The CFO Trust Gap: Why Finance Still Doesn’t Believe in Marketing

It’s planning season once again, and a familiar tug-of-war is under way. In organizations across industries, from startups to global enterprises, CMOs are stepping up to defend their budgets. On the other side of the conference table, CFOs sit, arms crossed, hunting for cost-cutting opportunities. A data point from Gartner captures the divide: Only 48 percent of CFOs believe marketing is essential to corporate performance.

If you’re a CMO, you know how unfair that feels. Our mission is to build pipeline, elevate the brand, and drive revenue in markets that are changing daily. But about half of the time—literally, apparently—when we meet the colleague with the most influence over our funding, that person sees our work as nonessential.

For far too many CFOs, we are the least trusted C-suite colleague in the room. The thing is, as much as it may sting, it’s not about us. It’s about our data. 

Think about it. Why would a CFO trust an IT or operations leader more? Believe me, it’s not because they're more charming. It’s because they have systems of record that prove the value of their department's investment. The data they show up with cleanly fits into P&L models.

But when it’s marketing’s turn to present—engagement, share of voice, sentiment, nurture campaigns—nothing  translates to anything finance can grok. It’s a messy production of apples and oranges data, pulled from 15 or more tools. To say that our numbers are met with skepticism would be a gross understatement.

Without hard data that convincingly demonstrates value, the CMO is bringing paintings and poetry to a knife fight. We may be able to eke out a win once in a while—because we built the right cross-functional relationships or traded one line item against another.  But otherwise we’re probably going to lose.

Why CMOs Struggle to Give CFOs the Data They Want

The irony is that CMOs in fact tend to be very data-driven professionals.  We place high value on financial rigor. The issue is that the tools and systems built for marketing have never been designed with finance in mind.

Frankenstacks everywhere. Marketing teams are managing dozens of point solutions—email, social, content, events, analytics—none of which talk to each other natively. Stitching that data together requires armies of ops people and consultants, eating up our budget. The CFO wants clean, apples-to-apples numbers that point directly from budget to performance. What marketing has are siloed feeds and backward-looking reconciliations.

Metrics that don’t map to the P&L. Engagement, impressions, and brand share of voice might often be the best indicators of demand we have, but they don’t line up neatly to CAC or contribution margin analysis. Translating creative and customer-centric measures into CFO language takes extra modeling that few organizations have invested in.

Finance structures that work against marketing. Consider a common scenario: a marketing leader builds an omni-channel campaign comprising dozens of tactics, but finance gives them five (not particularly relevant) GL codes to report against. So everything gets collapsed into one giant number. From the CFO’s perspective, it looks like an undifferentiated, and very large, line item. From the CMO’s perspective, the strategic value they've worked to deliver, designing and orchestrating a complex operation, has just been erased. Demonstrably effective tactics with shorter time horizons are diluted by longer-arc strategic plays and performance looks mediocre.

How this plays out is all too familiar. The CMO is pushed into a defensive posture, and credibility ends up hinging less on data and more on whether the CEO is willing to intervene and tell the CFO that the CMO is someone that should be trusted. At best, the CMO burns political capital just to do their job. That dynamic isn’t sustainable—and it’s exactly why the trust gap persists.

Finance Teams Need to Adapt Too

This trust gap doesn’t close by asking CMOs to do all the heavy lifting. CFOs need to change the way they evaluate marketing as well.

It starts with acknowledging that marketing’s job isn’t analogous to IT or ops. Customer buying behavior isn’t a server uptime metric. Demand generation isn’t a factory throughput measure. Some marketing efforts show performance on short time horizons; some are long-arc category-builders that can take months or even years to break through. Marketing requires investment in experimentation, creativity, and long-term brand building. They all have impact. But they don’t show well in quarterly and annual statements.

That means CFOs must:

Learn a new language. Stop forcing all marketing into backward-looking GL structures. Build reporting taxonomies that reflect campaigns, customer journeys, and omni-channel dynamics.

Value leading indicators. Waiting until deals close and show up in the P&L misses the real demand levers marketing is pulling. Top of funnel efforts, pipeline nurturing and velocity, and share of voice are early signals of growth—if finance chooses to recognize them.

Engage as a partner, not just a gatekeeper. The best CFOs don’t just say “prove it.” They sit at the table and co-design how marketing will be measured, tracked, and course-corrected.

Place partnership over politics. The C-suite can sometimes become a royal court. Alliances are formed, and budget season turns into a performance for the CEO and the board. Knocking the CMO can be a power play (even if it ultimately hurts the business). That behavior needs to stop. The CFO might instead best be judged on how well they understand marketing strategies and create financial analysis to support the CMO.

Leave room for nonquantifiables. Some efforts are intuitively important, but defy measurement. The CEO was quoted prominently in your industry’s trade publication. How does the CMO report that value? Intuitively, we know it raises the brand authority in the minds of purchasers. Good luck proving that!

What It Takes to Build Trust

Both sides have work to do. CMOs may never have run a P&L, but they need to internalize the basic math that companies track to CAC, payback, contribution margin, and pipeline velocity. We need to stop defending budget lines and start presenting programs in CFO-grade metrics —aligned to strategic priorities with clear hypotheses and reallocation plans.

Meanwhile, CFOs need to meet us halfway. They can stop treating marketing as a cost center until proven otherwise. They can give us reporting structures that let us defend our investments with clarity. And they can recognize that growth doesn’t come only from efficiency; it comes from creativity and customer engagement, which definitely don’t show up in the variances.

That’s the future I want to see. Not CFOs versus CMOs. But CFOs and CMOs, aligned, holding each other accountable, and driving the business forward together.

Marie Bahl, CMO of Uptempo, is a senior marketing and sales professional with a strong technical background and a knack for making the most complex technologies understandable and desirable to their intended audiences. With two decades of technology, business-to-business and business-to-consumer experience, Bahl defines and drives highly effective market strategies and winning brands, solutions and customer acquisition strategies. Her experience has spanned a wide array of technology companies that include Opower, Tendril Networks, Comverge, Yahoo, Zoho, Netrake, TrueSpectra, NetFlip, and Sun Microsystems, to names a few. Bahl began her high-tech career at Silicon Valley's premier Internet public relations agency Neihaus Ryan Haller in their enterprise software practice.