Meet your new best friend
Hint - they love math.
As a marketer one of the great unlocks you will achieve in your career happens when you become best friends with an unlikely person.
It isn’t another marketer.
It isn’t anyone in sales.
It isn’t the CEO.
It is… your finance team.
I know what you are thinking - they scare us. All they care about is how much we are spending and don’t care about any of the creative things we are doing.
Most marketers treat the finance team similar to how my one boss horribly explained I should - “Treat them like mushrooms, keep them in the dark and feed them shit.”
But that is exactly the reason so many marketing teams find themselves in the spot they do today - that when it is time to make cuts they find their programs and headcount on the table.
So if you don’t treat them like mushrooms, how can you make them your new best friend?
The way to a finance team’s heart is being a good steward of company money. This means operating in the confines of the business.
Understand the key metrics they report to the board for marketing and report back how you are pacing monthly against them.
Understand the revenue goals and share back how the plans you are rolling out will impact those goals (with numbers not fluff)
No surprises - You are the canary in the coal mine. You should know first if a month seems off because lead volume is down or traffic is taking a dip. Be the first one to communicate that to the finance team so they know what is coming and may be able to help adjust.
Help them understand what is happening - give context to the numbers they are seeing on a spreadsheet.
And as a result of doing these things what you will find is that your new best friend is able to better understand what you are trying to achieve and have confidence you are trying to do it responsibly. Suddenly the conversation will switch from why are we spending this to things like:
What channels are working well enough that we can funnel more money into them?
How can we help get the team to go faster? Do you need more headcount or other help?
That’s when you know… you just made a new best friend.