• by Jennifer Ross , November 14, 2024

You’ve submitted your budgets for fiscal year 2025 — a sweet relief — but the hard part isn’t over. Any time of year, marketing leaders need to be prepared to justify their budget choices to the CFO, offering uncomplicated evidence of the value each investment brings.

Just because something worked in the past doesn’t mean you don’t need to continuously take a magnifying glass to your campaigns, strategies, and people. Your yearly budget strategy should be an ongoing strategy — not a once-a-year freakout.

Be ready to clearly articulate where you’re investing more and where you need the same spend so you can defend your marketing choices as essential, strategic, and beneficial to the organization as whole.

To cultivate a strong relationship with your CFO during budgeting season and beyond, keep these three high-level ideas in mind.

Speak the same language. Too often, a language barrier plagues the CMO-CFO relationship, creating rifts between departments. But when you show you’re prioritizing the same things, you solidify yourself as a trustworthy, transparent ally. To gain buy-in from your C-suite, focus on:  

Financial metrics and ROI: CMOs should emphasize financial outcomes like ROI, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, and marketing’s impact on revenue. This helps your CFO see marketing as a revenue generator rather than a cost center.

Cost optimization and scalability: Prove marketing activities align with the CFO's priorities of profitability and expense management by highlighting your team’s role in improving operational efficiencies — such as leveraging automation and optimizing resources — and demonstrate how your initiatives can scale without proportional cost increases.

Data-driven decision-making: Your CFO makes decisions based on financial data and measurable outcomes, so home in on data and measurement to gain credibility. Use robust analytics to establish that your strategies are grounded in data — reducing risk and enhancing predictability.

Customer-centricity:There will always be marketing efforts that are harder to tie directly to revenue, but you’ll gain trust by linking specific features of an investment to customer value and bottom-line impact, such as social media sentiment analysis linked to fluctuations in buyer churn.

Know the health of the business. Don’t work in a silo: When you take the big-picture view of your team's role within the organization and the rapidly evolving market’s impact on the business, you’ll develop a deeper understanding of your CFO’s mindset. This holistic viewpoint actually takes pressure off your department and creates space for more innovative thinking.

Take a shared view and accountability for pipeline dynamics. Historically, marketing doesn’t align with sales, especially when planning and budgeting. But taking a shared perspective of the pipeline dynamic and collaborating on issues like filling the top of the funnel and converting is a surefire path to success.

Marketers also need to focus on flexible budget allocation year-round to adapt quickly to pipeline dynamic shifts, reallocate budget to support areas like stalled deals or emerging opportunities, and ensure investments drive needed impact. Show how program investments directly impact pipeline growth and health to create synergy between departments and deepen your CFO’s trust.

The CFO-CMO relationship has often been prickly, but you can transform it with strong communication and strategy alignment, gaining your CFO’s buy-in that your marketing choices are a win for your team and the business.