The CMO vs CFO Budget battle
Recently I was reading some McKinsey and Google studies about “the effectiveness of marketing” and CMO/CEO issues. It’s a recurring boardroom drama: CMOs defending budgets while CFOs quietly (or not-so-quietly) ask for cuts. And it’s almost always followed by the same question: “What’s the ROI of marketing anyway?” (Random note: It would be interesting to put a percentage of all brand ads into the balance sheet as brand equity).
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Now, there’s a case to be made for both sides. CFOs see marketing as a spend, not an asset. No widgets, no IP, just outflows. CMOs, on the other hand, argue that without brand and awareness, the widgets won’t sell. They’re both right, and both wrong.
The real issue isn’t money. It’s clarity. Too often, CMOs try to be strategists instead of interpreters. Instead of breaking down the CEO’s strategic vision into actionable marketing goals, they try to move up and start suggesting strategic visions and stuff like that. I don’t think that is marketing’s role.
If the CEO says, “We want to be the number two player in the market in five years,” it’s not marketing’s job to rewrite the strategy. It’s marketing’s job to map out the brand-building, lead-generation, and demand-driving work that supports that goal. That includes knowing how many leads sales needs, when they need them, and what kind of brand presence supports that journey.
And yes, it’s absolutely measurable. Lead volume, lead quality, brand awareness, review scores, organic traffic—these aren’t vanity metrics. They’re marketing KPIs. A trusted brand is measurable. An inbound funnel is measurable. Even trust is measurable (just look at referral rates and review volume). Sales has revenue; marketing has reach and conversion.
Here’s the uncomfortable bit: I think many marketers over-focus on big picture strategy and rebrands because those are harder to measure and take years to disprove. They’re great at buying time. But if you land in a company preparing for an IPO, that time doesn’t exist. If you’re building a bootstrapped business, the appetite for rebranding is very different. Context matters. And that context comes from the top, from the founder or CEO. Not from the CMO.
So if you’re looking for more budget as a CMO, show more results. If you’re unsure of what your CMO is doing as a CEO, ensure you have given them a clear vision and objective for the company and ask them to show you how they’ll get there. Crunch the numbers. Do they add up?
It’s easier for everyone to have alignment on these.
About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies helping turn them into industry leaders. I'm also the co-founder of 10minutes.news, a hotel news media that is unsensational, factual and keeps hoteliers updated on the industry.
