OFF THE RECORD: Bridging The Communications Gap Between CMOs & CFOs 🌉

Candid conversations with real CMOs over lunch at a secret location in Singapore 🤫

Welcome to 'Off The Record' the first in a monthly series of posts based on candid conversations with real CMOs over lunch at a secret location in Singapore.🤫

The format is simple, between each course one of the 2-3 CMOs in attendance picks a card from our stack and reads out the question to be discussed before the aperitif, the appetiser, the entrée, the dessert and the coffee.

The CMO's will remain unnamed but rest assured they are working at the highest levels in the most dynamic industries and are prepared to share with us only on the condition of anonymity.

This months topic? Bridging the communications gap between CMOs and CFOs.

🥂 Aperitif: The Translation Trap

What’s one thing you constantly have to explain to your CFO that you wish they just got?

"They don't see the seasonality of investing." Quick as a flash our fintech CMO kicked off the discussion by sharing that his finance expects to see, "Month on month growth, year on year growth. Everybody should be wanting to invest the same amount all through the year", regardless of external economic factors.

After five years in the game he knows his market has investing seasons, most obviously around the end of the calendar year when workers receive their bonuses. However, his CFO sees this as a risk and would much prefer to front load the year but the CMO knows his customers and holds his biggest campaigns back for Q4 insisting the CFO hold their nerve!

Similarly, our other CMO guest from a major energy company, has been trying to transition her brand from fossil fuel villain to sustainability hero amongst a target market of large enterprises with long product sales cycles. This is not a short term assignment and yet her execs still expect to see short terms results.

She tells us that she holds them off with KPIs like brand preference and share of voice but also buys herself time by operating other revenue levers like convincing current customers to upgrade to more premium products, which has a much shorter sales cycle.

"How do you translate all the efforts we do in building brand positioning, thought leadership, engagement with senior sustainability officers...into short term revenue or short term profitability and explain that to the combination of CXOs that I have?"

The core issue doesn't seem to be about opposition, but communication. Marketers are building credibility, trust, and strategic positioning that may not show immediate financial returns. CFOs want quick, measurable, dependable results; marketers are playing a longer, more strategic game.

The solution? Speaking a common language of business value, always backed by data.

🥗 Appetiser: The Budget Dance

What’s a moment when you felt your CFO didn’t trust your judgment - and what do you wish they had seen instead?

"They always think we can cut more." Was the simple answer but it's rarely the right move in the long term as Analytic Partners Asia & Australia MD Paul Sinkinson, visiting from down under, explained between mouthfuls of bruschetta:

"We have a few case studies where you go, I can cut spend this year, and it doesn't have much impact. Base sales might go down by 2% but the year after that it's 8%, the year after that 20%, year after that 40%, and it becomes this massive cliff as it goes down. But by the time you're experiencing that hit, you're at least two years in, which means it's going to take you four years to get back to the start point - not to growth, but back to net zero - and it's one thing that fills me with fear."

🍽 Entrée: Blocked or Backed?

Can you share a time when a CFO either blocked a big idea - or helped make it happen? What made the difference?

This was deemed an "enticing" question by all at the table who generally agreed that anything flagged as new and untested was a struggle to make happen. For our sustainability CMO that meant "intent marketing"

"So, we want to deploy marketing tactics to target people who might be, thinking about carbon credits, right? I want to be able to target them. And my CFO equivalent is struggling...because it's so new, they cannot understand how it works."

Her solution was to run a pilot for a lower cost, noting that even if it failed it could be recast as an experiment in innovation.

But the best way to get the CFO on side, according to our fintech marketer, is simply to demonstrate that you can show returns.

Trust builds more trust and the more you deliver the more latitude you have to experiment.

🍰 Dessert: Hidden Costs

What’s one cost or risk in not investing in marketing that you think CFOs underestimate?

Perhaps unsurprisingly the biggest risk noted by our CMOs was the risk of underinvesting in brand. Sharing some of his previous experiences with CFOs in other companies, our fintech CMO told us:

"A lot of them are like, hey, you know, just focus on conversions, lower your acquisition cost, or just shift your focus to existing clients and just work on them and get them to spend more money. But you don't work on the brand. They see that as the costliest welfare that has the least return because it's not as tangible from a measurement (perspective)."

This is, of course, short sighted as well as untrue according to our research, which demonstrates that running brand and performance marketing campaigns concurrently can increase the ROI of the performance component by up to 60%. Basically brand has a multiplier effect on performance. But there are potentially even bigger dangers in cutting performance marketing for short term savings because you are out of the market. Being out-of-sight and out-of-mind allows your competitors to take market share as our MD Paul Sinkinson observed during the Covid pandemic:

"You saw the people who cut for like, six months or so, and some of them lost brand position. You know, they were the trusted brand or the high value brand and somebody else's advertising stole that position."

Once you've lost that position, he noted, it can take more than twice as long - and twice as much - to win it back.

☕️ Coffee: From Adversaries to Allies

What would make it easier, or more enjoyable, for you to collaborate with your CFO?

For our fintech CMO there are three rules to enjoyable collaboration with his CFO:

1. Ask me the right questions

2. Trust that I can deliver

3. Do not try and go through ever line

But collaboration goes both ways, and marketers must also work harder to make themselves understood by CFOs according to our sustainability marketing leader:

"For me, I guess, it's about avoiding using marketing language in my conversation with them. I'm speaking their language, translating my priorities, my slang, into the words they understand."

Want to dive deeper into the CMO-CFO relationship download whitepaper on “United in Growth: Transforming Shareholder Value Through CFO-CMO Collaboration”

And if you're a CMO who would like to propose a topic or join a lunch - in confidence - email nikki.taylor@analyticpartners.com.

The CMO Office posts go out weekly but for a more frequent dose of data and expertise follow us on LinkedIn and/or TikTok too.