In this conversational excerpt, Michael Kaminsky asks about the common antagonistic relationship between marketing and finance teams, where marketers feel finance constantly cuts budgets and finance views marketers as reckless spenders. The speaker responds with a set of best‑practice recommendations: start with the end in mind by identifying what finance stakeholders need to see; create a mock or “fake” report early on to test whether the proposed metrics and presentation would convince finance to release more budget; involve finance from the outset in a kickoff meeting to co‑design the marketing media mix and reporting structure; and iterate collaboratively so that finance feels ownership and trust in the marketing plan. By aligning expectations early and building joint evidence of revenue impact, marketers can break the cycle of static annual budgets and secure larger, data‑driven allocations.
Chapters
You mentioned how in a lot of organizations, the marketing team and the finance team have a very antagonistic relationship. Let's say there's a lot of conflict there. Marketing team thinks the finance team's always coming in to reduce their budgets, and the finance team thinks the marketing team are profligate spendthrifts wasting money on who knows what. It sounded like you had a better approach to that relationship. I'd love for you to, to talk more about how that's worked for you and what you think the best practices there are.
I've learned a lot from content created by engineers, even software developers, where the idea is to start with the end in mind. One thing that I think about is, what are my stakeholders going to need from me at the end of this? As a marketer, I want to create this robust, beautiful, omnichannel marketing media mix that proves the revenue impact of these multimillion-dollar investments that we're making. Basically, I need to have other teams look at us and think, okay, I may not know all the details, but they clearly know what they're doing. I believe them. I trust them, they're good to go. With finance teams, I often find that marketing teams feel the need to create the perfect presentation, maybe with a platform, maybe with a software vendor, but they want to get everything perfect and then present it to finance. I think it's a better approach to bring finance in from the very beginning and say, we know what we can do, what do you need to see? Before the data is even coming in, I'll create a fake report and I'll say, if I gave you this 3 months from now, would you believe me? Would you believe that our marketing is this effective? Do these columns show what you need to see? Would this make you want to open up the purse and give me more budget? I'll try to create an environment where I'm like, look, I'm not married to this look. I just want to make sure that this is relevant to you because I want to spend more money. We'll have a little laugh and then they'll get into it. The finance folks that I've had experience with over the years, they'll tell me, they're like, yeah, I've seen this before. I've heard this before from previous marketers and I just never understood it and I can't prove its worth to their senior finance leaders. So it never goes anywhere. And we get the same budgets every year. Bring them in with you, bring your stakeholders in with you, bring the people who aren't going to believe you, have a kickoff with them and say, I want to build this report with you. I want to build this marketing media mix with you, bring them in from the start and then work through it together.
