Tired of defending your marketing budget to a skeptical C-suite? If you can justify spend, you shift the perception on marketing, showing that it’s a growth driver rather than a cost center. Then you can get the buy-in you need to innovate, drive sustainable results and better support business objectives.
However, using standard metrics to demonstrate performance isn’t enough. Why? Because clicks and conversions fail to resonate with CEOs and CFOs who only want to see how marketing impacts revenue growth.
To get their attention (and budget approval), you have to take control of the narrative and show the direct contribution of marketing costs to business success.
Defending the value of marketing spend in 2025
It’s no secret that the role of the CMO has evolved significantly in recent years. You’re juggling emerging media platforms, diverse customer segments, increased interaction points and sophisticated distribution frameworks.
You have to embrace innovation to manage what’s on your plate. How else can you deliver competitive results in a world that offers almost limitless potential from AI and other technologies yet, at the same time, limits possibilities with shrinking average marketing budgets?
The trick in all this is that innovation requires resources and the leeway to experiment, measure and get better. In a perfect world, executives would trust CMOs and take the lid off marketing budgets. However, financial pressure on businesses demands strict justification for all spending in advance. That’s a problem when marketing efforts can’t easily be tied to immediate results.
CEOs and CFOs expect clear marketing ROI tied to business outcomes directly. But you know that ROI alone isn’t enough to justify spend because you need to play a longer game.
You’re trying to shift from a lead-generation approach to more high-value engagement over the entire customer journey. You’re trying to build long-term customer value creation.
Your CFO wants to know how you’re contributing to the valuation of the company (CAC).
So where’s the middle ground?
More measurability in digital marketing creates misconceptions
Marketing measurability is perceived as easier because of the access to metrics you have across marketing channels. But you know this isn’t the case. If anything, attribution issues have added more chaos to measurement.
Here’s the challenge: the perception that more data equals better insights means that the C-suite has heightened expectations around accountability for every dollar you spend and its contribution to revenue uplift.
You need to be able to paint a picture and connect your marketing efforts to the outcomes that matter most to your company — think customer lifetime value (CLV), sales pipeline velocity and marketing efficiency (MER).
This isn’t just about reporting what your campaigns did or didn’t do. It’s about reshaping perceptions. It’s about proving marketing’s role as a strategic growth driver rather than just the department that delivers the quick assist to the sales team.
Like it or not, as CMO, your efforts are judged through a financial lens, not a creative one. Data storytelling shifts marketing’s perception from a cost center to a growth driver by aligning metrics with business KPIs like revenue growth or EBITDA.
"Absolute numbers tell you what happened, but they’re often lagging indicators. To truly understand performance and stay ahead, focus on input metrics expressed as rates or ratios. These early signals not only help benchmark against industry standards but also directly connect to outputs like revenue, margins and order value. It’s about driving real, measurable impact with smarter, more adaptable strategies."
-Funnel’s VP of Growth, Vanessa Meyer
You already know the impact your marketing efforts have on revenue. The problem is that the people making decisions around future marketing spending believe that’s not enough. In 2025, you need to be able to show the board that you know which commercial levers to pull and when to keep ratios within pre-defined borders. But how?
Skills CMOs need to win support for marketing spend
To bridge the communication gap between marketing and C-suite, you must position yourself as a growth champion
CMOs should prioritize measurable outcomes to transform marketing from being a department that has to battle it out for their piece of the pie every quarter to a strategic growth driver that leads institutional initiatives. To improve your storytelling skills, you need to first master these three skills to help you think and present data like a CEO:
1. Elevate business responsibilities
You need to shift marketing efforts to directly support strategic goals. When you elevate your vision and focus on initiatives like entering new markets, increasing customer lifetime value and accelerating revenue growth with digital-first priorities, you show leadership that you share the vision and concerns they do.
As CMO, you’re required to lean away from the more creative aspects of marketing and start leaning into the data-focused commercial side. When you can easily collaborate with leadership to align marketing campaigns with high-priority business outcomes, you’re already halfway there.
2. Speak the language of business
Only 40% of CMOs strongly agree that C-suite understands the value of marketing efforts. The onus is on you to correct this gap by tying your outcomes to business objectives.
That means learning the language of business strategy. It might mean learning to analyze balance sheets and operational reports. Get familiar with key metrics that matter most to your CFO and CEO like:
- EBITDA margin: which indicates operational profitability and efficiency
- Market penetration rate: Tracks the company’s ability to capture the target market
In a B2C context, understanding the cost to acquire a customer (CAC) and your customer lifetime value (CLV) will help you prioritize campaigns that build more loyal customer relationships with higher lifetime value over quick-to-market campaigns.
In a B2B context, get comfortable with sales pipeline health, win rates and even subscription metrics like annual recurring revenue (ARR) and monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
3. Collaborate with finance
Collaborating with finance is the most critical step in learning how to translate your performance into these high-level financial metrics. This isn’t going to happen overnight, but you can start making it a reality with the following six steps.
6 steps to collaborate with finance
1. Agree on co-authored KPIs
A great starting point is to schedule a joint session with your CFO to define shared KPIs like CAC, EBITDA impact or revenue growth. The stronger your connection to these metrics, the more compelling your story will be when you build your unified revenue model.
2. Implement a unified revenue model
Rather than agreeing on just one existing metric, tie marketing spend directly to revenue by creating a unified revenue model. In a B2C context, this might mean connecting marketing activities to metrics like revenue growth, customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (LTV).
In a B2B context, you might work with your CFO to build a spend-to-revenue ratio framework that tracks campaign investments and their effect on pipeline velocity and closed deals. When you demonstrate your impact on shortening lengthy sales cycles and closing high-level accounts, you show your board that you’re contributing directly to their objectives.
“For B2B marketers, the challenge today is not just about generating leads but about aligning every part of the go-to-market strategy to drive high-value engagement. This shift requires a rethink across the entire operation — prioritizing efforts that deepen relationships and build long-term value over sheer lead volume. It’s a tougher, leaner approach, but it’s what sets up B2B companies for sustainable growth.”
-Funnel’s VP of Growth, Vanessa Meyer
3. Reverse engineer the budget approval process
When you’re creating winning marketing campaigns, you’re always thinking about what success looks like. Your CFO thinks the same way. They just use different benchmarks. So, ask them what success looks like for the marketing budget approval process.
“What do you need to see from me to make the budget approval process simple?”
When you collaborate to develop a structured process for proposing and evaluating marketing investments, you both know what’s required in advance.
This might involve presenting marketing initiatives as business cases, complete with financial models and clearly defined projections to demonstrate how your initiatives will meet the goals of your shared revenue model.
4. Be accountable
You’ve submitted your business case for your budget request. If you are granted the funding, you might believe you have fulfilled your responsibility. However, a key part of marketing accountability is being able to compare actual results to the forecast to solidify trust.
5. Adopt shared tools
With your agreed metrics and revenue models in place, try to cut out the manual effort so that reporting on forecasted versus actual results becomes seamless.
The only thing better than creating data stories that win budgets and report your success is a central dashboard that tells these stories for you in real time.
Use a Data Hub that aggregates marketing performance data into dedicated dashboards to save time and maximize insights. Export your real-time revenue models to your C-suite’s choice of data destination, such as Power BI or Tableau.
Run integrated performance reviews
When finance and marketing have a shared view of what success looks like, contributions should be weighed together. Hold joint reviews where the CFO and CMO evaluate marketing’s impact on business performance. Focus on metrics like growth, profitability and efficiency to create a shared narrative on results.
This level of synergy makes budget conversations a part of everyday conversation rather than frustrating presentations you have to work toward weeks in advance.
3 pro tips for better data storytelling
Effective data stories start with solid foundations:
1. Master the key elements of an impactful report
When it comes to the actual reporting, keep it simple with the three C’s:
Validate your marketing efforts with impactful reports.
Stick to the agreed metrics and revenue model. Turn campaign performance into a narrative about market share growth, business valuation or competitive advantage that makes sense to your busy board.
2. Use tools to do the heavy lifting
Use practical tools for creating compelling reports. The quality of your data synergy with finance depends on having access to aggregated data you can trust in a reliable platform.
The types of features you need include:
- Robust APIs to integrate all of your marketing performance data
- Automation tools to streamline data collection and reporting on centralized dashboards you and finance can both access
- Visualization platforms to clarify and simplify marketing outcomes — think Power BI and Tableau — for when a personal touch is needed´
3. Use templates and dashboards to simplify your story visualization
Make the most of available templates that you and finance can both appreciate so that sharing stories and getting that budget approval is stress-free. You can try these templates today:
- Funnel’s campaign performance overview to present campaign costs over time
- Tableau’s sales growth dashboard
- Microsoft’s Power BI visualizations from reports
You can also take advantage of smart budget and performance tracking.
Take control of growth and never fight for your marketing budget again
As CMO, the onus is on you to prove that your marketing strategy is worth the investment. That means transforming how you communicate marketing’s value and contribution to business priorities.
It’s time to think like a growth champion. Start reframing your metrics, align closely with finance and master data storytelling to connect your efforts to business impact.
By turning the insights you work with every day into simple but compelling narratives, you’ll secure buy-in, defend your worth and position yourself and your team as key growth drivers.