The Overlooked Connection Between Finance and Marketing: How Collaboration Drives Business Success

Finance and marketing are both extremely important aspects of any business; the former sets the overall goals based on profitability, growth and stability, and the latter is a key driver towards hitting those targets.

More often than not, these teams tend to work independently, with little collaboration. A previous report found that just 22% of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) said their partnership with Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) was truly collaborative. However, when finance and marketing don’t join forces, it can lead to potential issues, such as overspending on low-performing campaigns, failing to track the marketing Return on Investment (ROI), and inaccurate revenue forecasting.

Aligning these teams can allow for strategic decisions that support sustainable business growth. In this blog, we’ll advise on how to effectively sync up the two departments and the significant benefits it can provide.  

What keeps finance and marketing teams apart?

These teams often work separately due to their different priorities, timelines, and specific objectives. While the overall goals are the same, ensuring the business grows and succeeds, the approaches differ. Marketing teams tend to focus on building customer relationships, market expansion, and overall brand awareness to drive leads and revenue. However, the finance department’s aims are often to analyse profitability, manage cash flow, and mitigate risks to maintain the business’s overall financial health and stability.

Organisational structures can also create a divide. Both teams are likely to have different managers, tools, software, and KPIs. Without understanding how both teams operate, a disconnect is likely to emerge between the teams, leading to a lack of communication and collaboration. 

Strategies for team collaboration

Businesses can create an environment that promotes cross-functional work. When alignment is a focus at the leadership level, it helps to encourage participation across the team, increasing the chances of a successful collaborative approach. Leaders can try the following strategies:

• Ask all teams to communicate routinely, ensuring there’s a mutual understanding of how often, why, and when.

• Set shared goals that coincide with wider business objectives (e.g., customer retention, profitability, and gaining new customers). 

• Align the marketing campaign schedule with cash flow to optimise impact and avoid financial strain. 

• Develop a shared budget that both teams can manage collaboratively.

• Review campaign spending together often to ensure it’s adhering to the marketing budget and adjust where necessary.

• Invest in integrated technology, such as accounting or financial software, that provides real-time clarity. 

• Use a shared dashboard or reports to monitor performance and make decisions together based on data.

Advantages of finance and marketing working together

If both teams work together, it can bring a range of benefits to a business that go beyond workflow optimisation.

With better collaboration, both teams can plan marketing spending better, correlating it with business priorities and allocating the budget wherever it will likely drive the most value. Planning marketing campaigns with a clear understanding of the company’s financial situation can support cash flow management, mitigating any overspending during times of limited inflows (e.g., off-season periods). 

Working together can also help provide clearer visibility on the ROI of marketing activities, directly connecting them to financial outcomes, helping businesses understand which campaigns generated revenue and which didn't. This collaboration allows for better strategic planning, using real-time data and financial insights, on top of the usual vanity metrics, which can lead to more effective marketing campaigns. 

Challenges to collaboration

Although the benefits of connecting these two departmental areas are clear, in reality, it isn't always straightforward for a few different reasons, such as:

• Differing mindsets and priorities: The different aims of both teams can often lead to misunderstandings or even mistrust when it comes to planning campaigns, setting budgets, and evaluating performance.

• Timeframe misalignments: Marketing and finance teams tend to work to very different timelines, which can potentially make it difficult to work together. Marketing teams tend to have shorter deadlines, often tied to seasonal and market trends. Finance, on the other hand, tends to have long-term objectives, often focusing on quarterly or annual performance.

• Individual tools and data: Both teams may use tools and platforms that don’t integrate or share insights, creating a lack of visibility and making it harder to measure impact and align strategies.

• Limited understanding of roles and priorities: If the departments don’t have a full understanding of each team's goals, metrics, and processes. Without an appreciation of how both sides contribute to a business's success, collaboration can be challenging.

• Resistance to change: Introducing new processes is often met with resistance due to team members’ fears of increased workload, losing control, and the unknown. Not understanding the other team's goals or why the changes are happening can also add to the reluctance.

Combined key metrics

Setting joint KPS is a key method for motivating both teams to collaborate effectively. Some examples of potential joint financing and marketing KPIs include customer lifetime value (CLV), marketing ROI, customer acquisition cost (CAC) and revenue per campaign. 

These KPIs can help marketing teams see and understand the financial impacts of their campaigns, and allow finance teams to see the value marketing can bring for long-term growth. 

There is certainly an overlooked connection between finance and marketing teams. The two often work in silos, which can lead to decisions being made with incomplete data, conflicting objectives, and unclear goals. 

However, by working together and supporting one another, both teams can contribute towards achieving wider business goals. Sharing insights, communicating often, and aligning KPIs can help both teams make more informed decisions, drawing from both creative and financial factors and supporting the business as a whole.

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