Chief Financial Officers are wired to want proof, not promises. While we marketers light up at impressions, and engagement — excuse the stars in my eyes — CFOs focus on revenue, risk, and return.
This clash of professional love languages can create friction in budget conversations, performance reviews, and board meetings.
In this guide, you'll learn how to use automated attribution reporting to show finance the metrics they want, bridge the communication gap between departments, and ultimately win the budget you deserve.
What metrics do CFOs actually care about?
We marketers get pretty excited about likes and views, but those will likely leave your finance folks unimpressed.
CFOs prioritize financial efficiency and scalability, not just volume or exposure. Many marketing teams focus on performance indicators like MQLs, website traffic, or engagement rates, but CFOs prioritize metrics that directly relate to bottom-line outcomes.
As Todd Morris, InMarket CEO, explains, “CFOs have all these measures that matter [to them], and unfortunately, marketers don’t always have an aligned sense of what those same metrics are for them....CFOs [will] appreciate the beautiful commercial… but they’re going to want to know, ‘for every dollar I invested, what did I get back?’”
In other words, marketers need to learn how to speak CFO.
