Business Goals, Budget & Buy-In: 10 Ways to Foster CMO + CFO Alignment
I have always believed that you can’t expect to achieve a goal — growth, especially — if you aren’t willing to put budget and resources against it. This is especially important in tech, where the only way to remain relevant and competitive is to continuously be innovating.
Rise Interactive has been on a double-digit growth trajectory for many years, and to sustain this level of growth, we’ve continued to invest in key functional areas like marketing, sales, and innovation. But doing so, I have learned, requires a special recipe of collaboration across our executive leaders and our CFO, David Zuaiter, to gain buy-in and alignment. It is David’s job, after all, to be convinced that any additional dollars we put toward marketing and other efforts will generate an ROI justifying the expense.
A couple of years ago, I challenged David to focus more time as a growth-minded CFO — to take more responsibility for revenue and to think beyond the expense side of the business. At the same time, I challenged Natalie Scherer, our head of marketing, to understand what kind of data CFOs need to see to feel good about the budgeting decisions they’re making. At Rise, we talk about several principles we believe brands should be thinking about, and the last but not least of these is “prove it” — build an infrastructure using data that everyone sees and believes for themselves so that we can collectively and proactively make investment decisions that ultimately lead to outsized growth.
I sat down with David and Natalie to find out what the process has been like for them, what they discovered along the way, and what key takeaways they have that may be of benefit to other growth-minded companies like Rise. Here are 10 best practices they’ve honed over time, that you and your Finance and Marketing leaders may find useful:
Final thoughts
Looking back on all of this, David and Natalie made it look easy even though none of us would tell you it was. They broke the mold. Growth doesn’t just materialize out of thin air, but I do think people can make magic happen when companies commit to three important things:
- Have a vision of growth — set the tone across your organization that growth is your imperative and that you’re going to pursue it properly, taking a data-driven approach.
- Bring on two remarkable "A-Players" like David and Natalie, challenge them to think differently about their respective roles, and give them the space they need to figure out how best to work together and use data in a way that we can all be on the same page.
- Give it time to work. This isn’t about instant gratification — it’s about outsized, sustainable growth.
Which of these points resonates most with your executive team? Message me so we can keep the conversation going.