The marketing-finance divide is not about attribution. It is about trust.

Spend enough time with CMOs and CFOs and you quickly realise they are often trying to solve the same problem from entirely different directions.

Finance wants confidence that investments will generate returns; marketing wants the resources and time needed to create future growth; both are accountable for business performance. Yet conversations between the two can often feel adversarial rather than collaborative, as has been noted across numerous HotTopics C-suite events. 

As such, for our most recent CMO 2.0 virtual MeetUp, leaders explored a simple question: what would it take to build a stronger relationship between marketing and finance?

The discussions covered budgets, attribution, accountability, brand investment, and organisational design—but beneath all of those topics sat a far more entrenched issue.

Trust is expensive currency

That issue is trust. Given the creative practice and domain within which marketing sits, most marketing budgets are not built logically, in a way accountants, for example, consider data-driven and rational.

In fact, few organisations calculate marketing investment from first principles. Instead, most budgets fall into one of three categories. The first is the familiar "bill of materials" or BOM approach. Marketing creates a list of activities it would like to execute for finance to review; then, often, it removes a proportion of the funding, and marketing then decides which activities to cut.

The second is reverse engineering. A budget arrives from above and marketing works backwards trying to understand the assumptions behind the number.

The third is the percentage of revenue: while imperfect, we heard, many participants viewed this as a reasonable starting point when more sophisticated planning models do not exist.

The problem? None of these approaches truly answer the question of how much marketing investment is required to achieve a specific growth objective.

The ideal model is relatively straightforward—in theory. 

Start by understanding conversion rates throughout the customer journey, and calculate the cost of creating demand at the top of the funnel. At the same time, model how opportunities convert into revenue.  Then, determine the level of investment required to produce the desired commercial outcome.

The reality, of course, is that few organisations have sufficient data, patience, or alignment to operate this way.

As one participant observed, marketing budgets are often treated less like strategic investments and more like discretionary spending. That perception alone creates tension before a single budget discussion has begun.

Attribution is not the real problem

Marketing and finance conversations also frequently become trapped in debates about attribution.

Which campaign created the opportunity? What percentage of the deal should marketing claim? How much revenue was influenced versus sourced?

Yet many of the executives in the discussion argued that attribution itself is not the core issue.

Good multi-touch attribution models can provide useful insights throughout the buying journey. Where the real challenge emerges is as deals move closer to revenue. At that point, the number of variables increases dramatically. Think: sales conversations, pricing decisions, product capabilities, executive relationships, customer experience, and procurement processes, all influencing outcomes.

Marketing's contribution remains significant—it just becomes harder to isolate. And this creates an uncomfortable reality because the closer a business gets to revenue, the less useful a simplistic cause-and-effect narratives become. Many leaders have experienced this first hand, but the mistake many marketers make is assuming they need perfect attribution to prove value. In reality, the CFO (and the Board) would rather have credible evidence and consistent logic.

This mistake raised the strongest criticism during the debate: marketers who change attribution models to suit personalities do the whole function a disservice.

Marketing’s mea culpa

Several participants described situations where new CMOs arrived and immediately introduced new measurement frameworks. Sometimes marketing-sourced became marketing-influenced and sometimes multiple metrics were consolidated into a single number In others, reporting changed entirely.

While the intention may have been positive, the outcome was often predictable: Board confidence declined.

If a business can justify the same investment using multiple attribution methodologies, which version should executives trust? Measurement frameworks should evolve as strategy evolves; markets change, customer journeys change, and technology improves.

But when models change without a corresponding strategic rationale, finance teams often see manipulation rather than improvement. And any trust lost is difficult to recover. What we heard from different conversations is that organisations making progress are those sharing data and talent—not arguments. 

One of the most interesting examples discussed came from organisations that have reduced friction between sales and marketing by removing so-called information asymmetry. Rather than debating attribution after the fact, both teams work to see the same signals in real time. This included: intent data, pipeline movement, account engagement, and buying activity.

The result, we heard, is a fundamentally different conversation; one that repositions justification, replacing it with one of collaboration.

One participant described an "all-bound" go-to-market model where sales, marketing, and customer-facing teams operate as a single revenue organisation. Different specialists contribute at different stages, but everyone shares accountability for outcomes. Whether or not businesses adopt such structures formally, the principle is important.

Closing thoughts

Perhaps the most important conclusion from the discussions was that the role of the modern CMO continues to evolve. The future belongs neither to brand marketers nor performance marketers, but increasingly it favours those who can prove commercially fluency.

These leaders understand revenue mechanics, investment principles, and business strategy; they discuss customer acquisition costs and market positioning with equal confidence. And, after this conversation, I am convinced they are also leaders who recognise finance not as the enemy of marketing but its most important partner.

Because in the end, the marketing-finance divide is rarely about metrics. It is about whether the organisation trusts marketing to make decisions that create long-term value.