Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Getting Finance and Marketing to Common Ground and Common Cause
In her Monday 1to1 weekly newsletter, Martha Rogers recommends rapprochement between the CFO and the CMO.
I'd extend that to marketing directors and their financial analyst counterparts. Learn a common language that takes from both of your tool kits, and work together to build stronger selling and service "machinery".
I'd like to expand on this over the next few days, but here are a few suggested starting stances.
Finance "guy" (whether you be a woman or a man):
- Be willing to learn something new that you can use from a marketer.
- Accept some squishily imperfect metrics that imperfectly indicate that some spending is mis-spent.
- Start sketching a simplified model of the "marketing production process", particularly where funds are spent: awareness-building, interest-building, relationship building with channels and ultimate customers, sales promotion, and resale promotion.
- Be willing to learn something new that you can use from a finance person.
- Be willing to be shown imperfect evidence that you've been wrong in some of your assumptions, even in deeply-held ones.
- Start thinking about where you would spend funds and direct your team's thinking if you find out you are over-spending and over-thinking somewhere else.
Labels: direct marketing, marketing analysis, web analytics
