This ensures both departments are aware of what the other is doing, maximizing opportunities for teamwork.

Take an interest in attribution
Your finance team should take time to dig into the average sales and marketing cycles your organization sees; this will give them greater insights into what should and shouldn’t be attributed in those flexible financial models we mentioned above. Understanding what can often be a complex process will eliminate frustration on both sides of the desk, and make everyone on your finance team the ideal partner to your marketing cohort.

Ready to hear practical advice from a seasoned marketing leader on how to build the best possible relationship between these two crucial organizational departments? Ruth Zive, CMO at LivePerson, digs into this and more on the latest episode of The CFO Show.

In case you missed it…

Using a dashboard populated by the right KPIs matters for growth, innovation and continual optimized performance. If you’re looking for a tip sheet on navigating business performance metrics and creating harmony between strategy and execution, you’re in the right place. Craig Schiff, President & CEO, Lead Analyst, BPM Partners, joins The CFO Show for a conversation that covers everything you need to know about navigating the dashboards, scorecards, KPIs, and metrics that drive business success.

What’s next…

Enhanced Risk Management (ERM) and internal controls can sometimes sound more ominous than what they really are: great business practices with solid checks and balances. Sruthi Lanka, Chief Financial Officer at Public.com, joins us to share tactics around ERM and internal controls that can help organizations maximize their strategic operations.

We share everything you need to catalyze your career and revolutionize your business. To hear the best advice from today’s finance visionaries, tune into The CFO Show today.