Marketing and Finance Need To Agree Or At Least See Eye to Eye

Marketing and finance have been having versions of the same conversation for years.

Your CMO may talk about brand visibility, customer behavior, demand, engagement, retention, market position, and what is happening throughout the cycles. Your CFO may approach the same investment through revenue, profitability, productivity, risk, capital allocation, forecasting, and return.

That can make it sound as though the two leaders disagree about what matters.

Often, they are trying to understand the same business from different points in the growth system.

That distinction has become especially important in certain economic markets. Finance leaders are still expected to control costs and improve productivity, but they are also funding growth, technology, and AI. Marketing leaders are being asked to create growth, adapt to changing customer behavior, use AI more effectively, and prove business value without receiving a proportional increase in resources. Gartner’s research reflects both pressures: CFOs are continuing to prioritize growth-driving functions such as sales and marketing while CMOs report constrained budgets and increasingly ambitious expectations.

The interesting part is that this tension did not suddenly appear right now.

What is changing is what both leaders are being asked to prove.

And as you head toward the future, getting finance and marketing to speak a more shared language may become even more important than improving another dashboard.

How did finance and marketing get here?

Long before AI became part of nearly every executive planning conversation, marketing and finance already operated on different time horizons.

Marketing often works months or even years ahead of the final transaction. You are building familiarity before someone needs you, helping prospects understand a problem, earning trust while they compare alternatives, supporting sales, maintaining customer relationships, and creating reasons for people to return or recommend the business.

Finance has another responsibility. The company still has to decide how much money to invest, where that money should go, what level of risk is acceptable, and whether those decisions are creating enough value.

Research published by Google showed this divide clearly. Marketing and finance leaders largely agreed that marketing contributes to long-term growth, but marketers placed more emphasis on long-term brand building and positioning while finance leaders were more likely to prioritize profitability and margin under shorter-term financial pressure.

That difference explains a familiar executive conversation.

Marketing reports stronger awareness, more branded search, improved engagement, or progress with an audience.

Finance wants to understand what that progress means economically.

The problem is rarely that one side understands business and the other does not. The bigger issue is that companies often wait until reporting time to decide what marketing success was supposed to mean.

By then, finance and marketing may already be evaluating the same investment against two different scorecards.

Why does the conversation of fianance and marketing feel different now?

The pressures around both roles have intensified.

Gartner’s CFO research shows finance leaders continuing to invest in growth-driving areas. Sales is among the strongest areas for increased budgets, with marketing close behind. Technology spending is also receiving substantial investment as companies fund AI, automation, cybersecurity, and digital transformation ( boy how often have we heard that term over the years, insert companies bringing that term back). At the same time, headcount growth expectations have fallen significantly, which puts more pressure on organizations to create growth without simply adding people.

Marketing leaders are experiencing the same economic pressure from another direction. Gartner describes the CMO environment as one of limited budget growth, rising expectations, and accelerating pressure to deliver AI-enabled transformation.

So your CMO may be asking:

How do we create demand? How do we stay visible as search behavior changes? Are we reaching the right customers? Can AI help the team work more effectively? Are we building a brand customers trust? Where are people getting lost before they become customers?

Meanwhile, your CFO may be asking:

Where should we continue investing? Which technologies are improving the business? Are productivity gains actually showing up? Can we grow without increasing costs at the same rate? Which investments deserve additional funding?

There is a lot of overlap hidden inside those questions.

Both executives are ultimately trying to understand where growth comes from and how confidently the organization can invest in more of it.

What is your CFO actually asking when they ask whether marketing works?

When a CFO asks whether marketing is producing results, the question is usually larger than, “How many sales did this campaign generate?”

They are trying to determine whether marketing is a responsible use of company resources.

Revenue matters, but so can margin, customer acquisition cost, retention, customer lifetime value, market expansion, productivity, pricing power, risk, and the company’s ability to generate future demand.

The challenge for marketing is translating activity into that business context.

Consider a report that says:

“We generated 500,000 impressions.”

The number tells you something happened. It does not yet explain whether the right audience saw the company, whether visibility is increasing in a priority market, or whether that exposure contributed to stronger demand.

The same applies to traffic.

A 40 percent increase in website sessions may be encouraging, but leadership still needs to know who those visitors were, why they came, what they did next, and whether the increase relates to a business priority.

Your CFO does not need every channel metric eliminated from the report. They need enough interpretation to understand what those metrics suggest about the business.

That may mean explaining that more qualified prospects are entering the website, acquisition costs are improving, conversions/key events has increased, a priority service line is gaining demand, retention is strengthening, or the organization is becoming less dependent on one expensive source of new customers.

This is part of the reason Elevated’s reporting philosophy focuses on more than numbers. A useful report should explain what your focused on, why it mattered, who you were trying to reach, what you wanted them to understand or do, what happened, and what you are changing because of what you learned.

What does your CMO see that may not appear in a revenue report yet?

Marketing leaders are dealing with the reality that customers rarely experience a company through one clean, measurable interaction.

Imagine a potential client hears your company’s name from a colleague. A month later, they see one of your LinkedIn posts. They eventually search the company, visit your website, read an article, look at your reviews, listen to part of a podcast, and return weeks later after receiving a recommendation from someone else.

They finally contact you through Google.

Google may receive the conversion credit.

That does not mean Google created the entire decision.

Your CMO is trying to understand everything that helped the buyer move from unfamiliarity to consideration to trust and eventually action.

That is why marketing teams watch indicators such as branded search, search visibility, qualified traffic, content consumption, engagement, direct traffic, reviews, email behavior, return visits, and lead quality.

Used correctly, those measures help explain what is developing earlier in the journey.

They should not be treated as interchangeable with revenue but INDICATORS of potential revenue growth.

Customer journeys are also becoming harder to reduce to a single digital path. Research can now move through search engines, AI tools, social platforms, reviews, communities, video, podcasts, events, professional networks, referrals, and offline conversations before anyone completes a trackable conversion.

The more fragmented that journey becomes, the more important it is for finance and marketing to agree on what constitutes meaningful evidence without pretending that attribution will ever be perfect.

Where does the language cause unnecessary disagreement?

Sometimes marketing and finance are closer to agreement than their terminology makes it appear.

Take brand awareness.

Marketing may be trying to determine whether more of the right market recognizes the company and understands what it should be known for.

Finance may want to know how stronger recognition eventually affects customer acquisition costs, direct demand, conversion, pricing power, retention, market expansion, or dependence on paid channels.

Both are useful questions.

Or consider customer experience.

A marketer may be examining the experience because confusing scheduling, weak follow-up, poor onboarding, or inconsistent communication can damage trust.

A financial view might look at how those same problems affect conversion rates, cancellations, churn, repeat revenue, lifetime value, and the cost of replacing customers who leave.

Even engagement, one of marketing’s most overused words, becomes more useful when the business defines what it’s potential client are trying to learn.

High engagement with a broad audience may have limited value.

Strong engagement from decision-makers in a market the company is actively trying to enter tells you something different.

The conversation becomes much more productive when you move past the label and explain the business condition behind it.

Why doesn’t ROI answer everything for marketing and finance?

ROI should absolutely be part of marketing measurement when you can calculate it responsibly.

Some situations make that fairly straightforward. If you spend a defined amount on a direct-response campaign, accurately identify the customers generated from it, and know the revenue or margin associated with those customers, you have useful financial information.

Other marketing investments are more complicated.

1. What value should you assign to the article that answered a buyer’s concern three months before the sale?
2. How much credit belongs to the sponsorship where a relationship began?
3. What portion of the conversion belongs to your reviews, Google Ads, salesperson, email follow-up, website, case study, and referral when all of them influenced the decision?
4. and on and on.

You can improve attribution significantly without pretending every question has a precise answer.

A stronger measurement system distinguishes among three things.

Some outcomes can be directly measured. A trackable form submission from a paid campaign may fit here.

Other outcomes can be reasonably connected through CRM data, customer-reported sources, attribution models, call tracking, or other evidence.

Then there are leading indicators that help you understand whether the conditions required for future growth are improving.

The quality of the business decision matters more than creating an impressive-looking attribution percentage.

PwC’s work on finance and marketing makes a related argument. Their research focuses on creating a shared view of marketing as a growth investment tied to acquisition, retention, profitability, enterprise value, and other business outcomes rather than evaluating marketing as an isolated expense category.

That shared view matters because different marketing investments operate on different timelines.

How should you explain brand investment to finance?

Brand investment often becomes difficult to defend when “brand awareness” is presented as the outcome instead of the beginning of the explanation. The more useful conversation is what stronger brand familiarity is expected to help the company accomplish.

For a service company, greater familiarity may mean customers are more likely to search the company by name rather than clicking through a paid lead marketplace.

For a professional services firm, stronger authority may help prospective clients enter sales conversations with greater confidence.

A healthcare organization may need brand investment to strengthen community trust around a new service line.

An education organization may use reputation and thought leadership to influence a longer enrollment decision.

Another business may need a stronger brand because customers currently see every competitor as interchangeable and make decisions almost entirely on price. The economic benefit will not look identical across those businesses.

That is why “What is the ROI of brand?” is usually less helpful than asking what business conditions the brand investment is intended to influence and which measures can tell you whether that influence is developing. Your CFO can understand brand perfectly well when the connection to the business is made clear.

What should marketing say when attribution has limits?

Marketing leaders also need to be comfortable saying where the data stops. You do not strengthen credibility by assigning an exact dollar value to something when the available information cannot support that conclusion. Accountability comes from establishing expectations before the work begins.

1. If your goal is increasing qualified demand, decide what “qualified” means and measure it.
2. If conversion is the problem, establish the current conversion rate and identify where people are dropping out.
3. If customer retention is weakening, understand the current churn or repeat-purchase pattern.
4. If you are entering a new market, determine how you will recognize early progress in awareness, consideration, qualified traffic, conversations, and eventual revenue.

The measurement model should match the business problem. That principle is central our broader positioning as marketing company but it’s not about us, it’s about you. You begin with what is limiting growth, understand where the customer journey is breaking down, and then determine which marketing response makes sense. We will help.

Why is AI making this conversation even more important?

AI has added another layer to the finance-marketing relationship because it can create both efficiency and growth opportunities. Marketing teams are investing heavily. Gartner reports that AI represents an average of 15.3 percent of marketing budgets this year, although only 30 percent of surveyed marketing organizations describe their AI readiness as mature or fully developed.

A marketing leader may see AI helping with research, production, personalization, analysis, testing, automation, customer experience, and faster execution. Finance will reasonably want to understand what changed after those capabilities were introduced.

1. Did the team produce more without increasing headcount?
2. Did work happen faster?
3. Did campaign performance improve?
4. Did better analysis lead to smarter investment?
5. Were customers served more effectively?
6. Did productivity improvements free people to spend more time on higher-value work?

That last question may become especially important.

PwC argues that businesses face a choice in how they use AI-driven efficiencies in marketing. Companies can simply reduce costs while maintaining similar output, or they can reinvest some of those gains to improve effectiveness and create additional growth. Their research suggests the larger opportunity comes from using AI to strengthen the business rather than viewing it only as a cost-reduction mechanism.

This makes the CFO-CMO conversation much broader than “How much money did AI save?”

You also need to ask what your organization became capable of doing because of it.

What should you be preparing for as the next year approaches?

Nobody can know exactly how the CFO-CMO relationship will evolve next year, but the pressures already visible in now give businesses some useful clues.

Marketing teams are being asked to create more growth with potentially constrained resources.

Finance teams are being asked to fund growth while improving productivity.

Both functions are investing in technology and AI.

Customer journeys continue to spread across more channels and become harder to capture through simple attribution.

Those conditions point toward more shared responsibility, not less.

Your CMO will likely need a stronger understanding of revenue, profitability, customer economics, productivity, sales, technology, and operational capacity.

Your CFO will increasingly benefit from understanding how brand, customer behavior, demand creation, retention, and long decision journeys affect future financial performance.

You do not need either executive to become an expert in the other’s discipline. You need enough shared understanding that both can participate in the same growth decision. That may be one of the most important shifts heading into the next year.

Marketing performance will become harder to manage as a collection of channel reports.

Finance will also have difficulty evaluating growth investments using only immediate financial returns.

The businesses that adapt will build better connections among customer behavior, marketing performance, pipeline, revenue, profitability, retention, capacity, and long-term growth.

How can your CFO and CMO create a shared definition of marketing value?

The most useful conversation happens before money is spent.

Finance and marketing should agree on what the organization is trying to change, what evidence will indicate progress, and how long that change should reasonably take.

A practical starting point is to work through the business problem together:

1. What are we experiencing in the business that needs to change?
2. Where is that problem occurring in the customer or buyer journey?
3. What evidence supports that diagnosis?
4. What appears to be the primary constraint?
5. What needs to change for the business outcome to improve?
6. What role can marketing realistically play?
7. What should we measure first?
8. What business or financial outcome should eventually follow?
9. What would cause us to continue, increase, adjust, or stop the investment?

That creates a much healthier measurement model because marketing activity now has a reason to exist. You also reduce the likelihood that a campaign gets evaluated against expectations that were never part of the original strategy.

What should a marketing report tell leadership?

An executive marketing report needs numbers, context, and a point of view.

Leadership should understand what marketing focused on and why it mattered at that particular moment. The report should identify the audience, the intended change in behavior or understanding, how the channels worked together, what happened, what appears to be working, where performance is weaker, and what the team recommends doing next.

Detailed platform information can still sit underneath that executive view.Your marketing team may need to know exactly what happened with paid search terms, social content, email segments, landing-page conversion, keyword visibility, or retargeting audiences.

Your CFO does not necessarily need all of that detail.

They need the interpretation required to participate in the next investment decision. A good report allows both levels to coexist.

What happens when finance and marketing begin with the same business problem?

The language will never be identical because the responsibilities are different.

That is useful.

Marketing keeps the customer visible in executive decision-making. Finance brings discipline around investment, profitability, risk, and sustainability.

The opportunity is to connect those perspectives earlier.

When you begin with the business problem, you can have a much more useful discussion about whether marketing is meant to build demand, capture existing demand, improve conversion, strengthen retention, support sales, enter a market, build trust, increase customer value, or solve another growth constraint. Then you can select the appropriate marketing tools and establish the measures that actually belong to that objective.

That approach becomes even more important as you move beyond the next year. AI will keep changing how work gets done. Customer research will continue spreading across more platforms. Attribution will remain imperfect. Leadership will still need to decide where the next dollar belongs.

Your CFO and CMO bring different information to that decision.

The company benefits when those perspectives meet around one question:

What are we learning about how this business grows, and where should we invest next?

That is a much stronger starting point for both marketing and finance.

What if your business does not have a CFO or a CMO?

You may be reading this and thinking, “We do not have either one of those people.” That is common, especially in established small and midsize businesses.

The titles may not exist yet, but the responsibilities usually do. Someone in your organization is making decisions about cash flow, profitability, budgets, investment, and financial risk. Someone is also making decisions about customers, demand, brand, lead generation, retention, messaging, and how the business goes to market.

Sometimes those responsibilities belong to two different people. Sometimes they belong to five people. In a smaller business, they may all belong to the owner.

That is why the CFO-CMO conversation still matters even when nobody has either title.

In an owner-led business

The owner or president may effectively be serving as both the financial and marketing decision-maker.

They are asking questions such as:

• How much can we afford to invest?
• Which services are most profitable?
• Where do we have capacity?
• Where should the next customer come from?
• Which marketing is actually producing business?

At this stage, an accountant, bookkeeper, controller, general manager, sales leader, office manager, or outside marketing partner may provide pieces of the information the owner needs. The challenge is usually less about getting two executives aligned and more about making sure the owner is not evaluating marketing from only one side of the business.

If you only look at marketing activity, you can spend money without understanding the business result.

If you only look at immediate revenue, you can underinvest in the visibility, trust, positioning, and customer relationships that create future demand.

As the business begins adding leadership

The responsibilities start separating.

You may have a controller, finance manager, director of finance, accountant, or fractional CFO providing the financial perspective. On the marketing side, you might have a marketing manager, marketing director, business development leader, sales leader, communications director, fractional CMO, internal marketing employee, or agency partner providing the customer and growth perspective.

This is often where the language gap begins to appear. The finance person may be looking at the budget and asking whether marketing spend can be justified. The marketing person may be looking at the customer journey and seeing that the company needs stronger awareness, better positioning, more qualified demand, or improved conversion. Neither person needs a C-suite title for that tension to exist.

In a growing midsize organization

The responsibilities usually become more specialized. Finance may be represented by a controller, VP of Finance, finance director, CFO, or fractional CFO. Marketing may be represented by a marketing director, VP of Marketing, Head of Marketing, Head of Growth, communications leader, business development leader, or CMO.

At this stage, the bigger risk is often organizational separation. Finance has one set of reports. Marketing has another. Sales has its CRM. Operations knows which services are profitable or constrained. Leadership is trying to make a growth decision using information that lives in several different places.

This is where shared definitions become especially important.

• What does the company mean by a qualified lead?
• Which customers are most profitable?
• What services or markets need more demand?
• How much capacity exists?
• Which customer behaviors indicate future growth?
• What information does leadership need before increasing or reducing an investment?

The conversation is becoming less about marketing performance alone and more about how marketing fits into the business system.

In larger or more complex organizations

You are more likely to see formal C-suite roles, although the titles still vary.

There may be a CFO alongside a CMO, Chief Growth Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, VP of Marketing, Chief Communications Officer, or another executive responsible for customer growth.

At this level, alignment matters because marketing decisions can affect far more than the marketing department. They can influence sales capacity, staffing, service-line growth, customer experience, technology investments, geographic expansion, and long-term financial planning.

So who should actually be part of the conversation?

You do not need to create CFO and CMO titles just to solve this problem. You need the people who understand the two sides of the decision.

One side needs to understand the financial and operational reality of the business: revenue goals, profitability, budget, capacity, cash flow, customer value, and acceptable risk. The other needs to understand the customer and market reality: who you are trying to reach, what creates demand, how people evaluate you, where the buyer journey is breaking down, what competitors are doing, and how marketing is influencing growth.

In some companies, two executives bring those perspectives. In another business, it may be the owner, controller, sales manager, office manager, marketing director, and agency sitting around the same table. The titles matter far less than whether those perspectives are represented. That actually strengthens the broader argument of this article. A shared definition of marketing value is not something only CFOs and CMOs need.

Every growing business eventually has to connect what it spends, how it reaches customers, what those customers do next, and what that activity contributes to the business.

A few things you may still be wondering or thinking after reading this.

Does every marketing metric need to connect directly to revenue?
No, but every important metric should have a clear reason for being monitored. A leading indicator such as branded search or qualified website traffic may matter because it helps you evaluate a particular stage of the buyer journey. The report should explain that connection rather than presenting the metric on its own.

Should the CFO be involved in marketing planning?
For meaningful investments, finance can add valuable context around margins, customer economics, budget constraints, forecast assumptions, and what the organization needs from growth. Marketing still owns marketing strategy, but stronger financial context can improve the decisions behind it.

Should the CMO report only financial KPIs to leadership?
No. Financial outcomes alone may hide important changes earlier in the customer journey. The better approach is to show the relevant leading indicators alongside downstream business outcomes and explain how they connect.

What if marketing and finance disagree about attribution?
Agree first on what the available data can and cannot prove. Improve tracking where the information would materially change a decision, use customer-reported and CRM data where appropriate, and avoid creating false precision simply to make the report look complete.

Where should the conversation begin?
Begin with the business condition you are trying to change. That gives finance and marketing something more useful to discuss than whether a particular channel or metric is inherently valuable.