Why marketers must prioritize the CFO relationship

Ask a B2B marketer who their most important relationship is, and you'll likely hear "sales" or "the CEO." Sounds reasonable. They are the revenue and strategy heads, after all.

But according to Marketing Week, 62.5% of B2B marketers cite sales as their most important relationship, and 50% cite the CEO. Just 19.8% say the same about the CFO. This isn't a quirk in the data. It's a pattern of strategic neglect.

And it's one that's costing marketers their credibility, their budgets, and eventually their relevance.

In a world where marketing is increasingly accountable for revenue—which requires capital allocation—treating the CFO as a peripheral actor is career malpractice.

From creative execution to capital allocation

Over the past 15 years, B2B marketing underwent a slow transformation—from a discipline grounded in formal training, consumer psychology, and brand economics to a catch-all growth function often staffed by generalists.

The explosion of SaaS tools and DIY ad platforms meant companies could do marketing without needing to understand marketing. It became the promotions department—shallow, reactive, stripped of pricing, product, and market strategy.

What got lost in the shift? A financial understanding of what marketing actually is.

Today, marketing is less about how growth capital is deployed across time horizons and more about the latest tech distraction and social meme.

Somewhere along the way, the discipline got hijacked. Market orientation, price strategy, and product input was traded for demand hacks and twiddling knobs on dashboards. But real marketing isn't the art of tactics. It's the management of growth. It sets pricing for margin, feeds product with market insight, configures channels for scale, and shapes persuasion to drive market share.

When done right, marketing is a capital deployment function—allocating finite resources across competing investments to build awareness, drive preference, and capture value. That's not a campaign. That's strategy. That's marketing management.

Which means the marketer's job isn't just to execute. It's to allocate.

And the CFO, not just the CEO, is a critical partner in that process.

Why the CFO is the internal LP

The CFO controls the capital. They understand the runway, cash conversion cycles, marginal return on invested capital, and how each function in the company affects long-term value creation.

Ignoring that role—or treating finance like an ATM that spits out budget when the story sounds good—is a fast track to marginalization.

When marketing leaders treat the CFO as an afterthought, they fail to build the shared mental models necessary for strategic resource allocation. The CFO doesn't just care about outputs; they care about how quickly investments return capital, how reliably those returns show up, and how each line item contributes to firm value.

If you want a budget that doesn’t get axed when sentiment turns, you need to speak to finance in their own language—and on their terms.

Reframing marketing in corporate finance terms

Here's a (very) simple map of how common marketing activities can be translated into familiar corporate finance categories:

If marketing wants to be part of growth planning—not just promotions execution—it must frame its entire strategic function in capital terms.

• Research is R&D: an upstream investment in future value.
• Segmentation is a capital deployment map: a diagnostic of the market landscape that informs all downstream allocation.
• Targeting is the act of capital allocation itself: deciding where and how to invest for margin and growth.
• Brand becomes capex: building long-term intangible assets.
• Activation remains opex: driving short-term revenue efficiency.

The point isn't to mimic finance—it's to make marketing comprehensible and investable. That's how you earn a seat at the table—because you've made marketing legible to finance.

A playbook for re-balancing influence

So how does a marketing leader operationalize this capital mindset in a world still obsessed with MQLs and spend efficiency (aka "ROI")? Here's how:

• Rebuild dashboards with capital fluency: Move beyond standard funnel metrics. Report on CAC by cohort, contribution margin, ROIC per motion—and include brand metrics alongside performance ones to show investment posture.
• Model uncertainty explicitly: Scenario-plan like finance does. Offer CFOs a view into best-case, base-case, and downside outcomes across programs.
• Map sequencing across time horizons: Don't just say a brand campaign will "drive awareness." Show how 25Q2 brand work seeds 25Q4 pipeline performance or lowers FY26 CAC.
• Loop finance in early: Don't present finished budget asks. Co-develop them. Invite finance into the investment process before you assign dollars.
• Train your team in capital thinking: Your head of growth and content strategist alike should understand how payback periods and cash burn affect strategic decisions.

Final thought

Marketers keep saying they want a "seat at the table." Well, at the strategy table, every conversation is a capital allocation decision. If you're not in conversation with the CFO, you're not at the table—you're waiting for leftovers.

If marketers continue treating finance like an ATM, they'll keep being treated like discretionary spend. Disposable. Easily cut when things get tight.

But the marketers who treat finance like a capital partner? They'll not only keep their budgets—they'll start helping shape the company's growth bets.

In an age where cash isn't free and growth takes longer to pay off, the most strategic marketing move isn't more tactics:

It's building a relationship with a CFO who trusts you with capital.