The meeting everyone has sat in
You know the meeting. Marketing presents the latest big push to the board, and presents it with pride. The finance director listens, then asks the two questions the deck didn’t answer. What is the return? What does it do for the bottom line? Within minutes the discussion has stopped being about the campaign. It is about the budget, and whether this money should go into sales instead, or nowhere at all.
The brand version is no kinder. Lead generation is weak in one market because customers don’t know who we are, so marketing asks for brand investment. The FD asks one question: when will that deliver? Neither question is hostile, and both are fair.
The scepticism is rational
Finance and marketing are not chasing different goals. Bain & Company’s survey of more than 1,400 marketing and finance leaders, previewed at Cannes Lions, found CMOs and CFOs prioritise the same two measures: sales and customer acquisition. What they don’t share is trust in how marketing is measured. Bain’s Brian Dennehy put it plainly: finance trusts finance more than anything else, and mistrusts everyone else (reported by The Current).
UK B2B leaders say the same. In the B2B Marketing report The CEO blind spot (June 2026, 150 CEOs and senior leaders at companies with revenue above £20m), 76% said marketers overstate their impact on revenue. In the parallel survey of around 150 B2B marketers, only 18% said they can consistently demonstrate business impact to the C-suite. So one side says marketing overstates its impact, and the other mostly cannot show it.
Two surveys, one gap
Share of respondents
No campaign has ever failed
No marketing campaign has ever failed, in the report marketing writes about itself.
That is not dishonesty so much as the way the report is built. The function that ran the campaign chose the metrics, chose the time window, aggregated the results and graded its own work. The agency did the same, and the agency is paid to be renewed. Impressions, engagement and “pipeline influenced” are measures that can only rise, which is why they get chosen. A result that cannot lose cannot persuade a finance director, whose own numbers are audited.
This reporting model was built when results took a quarter to arrive and only the people who ran the campaign could read the data. Neither is true now, but the reporting carried on regardless.
The lag is the tell
Marketing still tends to report last quarter’s performance. The board hears what happened after the money has gone and the decision has passed. By the time anyone can challenge the numbers, the next budget is set. Finance has every reason to read that as evasion.
Finance is also still barely in the room. The CMO Survey’s 2026 report scores CFO involvement in marketing business cases at 4.5 on a seven-point scale, against 4.3 in 2021 and 2022 (308 US marketing leaders). Four years of tools and still only marginally closer.
What changes it
In our careers before Crew & Engine, we built live dashboards and gave the board access, so they could track progress at any moment. The trust dynamic started to rebalance almost immediately. No jargon, total transparency, full access. Nobody had to be persuaded. They could look.
Three things made it work, and none is a tool.
Agree the goal with finance before launch, in the language of the business. Bain’s CFOs asked marketing to co-create the measurement framework before a campaign starts, not defend it afterwards. The same applies to brand. “When will it deliver?” needs an answer on the day the money is approved: the leading indicators, and the date they get reviewed.
State what failure looks like in advance. A target that can be missed is the only kind a finance director will believe when it is hit.
Report the misses on the same page as the wins, as they happen. AI now closes the distance between activation and result further than a human reporting cycle ever could. Data that took a quarter to assemble can be assembled continuously. That only helps if the numbers are ones marketing is willing to lose on.
Submit marketing to the same evidence standard as the rest of the business, and the scepticism ends on its own.
This piece goes deeper on habit four in Six habits marketing built for a world that’s gone: the effort was never the problem. What it adds up to, and how quickly the business can see it, is.