I’ve worked in business at a senior level long enough that I have a sense for how other members of the C-Suite view the chief marketing officer. No one tends to sit farther across the table from the CMO than the CFO.
It’s not hard to see why: Marketing is expensive, creative and hard to quantify. The CFO controls the purse strings and likes numbers in neat rows.
Also, everyone who’s smart (and CFOs usually are) seems to think they could do marketing if ever called to the task.
So, we start with a generous helping of the Dunning-Kruger effect, mix in a little right brain–left brain conflict, and there you have it: the CMO–CFO relationship. Ready to do a disservice to the business as a whole.
Here’s what I’d love CFOs to understand: It may look like your CMO has plenty of personality and not enough rigor or reporting discipline. But what you’re really seeing—the reason marketing can’t connect to your dashboards the way you’d like—is that our technology is broken. It’s a patchwork of tools, built for different purposes, stitched together with spreadsheets.
The truth is, CMOs often do have trouble tracking how their budgets translate into the scant GL codes finance uses to track revenue. A recent survey by Gartner found that only 52 percent of senior marketing leaders can successfully demonstrate their team’s contributions to business objectives like revenue growth—with 40 percent singling out the CFO as their main antagonist.
Measurement remains one of marketing’s biggest pain points. As we sift through the endless dashboards of our technology Frankenstacks, hunting for proxy indicators to justify or protect our budgets, there’s one thing every CFO should understand: The shortcomings of marketing’s data have little to do with discipline and everything to do with design.
How We Got Here
When software-as-a-service took hold in the early 2000s, businesses scrambled to reorganize around the cloud and invest in their online presence. Marketing—long treated as a cost center and left out of strategic discussions—was suddenly thrust into the spotlight as the digital storefront became central to success. CMOs were being invited into high-stakes meetings, but marketing teams were still rooted in traditional creative-heavy advertising and they lacked the cross-program data, insight and analytics to speak with real authority.
In hindsight, it was a turning point. Before that shift, marketing’s data needs were modest and highly siloed to specific functional areas. No one had ever built a standard enterprise system for the function, so when SaaS providers arrived ready to integrate, there was nothing to plug into.
CMOs had no real frame of reference for what to ask of these platforms to enable them to demonstrate impact—just as their companies were, for the first time, expecting marketing to hire technical talent and think like engineers.
As digital tools advanced, companies increasingly turned to performance marketing—marketing’s first subdiscipline capable of delivering real-time, quantifiable results. Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM), though pioneered in the 1970s, remained notoriously cumbersome to maintain, demanded PhD-level expertise and offered only retrospective insights.
In the end, every marketing tool revealed just a fragment of the picture, leaving CMOs to untangle the ensuing disorder.
Eventually marketing ops and rev ops teams were established to take the data pressure off creatives, yet much of the analysis still happens manually in spreadsheets. The models don’t leverage machine learning, often lag by a quarter and capture maybe 40 percent of the total effort—the only slice most CFOs ever see.
The result is the littered landscape of point solutions we have today: layers of complexity built to be interpreted manually, because marketing has never had a true platform of record.
And you can’t just bolt on AI, as some suggest. For AI to actually lighten the load, it has to be trained on that still-nonexistent foundation. In fact, AI is adding complexity instead of solving for it—not least because much of what marketing can measure is website traffic, and that traffic is now being swarmed by AI agents, meaning it is no longer the signal of live audience engagement it used to be.
The Way Forward
Back to that Gartner survey: It seems that CMOs who can communicate their value holistically and with a long-term view receive more credit for their contributions. (Of the 41 percent who said they do so, more than two-thirds reported such affirmation).
But it’s easier said than done. Marketers can’t communicate a holistic view if they don’t actually have one. And when their analysts do manage to cobble one into existence, the data rarely holds up, because it gets distorted in the process of squeezing omnichannel campaigns into a handful of GL codes. The result is even more CFO skepticism.
All of this points to the need for a new kind of enterprise marketing platform, one that can integrate in both directions with every system of the business. Today’s tech stack adds work instead of reducing it.
Marketers need a platform that takes some of the load off, doesn’t require them to change how they work and is sophisticated enough to understand marketing in its entirety. It should be purpose built; AI-driven; able to answer questions and surface insights instantly; and have access to the back end so it can pull data from every core function to capture a truly holistic view of impact. (Pro tip: This isn’t a job for a design software vendor.)
Partnering with Your CMO
CFOs need to see certain things to gain confidence in marketing, and CMOs have to be able to deliver performance metrics and KPIs that align—apples to apples—with what CFOs expect. Those numbers need to tie more closely to the metrics other teams track, especially sales—because fair or not, marketing performance is almost always judged against sales outcomes.
CFOs can empower CMOs by helping to design codes and taxonomies that are structured to reflect the realities of omnichannel marketing campaigns. Co-designing these frameworks provides an opportunity to align on metrics, account for varied time horizons and better integrate KPIs across teams. Since CFOs tend to value metrics related to customer acquisition and loyalty (like CPA, ROI and ROAS), these are a natural starting point.
Marketers are the most creative problem-solvers in the world, but they’re stuck defending historical perspectives because that’s what they have to work with. As much as if not more than anyone in the C-Suite, CMOs want to be able to back their investments with more than intuition.
So—give us a single source of truth that manages all marketing data with deeply integrated measurement, let us see into the back office to understand, in real time, what’s happening across the business and how we need to adapt. Only then will marketing be truly forward-thinking, giving CFOs a clear path to becoming our partners in building the platform of record that fits the business.
We’ve held this highly complex function together with shoestring and duct tape until now. Imagine what we could do with the real-time data insights our C-Suite counterparts have had for two decades. Watch out.
