The CFO vs. CMO Divide: Why Finance & Marketing Need to Speak the Same Language
Summary
Marketing and finance are two sides of the same coin, but too often, CMOs and CFOs don’t see eye to eye. Drew Fallon explains why understanding the entire business equation—from ad budgets to free cash flow—can bridge the gap and drive smarter decision-making.
Transcript
This is the most important topic of the last ten years in our industry. What I've been kind of preaching about is the CMAs. They know how all this stuff works because the marketing industry, it's the foundation of the entire business. The first number that you type into the Excel sheet is the ad budget. It drives every other possible inventory purchase.The free cash flow it every repeat rate. If you think of like the CMO kind of in one corner and the CFO kind of in the other corner. And they're both like doing business analysis. And at some point, the conventional CMO start stops understanding the equation even though they're going down the same equation. And then similarly, going down the other way, the CFO stops, understand the equation.And if they would just start reading the equation a little bit more, they would realize that they're feeding into each other.