CFO’s and CMO’s: Friends or Foes?
Traditionally, a CFO’s role was focused on planning, implementation, managing and running all the financial activities of a company, including business planning, budgeting, forecasting and negotiations. In other words to make sure the business plans are accountable. However CFO’s can actually see their largest contributions in the areas of performance management and strategic leadership (survey by McKinsey), so how does the CFO go from number cruncher to value driver?
As a CMO you are responsible for all marketing strategies and activities within the company. providing direction and making key decisions regarding product distribution, budgeting, branding, and sales. The problem, however, is that over half! (56%) of CEO’s do not trust that their CMO’s are doing their job (survey from Strategy box). So how do you actually prove you are leading the way? How do you measure marketing success and align with the CFO and CEO that marketing is as valuable as any other division of the company? Especially during a time where marketing budgets and staff are being slashed?
We believe that by uniting CFO’s and CMO’s under a common metric which can indicate marketing’s real effect on commercial success, that there would be absolutely no reason for CMO’s not being a CFO’s BFFL (best friend for life). We believe that metric is Share of Search.
Why? Three facts to prove our case:
Share of search has a correlation to market share.
Share of search is a leading indicator with the capability to predict market share.
Share of search is a globally standardised method of measuring.