Who should be the CMOs best friend?

We all have best friends. People we knew when we were younger. People we know now. Maybe our spouses or significant others. We usually think of best friends as someone from our personal life. But when it comes to your professional life, who is your best friend? There are definitely people we work with the most and sometimes those people are our friends — and in some cases, maybe our best friends. But at a functional level, who should the CMO be best friends with?

It may be stating the obvious, but in most cases the number one best friend of the CMO needs to be the CRO (or head of sales depending on what title the company uses). Between the CMO and CRO, you have roughly 80% of the Go-to-Market resources. This doesn’t include the product teams as I am referring specifically to the in-field GTM activities. The remaining 20% +/- of GTM activities are in the customer success/support teams where they engage with customers and ensure they are happy and renew their license. The alignment, vision and teamwork between the CMO and CRO will determine the amount of success the company has overall (assuming, of course, the product is solid). If these two functional leaders are not aligned, the teams won’t be aligned. And much like when you are taking a long shot in billiards, any variance at the beginning of the shot (similar to the alignment between CMO and CRO) is magnified as you move down the table (or the organization). Although not always practiced effectively, the CMO-CRO relationship is arguably the single most important relationship in a company.

But after the relationship with the CRO, who should the CMO be best friends with? A common response is the CPO or head of products/development. No doubt this is a very important relationship and the two leaders and their teams have a symbiotic relationship that revolves around understanding customer needs and communicating the company’s solution effectively. Without a well-functioning CMO-CPO relationship, you will have wasted effort, questionable field preparedness and possibly features that customers may not want. So, this is clearly an important executive relationship.

But there is another relationship that is equally key to success. It may be surprising but the CMO relationship with the CFO is critical and should be at the forefront of any CMOs thinking. It’s always been critical and perhaps even more now as budgets are scrutinized to align with the impact from COVID-19. The CFO is responsible for all aspects of the company’s finances. And most often the CFO has an outsized voice in the investments a company makes. There are always tradeoffs between hiring, building a new product/feature, returning money to shareholders, etc. and the CFO is closely involved in these decisions with the CEO and the management team. But as the single largest “discretionary” spend in most organizations, marketing spend is often a topic of discussion with the CFO and those on the CFO’s team.

The more the CMO can be aligned with the CFO the better. But what specifically should the CMO do as they work with the CFO? Below are four key steps every CMO should take to ensure a good relationship with the CFO:

1. Hold Regular Meetings: There is no substitute for meeting regularly and discussing the results of the marketing investment to strengthen the CMO-CFO relationship. These meetings should be as often as needed but a 30 minute weekly check-in is a good place to start.
2. Agree on Value Metrics: This sounds obvious but marketing and finance often use a very different vocabulary. Some times there are words that mean the same thing to each function and sometimes there are words that need to be learned by each. As part of one of the first regular meetings, the combined team should get aligned on what metrics are important to each. These could be things like investment amount vs newly created pipeline amount (understanding there is a lag time between marketing investment and pipeline creation) or cost per qualified lead or marketing investment influence. The key idea here though is to have a joint agreement on the valuable metrics and consistently review them.
3. Proactively Communicate: No one likes bad news. And the only thing worse than bad news is bad news that comes as a surprise. Proactively communicating how expenses are trending (over or under) as early as possible is key. The regular weekly meeting can help facilitate this communication. But having joint access to tools assists with the communication as both teams can access investments, returns, impact, etc. on-demand by using the same tools.
4. Jointly Build Investment Business Cases: At some point, the marketing team will need to build investment business cases. This may be for a new market opportunity or it may be simply planning for the upcoming quarter/year. Regardless of the catalyst, building this business case with the finance team (after aligning with the CRO and/or CPO of course) will ensure the business case is solid and has a higher chance of success.

The CMO-CRO relationship is undeniably the commercial engine that drives a company forward.

But the CMO-CFO relationship is the frame that the engine is built on and ensures it can withstand breaking, accelerating and speed bumps.