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CMO & CFO: The Critical Alliance For Business Growth
Sep 22, 2025 • 3 Minute Read • Jonathan Tatlow, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer
The Current Reality
Marketing budgets aren’t moving. Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey confirmed what many already know: Marketing investment is pegged at 7.7% of revenue, which is identical to where it stood last year. Flat budgets but rising expectations are all too familiar as CMOs are being asked to squeeze more results from the same dollars. “Do more with less” isn’t optional; it's expected.
Across the Exec hallway, meanwhile, the CFOs are themselves focused on productivity and cost control. With economic uncertainty tightening the screws, finance leaders are looking to data and AI with the expectation that every tech dollar will deliver improved efficiency. When Marketing ROI looks fuzzy or delayed, CFOs default to caution, and the purse strings pull even tighter.
The Opportunity in Alignment
The gap between CMOs and CFOs has existed for a long time. Rather than considering it an inevitable impasse, today’s business environment makes it an opportunity. Necessity being the mother of invention, means now is the time for CMOs and CFOs to close the gap and build an alliance to drive effective business growth.
Success depends on creating a shared language, a shared understanding of impact, and a shared ambition for growth.
Building a Shared Language
Brand awareness is a fundamental measure for marketers, yet at the same time is emblematic of vague or soft language to the rest of the business. It’s necessary as a measure, but can be a bridge to the CFO if CMOs reframe brand awareness as “future cash flow.
”The LinkedIn B2B Institute reminds us that only 5% of buyers need your product in the short term. That means the remaining 95% are potential customers we need to build awareness with. Focusing on those future customers is, therefore, focusing on future cash flow, and that’s much more palatable to the CFO.
Awareness does not equal sales, of course, but brand is a long-term investment and any CFO is vested in the long-term success of the business. So, talk and report on terms like “future cash flow” while factoring in how many out-of-market buyers are seeing your brand. You can feel confident you’re applying core marketing principles, and your CFO can feel confident that it will have an impact on business.
This is one such example. There are many more.
Personalization, for instance, is an aspiration for marketing and likely meaningless for the CFO, unless you demonstrate the incremental profit that it drives. Your CFO doesn’t have to love the creative, but they will love the math.
Communicating A Shared Understanding of Impact
Marketing loves its acronyms: CTR, CPC, CAC, CPL, and on and on. But it’s not just understanding what they stand for that adds to the CFO gap. It's recognizing how they affect the business.
Marketing has the potential to be the organization's growth driver, understanding the customer at an intimate level and knowing how to move people. However, focusing reports on granular operational measures or engagement data only exacerbates the gap with the CFO, who is far more interested in hearing about clear commercial outcomes.
The CMO must take the reins in developing a measurement framework that cascades organizational goals and business economics to marketing metrics. This ensures that marketing strategies are directly linked to financial results and that evidence becomes the foundation of marketing's impact.
Measures such as Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) provide visibility into long-term profitability across customer segments. Starting with measures like CLV allows CMOs and CFOs to identify which customers truly add value to the business and better justify marketing investments that demonstrably drive sustainable growth.
Ultimately, scalable growth becomes possible when the CMO and CFO define the scoreboard together.
Forging a Shared Ambition for the Business
CMO and CFO are an alliance, not just two people who find themselves in the same Exec roundtables.
Norm de Greve, GM's CMO, called for mutual understanding and obligations on both sides. He states: “If finance believes marketing works, then they can’t treat it like the ATM for the corporation whenever they need to cut costs. And for their part, marketing must demonstrate discipline, evidence, and a mindset that prioritizes company growth, not just budget protection.”
This emphasizes not just the importance of mutual understanding but the value of a shared vision of the business's future.
A CMO is not merely an elevated VP of Marketing. At the C-level, the role demands thinking like a General Manager, who understands and acts on the health and growth of the business. That means moving beyond narrow objectives, such as “maximizing leads,” to embrace broader strategic outcomes.
As a conduit to the customer, the CMO should bring vital intelligence on customer needs, behaviors, and market dynamics—profoundly important intel every CFO needs to guide business projections.
But strong partnerships take more than an agenda item on the Exec forum. They require regular connection, such as pre-meetings where Marketing and Finance align on evidence and ambition before major planning and budget meetings.
By embracing this broader view, CMOs and CFOs can find the common ground necessary to guide the direction of the business and its future growth.
This partnership gap will keep leaving growth opportunities on the table. Those who act now will forge ahead. Which of that divide do you want to be on?