Ask someone in finance what they trust in your reporting, what they don’t, and why. Don’t defend it, just listen.
Do that and you probably won’t get a lecture about brand. You’ll get a question about one number. Where does it come from? Who produced it? Can they open it themselves next Tuesday, without you in the room to explain what it means?
I spent years thinking my problem with finance was language. It’s not language per se. And it’s harder to fix.
Bain and Google surveyed almost 1,400 senior marketing and finance executives this year (yes, Google co-sponsored the research about proving media investment). Brian Dennehy, an expert partner at Bain and a former CMO at Nordstrom, told The Current that 20 CMOs and 20 CFOs sat for interviews alongside the survey. What struck a chord with me: “Finance trusts Finance more than anything else, and they mistrust everybody else.”
Dennehy said he was personally surprised by how many CFOs were comfortable with aided and unaided awareness, measured before and after a flight. “They all got it,” he said. Which tells me comprehension was never the issue. In the interviews both sides kept saying they probably had the wrong objectives, when the survey data shows they named the same ones: return on marketing investment and revenue impact.
Awareness is exactly the metric we assume finance won’t follow. They follow it fine. So the standard advice, learn to speak the language of finance, is solving a problem you don’t have. Your CFO knows what awareness means. They just can’t check your number, and their job trains them to not spend on what they can’t check.
We’re not helping. Only 41% of marketers told Bain they felt properly equipped with the data, tools, and measurement to tie what they do to business outcomes. More than half can’t.
Post-COVID I ran GTM at a tech company I won’t name. Great products, no recognition in the US market, budget well below what the job needed. Even still, our little skeleton crew was making progress.
The plan was six months of brand campaign to build up awareness and demand, then sales activation layered on top, then consistent in-market presence for two to three years. Near the end of the six months, they pulled the plug, let me go, and hired a PPC agency who told them what they wanted to hear. They fired the agency six months later.
I’d set the expectations in plain language. What I didn’t have (nor the agency) was a single thing a finance person could carry into a budget review without me standing next to them explaining it. I had a plan and an ask for patience. Patience is the one line on the page nobody can defend in your absence, which is exactly why it goes first.
The agency is the tell. They replaced a slow answer with a fast one, and the fast one didn’t hold either.
The version that worked was BELLIN, corporate treasury software out of Germany. I built “Treasury That Moves You” to take them into English-speaking markets, it ran for years, and Coupa acquired them in 2020.
But four years of campaign running alongside a deliberate market expansion is a correlation, and I’ve argued against that inference too often to turn around and make it myself. That plan ran long enough to be judged on its own terms, which is what a checkpoint buys you. The other client never got near it.
Bain’s interviews turned up an instruction most marketers will hate. Stop telling the story. In that same interview, Dennehy said finance executives told them almost literally that the worst thing a CMO can do is become a storyteller. They want the table with the number on it, and they want to have the table settled before they see it filled in.
One caveat: Bain’s examples lean toward consumer and media. If you sell five- to six-figure software to a buying committee, awareness may not be your number. Use the metric that matters in your market: share of target accounts engaged, win rate in a named segment, inbound from the logos you’re chasing.
But whatever metric you choose, the basics don’t change:
None of this requires you to learn a new word.
You might reasonably ask why any of this is necessary if finance is already sympathetic to brand. Because sympathy doesn’t survive a budget review. Christine Moorman’s CMO Survey polled 308 US marketing leaders this past January, 97% of them VP-level or higher, and found the CMO-CFO partnership barely improved, with more than 70% of marketers now prioritizing immediate results over long-term gains. Nobody rejects the “go-long” case. You just stop making it, because you already know how it goes. So does everyone else.
What Bain’s leading companies do differently is boring and procedural. They lock the measurement framework with finance before budgets are allocated, and hold it consistent through evaluation.
Do it in writing. Name the number, the date you’ll read it, and the method you’ll use.
Then add the part Bain doesn’t cover, because this one is mine rather than theirs: agree what happens when you read it. Be careful here. If the plan needs eighteen months, a six-month revenue target is the same short-term thinking that killed my campaign, and you’d be writing the case against yourself.
So the checkpoint tests the trajectory and stops short of asking whether the money has come back. Moorman’s survey found the median duration of marketing’s impact on customers has stretched to six months, with more of the distribution now running a year or longer. Her read is that “the cumulative value of marketing investments may be greater than short-term measurements capture.” A payback test at month six measures the wrong end of that. A trajectory check doesn’t.
So say it plainly. If your month-six number has to be at X against the January baseline for the plan to hold, write that down, along with what you do if it lands, if it misses, and if it lands somewhere in between. Volunteering that rule yourself is the clearest signal you aren’t asking for them to fund it on blind faith.
I’ve argued before for a common language between your CEO, CFO, and GTM team, and I still would. Shared language is how you have the conversation at all. You can also learn every word finance uses and still lose the room, because you’ll reach for them at the worst possible moment. Once the money is in question, everything you say sounds like a defence, including the true parts.
What holds is the agreement, and not for the reason you’d expect. Agreeing a number in advance doesn’t make it true. It makes it checkable without you, because you settled the source and the method in the same conversation.
Write down the single number that would tell you at month six whether the plan is on track. A trajectory number, read against a baseline you take now. Then take it to whoever controls the budget and agree three things: that it’s the right number, where it comes from, and what happens if it misses.
If you haven’t launched, do it this week, before the budget is committed. It’s a twenty-minute conversation while everyone still likes the plan and nobody’s position depends on the answer.
If you’re already halfway in, do it anyway, and understand that it’s a worse afternoon. Agreeing the number now means admitting out loud, in front of the person who signs your spend, that you launched without one. The money already spent is gone either way, and this is about the next tranche, the only one you can still influence. The alternative is month twelve, when someone cancels the whole thing and nobody in the room, you included, can produce a reason they shouldn’t.
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This article is AC-A (“Authenticity Commons, Assisted”): AI helped produce it, with me in the lead. Here’s what that means.
Achim’s Razor is also published as a LinkedIn newsletter.
