Why Marketing Is Not Just A Cost Center Anymore

Jennifer Chase is Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President at SAS.

When we view lines of business in isolation, we fall into traps—and we miss out on opportunities.

A business can maximize its potential by partnering across the value chain, delivering cross-discipline insights that make the whole more than the sum of its parts—and that especially applies to partnerships with Finance.

But relationships across lines of business (LoBs) can be, while not adversarial, transactional. We exchange information when the need arises rather than acknowledge a strategic relationship across disciplines. The strategic connection with Finance can arguably bear the most fruit for leadership in Marketing. And by its very nature—the fact that there’s an allotment of money—it’s the one most likely to be transactional.

In a typical Marketing/Finance relationship, budget is negotiated annually, spending against that budget and progress toward goals is reviewed quarterly, and the cycle continues. How many times, in any LoB, have you heard of a Q4 panic: “We have to spend this, or we’ll lose it.” If you didn’t need all of it this year, the logic goes, you won’t need as much next year. It’s often said in jest but with one eye over the shoulder. That’s one of the perils of a strictly transactional relationship with Finance.

It can be worse. We’ve talked about metaphorically siloed businesses for many years, wherein LoB leaders are not simply indifferent to each other’s strategic imperatives but might actually be competing with one another, and the flow of information between them is compromised. A transactional relationship is better than a siloed one, but there’s much to be gained from a true partnership.

So, what does that partnership look like?

Literate

Marketing is a complex discipline—business-to-business (B2B) marketing arguably even more so. You’re not just marketing to a customer; you’re marketing to a buyer group through a number of touchpoints in a months-long customer journey that you might not be engaged in until it’s almost over. Marketing is not a language for the faint of heart, and other disciplines don’t necessarily have that literacy. In fact, we can obsess over marketing jargon ourselves!

Similarly, financial literacy often eludes other lines of business. Like Marketing, there are distinct disciplines that fall under the Finance and Accounting umbrella. Marketing has media buyers, copywriters, creative and product marketing. Similarly, the disciplines in finance and accounting include financial planning and analysis, international tax, and revenue recognition. It is critical that leadership in Marketing and Finance speak and understand the other’s language fluently. Those who are fluently multilingual communicate without having to translate another language into their native tongue and back. So should it be with Marketing and Financial leadership.

Aligned

Alignment of leadership across departments is critical. Finance doesn’t just supply a budget. The CFO and his team can provide valuable insight to other teams at each strategic tier.

• Project level: Finance can help evaluate potential vendor partnerships for their relative financial strengths and weaknesses, their reach or exposure, and advise on the resources Marketing should commit.

• Campaign level: The same expertise can be applied at the campaign level. Finance input can help determine the client mix for a campaign that will deliver the maximum return on investment.

• Macro level: This is more akin to the traditional, transactional relationship—evaluating the performance of Marketing as a whole. But now, there are more valuable metrics, because the Finance team is immersed in the language and goals of the Marketing team and can collaborate on identifying metrics of success that are relevant for both departments.

Embedded

This immersion comes from having marketing-literate Finance team members embedded in the Marketing team and vice versa. This is not an advise-and-consent relationship. Finance team members become part of Marketing’s strategic and tactical processes, involved in planning and decision-making from square one.

Shifting from a transactional model to a strategic relationship with Finance is key. When the CFO and the CMO work on resolving the inevitable tensions between their respective departments, it can help in flipping the perception of Marketing from a cost center to a profit center. In this interview with MarketingWeek for its A B2B Marketer’s Best Friend series, I discuss how to move to this new dynamic, how to put in place future plans to measure creative effectiveness, and how to avoid common pitfalls that finance teams and marketers often encounter.

Unity

One thing that unites both departments and drives the partnership is a common focus on the future. Finance cares about future growth; creating the demand to fuel that growth is Marketing’s key mission. We’re already plotting models that look well into the future—together.

A partnership with Finance means you know you’re on the same track, that your strategies are aligned and that you can successfully pivot in response to market changes. It means stronger performance and leadership in the market and within the company, demonstrating how powerful it can be without silos. I encourage readers to investigate as a true partnership strategy, one based on empathy, curiosity and a common mission.

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