How marketing and finance can break down data silos for faster growth

Marketing and finance don’t wake up each day looking for a fight. But when campaign launches get delayed by budget approvals or finance challenges the ROI of a top-performing initiative, tension builds. These aren’t personal problems. They’re process problems that are almost always rooted in misaligned data.

Finance is focused on predictability, risk and spend control. Marketing is focused on speed, reach and growth. And when each team uses different tools, timelines and success metrics, even a shared goal like revenue growth can turn into a tug-of-war.

This article breaks down what actually goes wrong when finance and marketing work in silos: stalled campaigns, clunky reporting and missed opportunities. More importantly, it offers a path forward. Not in the form of feel-good alignment theory, but through practical steps and proven tools that help these two teams make smarter decisions together.

The current state: How silos hurt your business 

It’s the last week of June. You’ve got the audience defined, creative approved and your launch strategy ready to go. The campaign is time-sensitive — a Q3 push tied to seasonal demand. But there’s one holdup: finance hasn’t approved the PO. So your window starts to close.

These aren’t edge cases. They’re the daily ripple effects of disconnected workflows and siloed priorities between marketing and finance. And they’re eating away at speed, trust and business growth.

It’s a classic case of how siloed data slows teams down — and it shows up in budget delays, misaligned metrics and fractured reporting. Let’s take a deeper look at each of these problems.

Budget disconnects slow down campaign execution

Marketing teams plan in hours and days. Finance teams plan in quarters. Without shared timelines, the best-laid campaigns stall out waiting on budget codes and sign-offs.

Maybe it’s a vendor invoice, headcount reallocation or paid media overage that needs review. The requests ping-pong between departments for a week. And by the time everything clears, the campaign either launches late or gets scrapped entirely.

That’s not just a delay — that’s a missed revenue opportunity.

Takeaway: Reduce delays by giving both teams access to normalized spend data. When marketing and finance work from the same numbers, decisions happen faster.

Misaligned metrics weaken confidence in results

You’re presenting strong ROAS numbers to leadership, but finance is looking at a spreadsheet that tells a different story. Their report pulls from a different platform, with its own naming conventions and logic.

No surprise: the numbers don’t match. And when the data doesn’t align, neither team looks credible. That’s a problem, especially in board meetings where trust in the data determines whether your team gets more budget or more scrutiny.

This is where an ETL or data integration tool makes a difference early. With automatic extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) to your desired destinations, both teams benefit from a shared view of marketing data, normalized across platforms, currencies and timeframes. 

Takeaway: Normalize marketing performance data before reporting. Shared definitions and timeframes reduce cross-team friction and help both sides defend their numbers with confidence.

Finance professionals lack marketing context

To marketers, a brand campaign is a long-term investment. To finance, it’s $50,000 spent with no immediate return. And unless you’ve explained terms like “customer lifetime value” or “incrementality,” those line items look like waste. Without the right context, finance does what finance does: tightens the belt.

This isn’t about bad intentions — it’s about mismatched understanding. Marketing speaks in future value. Finance speaks to current impact. And unless both sides meet in the middle, the budget always bends toward the short term.

The divide doesn’t just affect operations. It slows down planning, distorts forecasting and undermines trust at the exact moment both teams need to move together. 

But you can give finance professionals marketing context by co-defining marketing metrics. For example, with customer acquisition costs (CAC), what costs are included in the calculation? Sales team salaries, marketing team salaries, ad spend or all three? What about software used by marketing and sales? The costs associated with hiring a content agency? When you work together to determine how to calculate your agreed-upon metrics, both teams stay on the same page regarding what’s behind the numbers.

Takeaway: Share marketing performance in finance terms by co-defining marketing metrics. Align with finance by collaborating on what metrics to use and what factors are plugged into the calculations. As a result, budget conversations start to shift from cuts to collaboration.

Marketing and finance see success differently

The friction between marketing and finance isn’t about intent — it’s about priorities. Marketing bets on future growth. Finance manages current exposure. That split shapes how budgets are built, how success is measured and how strategies move forward — or stall.

Different lenses, different decisions:

• Marketing wants room to test, pivot and invest in long-term brand equity.
• Finance needs predictability, documentation and near-term impact.
• Marketing measures success with awareness, engagement and lifetime value.
• Finance focuses on efficiency, ROI and cash flow alignment.

Brand equity doesn’t fit a quarterly P&L

Long-term brand-building work — content series, paid social, video — rarely ties neatly to quarterly revenue. Without clear context, finance may see these as high-cost, low-return bets.

When teams aren’t aligned on goals, marketers pull back on brand spend. Finance doesn’t get the context they need. And both sides end up playing it safe instead of planning to grow.

The chief financial officer and chief marketing officer aren’t aligned by default

The gap goes all the way to the top. According to a CMO Council and KPMG report, only 22% of CMOs say their CFO is a true partner on decisions around investment, metrics and planning.

It’s not about personal friction. These execs often operate from different dashboards, with different KPIs and different timelines. CMOs are tasked with growing the brand. CFOs are tasked with protecting against risk. Without regular alignment, they rarely base decisions on the same set of facts.

When data stays trapped in departments

Marketing and finance teams often see different things when they look at data. That disconnect comes from more than just miscommunication. It’s built into how each team defines value, tracks performance and reports results.

For example, marketing might pull revenue data from platforms like Meta and Google Ads. Finance looks at ERP data. Whether it’s because of delayed syncing, API differences or just plain old platform reporting variations, the numbers don’t match. Other data misalignment issues are just as innocent, but that doesn’t stop distrust from creeping in.

Let’s take a look at some of the most common data-silo scenarios that cause finance and marketing friction. 

Financial data doesn’t reflect marketing nuance

Finance platforms are built for control and clarity. They surface total spend, budget variances and monthly rollups. But that top-line view often flattens important details. 

For example, a $120,000 “paid media” line item might span three campaigns across two platforms, each targeting different audiences with different results. If that context never makes it to finance, the outcomes don’t either. So instead of seeing what worked, they’re left to judge whether the line item was “worth it.”

That’s not a matter of opinion — it’s a visibility issue. And without that detail, even valid marketing decisions can get flagged or rejected.

Marketing metrics aren’t standardized for finance teams

Marketers track ROAS, CPM, CTR and CAC. Finance tracks gross margin, budget variance and forecast accuracy. These terms overlap, but the definitions don’t. Even something like “ROI” might be calculated in three different ways between platforms and teams.Most marketing metrics don’t line up with the metrics finance uses, causing never-ending confusion.

This mismatch creates real problems in reporting. Without standard definitions or shared logic, numbers don’t reconcile. Dashboards don’t align. And cross-functional reviews turn into translation exercises instead of decision-making sessions.

Why self-serve dashboards aren’t a fix-all

Dashboards have become the go-to fix for data friction. And yes, they make information more accessible. But they don’t make it more aligned on their own.

A dashboard can pull in spend data from Facebook and Google Ads, but it won’t standardize campaign naming. It won’t apply finance’s definitions of return or cost center classification. And it definitely won’t flag that the same product is labeled differently in three systems. Without agreement on what the numbers mean, a dashboard is just a prettier version of the same problem. 

That’s where modern marketing data platforms come in. As a data integration layer that standardizes and cleans data before it goes to your warehouse or BI and analytics tools, with Funnel, you end up with dashboards that make sense. It doesn’t offer a templated finance dashboard, and it doesn’t need to. With clean, structured marketing data prepared for tools like Excel and Power BI, finance teams can build dashboards their way, without waiting on exports or translation.

Better visibility isn’t about more access. It’s about clarity. When both teams understand what they’re looking at, trust follows. 

Assumptions vs. reality regarding the finance and marketing relationship

Even with the right tools and processes, there’s still a potential blocker: human nature. When teams are stuck in siloes, it’s easy to make assumptions about what one group thinks of another.

Here are some of the assumptions surrounding the finance and marketing relationship that need to go out the window. Once that happens, your company can build stronger cross-functional alignment. 

• Assumption: Finance doesn't care about marketing.

• Reality: Finance cares deeply, but they need structured, ROI-tied data to see marketing’s impact. Without that, spending looks like a risk.

• Assumption: Marketing metrics are too complex for finance. 

• Reality: Finance teams aren’t confused — they’re cautious. When data is clean and consistent, they’re quick to engage and advise.

• Assumption: Marketing and finance operate on different timelines — they’ll never align.

• Reality: True, they plan on different cadences. However, with shared metrics and synchronized reporting cycles, collaboration isn’t just possible — it becomes significantly easier.

The bottom line: when both teams share clear, reliable data, finance and marketing can become a powerful duo for growth. 

Four ways alignment drives business growth

When marketing and finance operate in sync, it’s not just easier to collaborate — it’s easier to grow. Clear alignment between these teams makes reporting cleaner, budgets more strategic and decisions faster. 

The result is more than operational efficiency. It’s a direct boost to financial performance.

Here are four ways tighter alignment between marketing and finance shows up in business outcomes: 

1. Shared KPIs strengthen accountability

When marketing and finance operate from different metrics, even strong performance can trigger confusion. Marketing might highlight ROAS and LTV. Finance wants to talk CAC and contribution margin. Both teams think they’re proving value, but no one is actually aligned.

This mismatch turns updates into debates. Marketers defend the same campaign that finance questions. Reporting slows down. Budget asks get flagged. And strategy stalls while everyone tries to agree on what the numbers mean.

Shared KPIs solve this. Metrics like CAC, LTV and revenue contribution give both teams a common language. When those become the standard, meetings move faster. Reviews feel less like interrogations. And marketers can explain spending in terms finance already respects.

Just as important, shared KPIs build trust. They create a feedback loop where both teams influence goals early, not just after the fact. It’s less about defending the budget and more about owning the outcomes together.

2. Integrated data improves forecasting and future cash flows

Finance teams don’t just manage money — they model the future. But when marketing data is delayed, fragmented or unclear, those forecasts become guesswork. That’s risky, especially when cash flow depends on spend pacing and performance outcomes that marketing owns.

When finance has access to campaign-level data in near real time, they can catch trends early. If costs spike or pacing slows, they can adjust before the quarter closes. Instead of waiting for postmortems, they get live input and more accurate models.

That visibility changes how companies plan. Both teams can build best- and worst-case scenarios that reflect what’s happening on the ground. If a campaign is underperforming, finance sees the impact immediately. If spend is outpacing expectations, adjustments get made midstream, not after the damage is done.

Cash flow planning gets sharper. Forecasts reflect today, not last month. And board reviews become more about outcomes than surprises.

3. Joint planning drives smarter marketing investments

Great marketing budgets don’t start with departmental asks. They start with shared priorities. When finance and marketing plan together, the conversation shifts from “How much do you need?” to “What are we trying to achieve?”

That shift changes everything. Teams begin working from the same roadmap, aligning on where to invest, when to ramp up or slow down and how to manage risk in seasonal or uncertain markets. Marketing can bring insight from past performance to the table, not just to control spend, but to shape it.

This collaborative approach surfaces smarter tradeoffs. If one region is outperforming and another is flat, you can shift funds mid-flight with confidence. If a high-risk campaign needs guardrails, you build them in early. You’re not guessing; you’re planning together.

This kind of cross-functional budgeting makes it easier to tie spend back to strategic goals — whether that’s expansion, retention or a new product push. And for marketing leaders, it’s the difference between submitting a request and co-owning the outcome.

4. How marketing and finance report to the C-suite

The boardroom isn’t the place for conflicting dashboards. When marketing and finance show up with different numbers, neither side looks credible, and both lose influence in the conversation.

Unified reporting changes that. When both teams pull from the same data foundation, they tell a consistent story: one that’s easier for the CEO and board to follow and easier for investors to trust. It reduces questions, builds confidence and gives leadership a clearer view of how marketing spend connects to business outcomes.

That alignment also makes it easier to tie marketing initiatives to shareholder value. When leadership sees conflicting numbers, the question isn’t “Which metric is right?” — it’s “Which team got it wrong?”

Unified reporting gives the CMO and CFO a shared narrative — one that builds trust at every level.

It turns budget conversations into business strategy, not cleanup. Leaders stop debating tactics and start focusing on the bigger picture:

• Are we reaching the right segments?
  
  
• Are we allocating budget in line with growth goals?
  
  
• Are we building brand equity that supports future cash flows?

For CMOs and CFOs, consistent reporting is more than a tactical win. It’s a strategic one. It raises the floor on executive credibility and signals alignment on what matters most: growth, profitability and long-term financial health.

Inside Funnel: how marketing keeps finance in the loop 

If you want to see what marketing-finance alignment looks like, take a look at how we keep these departments on the same page at Funnel. 

First, all paid media spend flows directly into a shared Looker dashboard, updated automatically. Finance can log in anytime to see things like year-over-year and month-over-month spend trends and how actuals compare to budgets across campaigns and platforms.

If they need a granular view to see where money’s going, they can look at channel-specific breakdowns, like this one:

They can also see real-time pacing to flag underspend or overages early, giving finance and marketing time to work together to keep spend on track while maintaining marketing effectiveness.

And, when finance needs a view by region — say, EMEA vs. North America — the marketing team doesn’t scramble to assemble it. The data’s already centralized and filtered, ready to share in minutes.

This setup means fewer ad-hoc requests, faster answers and increased trust. Finance gets the visibility it needs to model cash flow and forecast accurately. Marketing gets to focus on performance, not formatting spreadsheets or explaining campaign logic.

Steps to build your cross-team strategy

Marketing and finance don’t need to work the same way, but they do need to work together. And that kind of collaboration doesn’t happen by accident. It takes shared systems, consistent check-ins and a clear understanding of who owns what.

These five steps can help marketing leaders start building the connective tissue. 

Step 1: Define shared metrics and timelines for marketing initiatives

The first step toward collaboration is agreement on what success looks like. Not just for marketing, but for the business. That means getting marketing and finance aligned on shared metrics like CAC, ROMI and pipeline influence — the numbers that tie marketing to business outcomes and help inform strategy.

Once you’ve agreed on what to measure, match your cadence to finance’s reality. Marketing might move in weeks, but finance closes books by the month and reports by the quarter. Map your review cycles to theirs, and make campaign timelines visible through a shared calendar.

That calendar becomes the backbone of cross-functional planning: launches, reviews, forecasts, board reporting. When both teams know what’s coming, they can make faster calls, respond to changes and keep spend in sync with strategy.

Step 2: Use tools to unify marketing and finance data

Shared goals won’t stick without shared data. If marketing is working from platform dashboards and finance is digging through general ledger codes, there’s no common ground — just confusion, delays and duplicated effort.

The fix isn’t more spreadsheets. It’s choosing software products that consolidate marketing performance and financial data in one place. That means a tech stack that connects ad spend, CRM data and finance systems without constant exports or manual rework.

The right setup gives each team what they need. Finance can view cost and performance without digging through campaign details. Marketing can explain results with data that finance already trusts. And both can work from a consistent, up-to-date foundation — not a patchwork of reports and one-off metrics.

Marketing intelligence platforms like Funnel help make that possible by piping clean, normalized marketing data from multiple sources into a centralized data hub, where it can then be exported to BI tools for analysis or to your data warehouse and storage tools that house your other business data. That’s how you move from siloed analysis to shared decision-making — and avoid wasting time debating whose numbers are “right.”

Step 3: Schedule recurring CFO-CMO alignment check-ins

Most misalignment doesn’t come from disagreement — it comes from a lack of communication. A quarterly sync isn’t enough. To stay aligned, the CFO and CMO need to talk regularly, and not just when something breaks.

Book a standing check-in, monthly or biweekly, and treat it as non-negotiable. These meetings aren’t just about reviewing numbers. They’re a chance to align on forecasts, flag budget risks early and build a shared view of what’s working.

The goal isn’t performance updates. It’s pattern recognition. What signals are emerging? Where do marketing trends hint at shifts in spend or outcomes? When both leaders share context in real time, it’s easier to make fast, confident decisions.

A consistent agenda helps: cover forecasts, campaign shifts and financial implications. Keep it focused on joint priorities — not just metrics. Over time, these conversations build trust and reduce the need for backchannel clarification.

If you're not sure where to start, try grounding the conversation in a few shared questions:

• How much manual effort goes into reconciling marketing spend each month?
  
  
• What’s the lag time between campaign execution and seeing its financial impact?
  
  
• How confident are we in the consistency of our cost data across platforms?
  
  
• What would change if both teams had timely access to up-to-date marketing data?

Questions like these help reframe the meeting around strategy, not just updates — and open the door for faster decisions, better forecasting and a stronger partnership between teams.

You can find a helpful playbook here: Mastering CFO-CMO cross-functional leadership.

Step 4: Document workflows for budgets and approvals

Most marketing delays don’t come from budget cuts. They come from budget confusion. When no one’s sure who approves what, or when finance needs to weigh in, even small asks can stall for weeks.

A documented workflow fixes that. Start by outlining how new spend gets proposed, reviewed and approved. Who owns campaign planning? Who signs off on budgets? When do reallocations trigger a finance review?

This doesn’t have to be complicated. It just has to be clear. A simple visual map or checklist can prevent unnecessary Slack threads, duplicate approvals or late-stage rework. When the process is visible, everyone moves faster.

It also helps build trust. Finance knows they’ll be looped in at the right time. Marketing knows where things stand and what’s needed to move forward. And leadership sees that both teams are working from the same playbook, not improvising one step at a time.

Keep it lean. Keep it accessible. And revisit it as the team scales or your budget processes evolve.

Step 5: Build dashboards that serve both target audiences

The dashboard isn’t just a reporting tool — it’s how decisions get made. But if it only speaks to one team, it won’t work. Finance doesn’t need CPMs. Marketing doesn’t think in ledger codes. And neither team has time to translate.

That’s why a shared dashboard needs to be built for both audiences. Start by stripping out jargon. Use plain language for metrics and label them clearly — cost per lead, revenue impact, spend to date. Add annotations where needed to explain shifts, flag risks or highlight pacing issues.

Make outcomes visible, not just activity. Clicks and impressions matter less than pipeline and contribution. The goal is to make the data decision-ready, not just report-ready.

When both teams can look at the same view and quickly understand what’s working, what’s at risk and what to do next — that’s when alignment shows up in the numbers.

How Funnel helps bridge finance and marketing

Alignment starts with shared data — not just access, but clarity. Marketing and finance can’t collaborate if they’re working from separate spreadsheets or translating platform jargon.

Marketing data integration platforms like Funnel connect and standardize your marketing data, so both teams see the same numbers in the same language. CMOs can track performance. CFOs get cost and ROI visibility. No bottlenecks, no rework, just shared understanding, built into the tools both teams already use.

Self-serve dashboards built for a unified view

Most dashboards speak to one team. Funnel gives both a view that makes sense.

Marketers see campaign performance by channel, creative or audience. Finance sees cost, ROI and pacing — without needing to dig through ad platforms or wait for manual exports.

Dashboards are customizable by role, so the CMO and CFO can each track what matters most, without sorting through noise. It’s the same data, just filtered for the right lens.

Finance can also rely on data that’s integrated and transformed in Funnel before moving to other destinations for analysis, like Tableau, Looker Studio and Power BI.

That flexibility removes bottlenecks. Both teams get the numbers they need when they need them — and spend less time reconciling reports, asking for context or second-guessing accuracy.

Metric standardization without manual cleanup

One campaign. Five platforms. Ten ways to label performance.

That’s the reality for most marketing teams — and the reason finance ends up questioning reports. Without consistent naming and attribution, no one knows which numbers to trust.

Funnel fixes that by automatically unifying naming conventions and attribution models across platforms. Spend is tracked consistently, so performance can be compared apples-to-apples, not approximated.

That means less time spent cleaning up spreadsheets or explaining data logic, and more time making actual decisions. For finance, it builds trust in what they’re seeing. For marketing, it means fewer reporting debates and faster approvals.

Timely data improves budget conversations and decisions

Marketing spend moves fast. But if finance only sees results at month-end, every budget conversation becomes reactive.

Modern marketing intelligence platforms like Funnel update automatically with fully managed APIs, giving both teams timely visibility into campaign performance. If a budget is burning too quickly — or not at all — marketing can flag it early. Finance doesn’t have to wait for EOM to see the impact.

That makes budget reviews more collaborative and less corrective. It also gives both sides room to adjust before problems escalate. Instead, they can reallocate spend, shift timelines or double down on what’s working.

The result? Faster, better-informed decisions, without compromising control.

Let’s bring finance and marketing to the same table

Marketing and finance don’t need to think alike, but they do need to work from the same foundation. When teams align on timelines, tools and the metrics that matter, planning gets easier. Budget reviews move faster. And campaigns don’t get stuck waiting for sign-off.

That’s the kind of alignment Funnel is built to support. It brings marketing data into one system, standardizes it across platforms and makes it usable in the tools both teams already trust.

It’s how Sephora cut data costs by 75% and how Basic-Fit accelerated onboarding while consolidating reporting across markets, without adding complexity.

Want to see how alignment drives better decisions?
Finance and marketing don’t need more meetings. They need a shared foundation. See how leading brands like Sephora and Basic-Fit made it happen — and what your team could unlock next.