From removing emotion and proving value with data to avoiding “specific team language”, there are steps marketers can take to better engage finance.
Marketers need to rethink how they present their work to finance and the rest of the C-suite by stripping out emotion and focusing on business impact, according to Workbooks CFO Phillip Wray.
Talking at B2B Ignite last week (3 July), he urged marketers to sharpen the clarity of their messaging and align more directly with company strategy when communicating.
“People in my team always want some element of data,” he said. “They would prefer marketers take the emotion out of what they’re presenting to the board.”
That is not to say marketers should abandon storytelling altogether, though. Wray acknowledged that narratives have value, but only when they clearly tie into broader business priorities. “There can be that element of storytelling, and [others] will be open to it as long as it aligns with the strategy of the company and the rest of the wider leadership,” he added.
The clarity challenge goes beyond emotional framing. According to several senior marketers talking alongside Wray, one of the biggest obstacles to cross-functional alignment is the overuse of internal jargon, which alienates peers in other departments.
“You have to park your specific team language at the door because everybody has to understand,” said Georgina Peters Venzano, CMO at specialist insurance business Beazley.
We have to understand the cost of what we bring to the table – and the value too.
Georgina Peters Venzano, CMO Beazley
The mood from multiple speakers was that CFOs – and businesses more broadly – are becoming increasingly risk-averse, especially in uncertain economic conditions.
Mike Scott, CMO at engineering and transport firm Hitachi Rail, summed up the commercial reality marketers must navigate: “Businesses do two things. They make things and sell things, and everyone else is helping you do one of those two things.”
To demonstrate their value in that process, he urged CMOs to translate marketing impact into language that resonates with finance.
Likewise, Wipro Europe CMO David Keene said marketers need to lean more heavily on performance metrics that align with business outcomes.
“Use metrics like win-rates,” Keene advised. “If you can show your CFO the cost of sale, how much money is being spent on these [leads], and then say we can actually change the win-rate and reduce the number of leads, that starts to make sense.”
He explained: “We need to get everyone playing on the same team. [Everyone is] playing different positions and [we] need to pass the ball.”
Friction with sales
Marketing’s relationship with sales is another area where misalignment continues to create friction.
On a panel exploring inter-team dynamics, Keene described the fundamental divide as “a clash of timelines and expectations”. While sales are focused on short-term conversion, marketing – particularly in B2B – is often working toward longer-term business growth.
“The core of the difference between sales and marketing is that sales is looking at a very short term. Marketing should be thinking about: how do we influence the way the business grows?” said Keene.
That time horizon is influenced by the nature of B2B itself, where sales cycles are often months or years long, and decisions involve multiple stakeholders. “Trying to create sustainable growth in the pivot abilities of the product – and not just responding to the customer need but anticipating it – that’s a marketing-led growth mindset,” he added.
Tensions between marketing and sales are far from rare. A third of B2B marketers (33.7%) say they are often in conflict with their sales colleagues, and nearly 40% believe their sales team thinks they could do the job better than marketing can, according to Marketing Week’s State of B2B survey.
As with finance, communication is often the root of the problem. Differing definitions of success, inconsistent terminology, and an absence of shared KPIs make collaboration difficult.
Some organisations are trying to fix that by embedding marketing earlier in planning cycles or linking sales and marketing goals more directly.
“We have to understand the cost of what we bring to the table – and the value too,” said Beazley’s Peters Venzano. “To get money, we have to be able to nurture value for companies. That means understanding how we earn it together.”
