How to Educate CFOs About Marketing Value

I bombed my first CFO presentation. Badly. If only I’d had AI then. This was early in my career at a startup. I walked into the boardroom with slides full of "user engagement improvements" and "enhanced brand awareness metrics." The CFO looked at me like I'd just presented my grocery list. "What's the payback period?" she asked, cutting straight to it. I stammered something about "long-term value creation." "How much revenue does this generate?" "Well, it's more about building relationships..." I trailed off. She closed her laptop. Meeting over. As I belatedly learned, I'd been speaking marketer to someone who thinks in dollars and cents. So I learned to speak CFO. Best career move I ever made. CFOs don't hate spending money. They hate uncertain outcomes. They think in three key buckets: - What does this replace? (Cost displacement) - What does this generate? (Revenue impact) - What does this prevent? (Risk mitigation) They need numbers, not narratives. "Improves productivity" means nothing to them. "Saves 90 minutes daily per sales rep, enabling 2.3 additional prospect calls, generating $47,000 additional pipeline per rep annually" - that gets their attention. They tend to prefer conservative, realistic scenarios, so skip the hype. Instead of "This will transform your business," try "Worst case, you break even in 8 months. Likely case, 40% ROI by month 12." Want to practice CFO-speak? AI is a big help. Try this: 1) The Translation Exercise: Take your current pitch. Rewrite every benefit as a financial metric. Use ChatGPT with a prompt like: "Turn this marketing benefit into a CFO-friendly financial outcome." 2) The Skeptic Drill: Ask Anthropic’s Claude to roleplay as a cost-conscious CFO. Practice until you can confidently answer "What if this doesn't work?" without sweating (or swearing 😁.) 3) The Benchmark Hunt: Use Perplexity or Microsoft Copilot to dig up industry financial data. CFOs trust peer comparisons far more than vendor promises. A product manager tried this last month. He went from "AI-powered efficiency gains" to "Reduces manual processing costs by $180,000 annually while preventing compliance risks worth $2M in potential fines." His CFO approved the budget in 20 minutes. Learning this changed my entire career. Suddenly, every marketing campaign had a clear business case. Every creative idea came with financial justification. Stop speaking features. Start speaking finance. Your CFO will become your biggest advocate. #B2BMarketing #ProductMarketing #MarketingStrategy #AI

It is every CEO's responsibility who leads a marketing organization to teach their team the ❤️ language of finance. Leading adQuadrant, I’ve seen firsthand how teams that understand financial metrics move from being “vendors” to strategic partners. For example, when our analysts started presenting campaign results not just in: - CAC - ROAS - nCPA/CPA but instead: - iROAS (incremental ROAS) - High Value Actions - SKU-level Profit - Contribution Margin ... client retention jumped. We stopped reporting data, and instead spoke a language executives cared about, which built trust and opened doors to bigger, longer-term collaborations. As an example, our team pushed back on a CFO’s request to cut TikTok spend by proving that campaigns targeting Gen Z, while higher CPA short-term, drove customers to higher-margin private-label products. By analyzing cohort data, they showed these buyers had 22% higher repeat purchase rates and 15% larger basket sizes vs. other channels, ultimately yielding greater contribution margin and bottom-line profit. That explanation didn't just reverse the CFO's decision, it aligned our team with the CFO’s priorities, turning friction into partnership. The lesson? Financial literacy isn’t about stifling creativity. It’s about empowering marketers to defend their ideas, optimize in real-time, and prove their impact in terms the entire business respects. Start small: host cross-functional workshops (we have even done lunch and learns on this topic), dissect P&Ls together, or role-play pitching campaigns through a CFO’s lens. The faster your team connects their work to the bottom line, the more indispensable they become to the business they are serving.

Most CFOs look at marketing as an expense item. Some look at it with disgust. Here are 4 ways I make CFOs love marketing: 1. Deeply understand the P&L CFOs are numbers people. They often think that finance is the lifeblood of the company (rightfully so) and everything depends on the finances to be successful. Many CMOs are NOT numbers people (though this is changing), and so they don't "get" each other. If a CMO (or their agency partner) really sits down and deeply understands the company's costs, run rate, cash flows, and EBITDA, they foster a lot of trust and alignment with the CFO. Maybe the CMO realizes that big sponsorship or event doesn't actually make sense after all. 2. Cut waste A lot of marketing (especially advertising) is wasteful. It does not nor will not ever generate revenue. Sometimes the CFO wants to cut it all because they can't rely on the way marketing is measuring success, but, all they see is that big hairy expense item creeping up without a commensurate increase in revenue. Marketers need to identify what programs are bleeding without producing ROI. Strict scientific rigor and objective measurement systems are key here. Once I sharpen my pencil and start talking about cutting costs, most CFO's eyes light up. 3. Optimize toward margin Most businesses in 2023 are profit-conscious. In many cases, it's the CFO's job to manage toward a total margin profile or EBITDA target. Not too long ago this was a "just grow revenue and everything will sort itself out" mentality, but, that's less common these days (and good riddance I say). Marketing can optimize toward contribution margin rather than revenue. REALLY smart marketers optimize toward incremental lifetime margin (LIMR), which requires deep understanding of the customer, the product mix, and what is the optimal spend point to hit that magic number. 4. Prove out ROI I can't tell you how many times I've sat on a meeting with a CFO, walked them through how we got to a scientifically measured ROI, and have them say "Well why don't we spend more?" CFOs ultimately want the company to be financially secure. If marketing can reliably and verifiably drive incremental revenue, then the CFO becomes best friends with the marketing team, and looks for ways to get them MORE budget. At the end of the day, it's about proof of impact. Marketing's job is to generate ROI. Period. Prove that to your CFO and they'll love you. How do you foster alignment between finance and marketing in your organization? If this sounds like a pipe dream, reach out to me and I can help. #marketing #finance #growthmarketing

Real life conversation between the CFO and the marketing team, happening in every company today…💬 CFO: “We need to be more efficient with our marketing spend. Times are tough. Show me what’s working, what’s not, and what we can cut.” Head of Marketing: “Define working. Are we talking last-click attribution, pipeline acceleration, brand lift, or the time our CEO wanted to copy everything our competitor did?” CFO: “Enough with your smoke & mirrors. I’m talking cash. Dollars in. Dollars out. Revenue, like the good ol’ days.” Head of Marketing: “Ah yes, the mythical straight-line ROI. Right next to unicorns, ‘the nurture sequence’, and the frictionless funnel.” CFO: “Cute. But seriously. There’s a reason why marketers are the first to feel the squeeze when times are tough. If we’re spending $50K on paid social and $50K on trade shows, I want to know what performs better. Is that too much to ask?” Head of Marketing: “Then let’s build a comparison table. Apples to apples. Each marketing activity, its expected ROI, ramp time, risk level, and how fast we can pull the plug if it flops.” CFO: “I like tables. And apples. And plugs that can be pulled.” Head of Marketing: “Perfect. Let’s treat marketing like what it actually is, a portfolio of investments. Some are low-risk bonds (hello, branded search). Others are high-risk, high-reward bets (looking at you, Liquid Death wanna-be B2B companies).” CFO: “So you’re saying... we diversify? We optimize? And we monitor the portfolio like grown-ups?” Head of Marketing: “Jokes aside. I can’t believe we didn’t have this conversation sooner. Appreciate you reaching out.” Marketing shouldn’t be treated as one big, uniform function where every tactic or channel is expected to perform the same way, be measured the same way, or deliver the same results. It’s a diversified portfolio of bets, each with its own return profile, ramp time, and risk. Before it’s too late, get aligned with your finance team. Build the comparison chart and make smarter, sharper investments that everyone has more confidence in 🤘🏻

Most CMOs present a #brand tracking study to the CFO as part of the annual budget process. (Many share tracking data more often, but that’s another post.) The CMO believes the brand health metrics support investment in brand building. 🛑 HOWEVER, investments don’t get approved because they’re good for the brand; they get approved because they’re seen as good for the business. What creates brand value isn’t necessarily what matters. It’s what the CFO understands. And time and time again, I've seen a huge disconnect. So, what’s the solution? 📊 Brand Statement > 💰CFO Translation. Marketing needs to translate brand tracking results into something finance can understand. 💡 Looking for an AI tool to assist, I tried the Brand Health Translation GPT. This GPT doesn’t land on a perfect fix, but it does offer a way to restate CMO speak in CFO speak. Here are four statements I began to "translate" with the GPT. 📊 Brand Statement: “Consideration decreased by 5%.” 💰 CFO Translation: There is a risk to future revenue projections. 📊 Brand Statement: “Share of voice has dropped below competitors in key markets.” 💰 CFO Translation: We're being outspent or outperformed in visibility, which may lead to a decline in market share and sales momentum. 📊 Brand Statement: “Brand favorability has declined among Gen Z.” 💰 CFO Translation: We're at risk of losing relevance with a key growth demographic, which could erode long-term revenue potential. 📊 Brand Statement: “Our unaided awareness in the UK is on average 20 percent lower than that of our top three competitors." 💰 CFO Translation: We're underperforming in brand visibility in the UK, which puts us at a disadvantage in capturing market share and future revenue in that region. (⬇️ My first comment includes the link to “A Guide to Getting Brand Budget” from Tracksuit, along with the link to the GPT.) Let me know what you think. How do you translate marketing speak to finance speak? #AI #GPT #marketing