Some biais are hard to change : marketers are creative and financiers are boring!
Obviously, if you work in finance, it should make you laugh. It does make me laugh, or cry depending on the moment 🙂 But the truth is, financial teams are not always very effective when it comes to personal branding, especially with marketing teams. And marketing teams sometimes lack curiosity and alignment with business. I speak from experience : as a Marketing Ops manager for years, I have been made Finance and Marketing communicate on a daily basis.
Finance speaks the language of business, belongs to Comex and has well-defined objectives. But sometimes obscure to marketers. Marketing, on the other hand, often absent from Comex, may lack clarity regarding its participation to the company's growth. Which seriously damages our credibility.
So how can we ensure that Marketing and Finance communicate?
Define business indicators and not only marketing
We marketers, use marketing metrics : website visitors, newsletters subscriptions, email opening rates, etc….. But when it comes to connecting our activty to financial indicators, we sometimes sit idly by. Yet we know that the importance of proving marketing performance and its impact on business growth, has never been so critical.
Let’s put growth indicators against our budget and marketing plan:
- Number of new customers and acquisition cost,
- Increase in sales per customer,
- % increase in cross-selling,
- CLV – Customer Lifetime Value,
- ….
Depending on our resources – tools, expertise, and I am not talking about time because it must be a priority – we should be able to define indicators which enable us to measure marketing impact to the business and sit at the same table as our new friends in Finance.
Manage your marketing plan and budget
Forecast, actuals, accruals, compliance, are often unknown words in marketing vocabulary. And that’s a shame! There is no need to become a financial expert, but since it is our responsibility to manage our budget, these words should be part of our daily vocabulary.
If that’s not the case, marketers invite your financial controler for a coffee and some explainations.
Organize monthly meetings with Finance
Let’s present our plan, our campaigns, our results to our financial team, in recurring reviews. Let us make our work and efforts concrete in their eyes. Explain how we generate new leads, show photos from our last event, create links and cohesion between teams. Let’s not forget, it’s Finance that gives us our budget! Gaining credibility can only help us:-)
CMO please lead by example: offer your CFO to have lunch and start the collaboration.
To go further on this subject, I am organizing a round table on this subject on June 13 in Barcelona, with my friend Valérie Le Diraison, Financial Director. We will share each team’s point of view, tools and tips to work better together. To receive an invitation, send me an email: Bloriot@beautifulnumbers.fr
To continue the discussion, please call me !
Béatrice Loriot – + 33 6 81 07 34 41 / + 34 680 907 987 – Bloriot@beautifulnumbers.fr
Photo blog post – man with phone – by Icons8 team on Unsplash