06/03/2026
The CMO-CFO relationship is either helpful or detrimental for the CMO. While this is true for any company, it’s especially true in a PE-backed organization.
This relationship determines whether your organization and the board view marketing as an investment or merely as a cost-control measure. And, from my experience working with many portfolio companies, this is the least developed relationship among executives.
I've seen CMOS with very active pipelines removed from consideration for promotion simply because the CFO didn't believe the CMO could effectively allocate spend. This was not due to poor performance or poor movement in the marketing numbers. The reason was simple: the CMO did little to develop the relationship outside of budget cycles, and when difficult financial quarters arrived, and the board began asking tough questions regarding the health of the company, there was no one in that room who knew the strengths of the marketing efforts well enough to adequately defend them.
That is not a marketing problem; that is a relationship problem, and it arrived at the worst possible time.
Finance and marketing typically speak different languages, and nobody in a PE-backed company is going to mandate that the CFO learn yours.
CMOs often fall into the same patterns when talking to the CFO, discussing pipeline influence, brand equity, attribution models, and campaign performance.
CFO’s speak in the language of payback periods, cash efficiency, EBITDA contributions, and whether they can stand behind the current revenue forecast when facing the board of directors.
Especially in PE-backed companies, the CMO must operate in both languages. Because the PE-backed boards won't referee, and the board meeting isn't the place to start translating marketing jargon into its impact on the company's financial goals. This should have already been planned and coordinated with the CFO long before the board hears a single word.
The CMOs who manage the CFO relationship successfully tend to do a few things differently than the CMOs who struggle.
They tend to meet with the CFO earlier and more often, not merely at monthly closing time nor during budget-planning seasons, but during quiet times when the conversation can truly be a conversation rather than a negotiation.
They find out what the CFO is personally under pressure for about cash efficiency targets, a covenant the business is close to bumping up against, LP reporting expectations, and they bring that context into their marketing decisions before anyone asks them to.
They stop attending meetings focused on campaigns and begin attending meetings focused on business results, so the CFO can see how well marketing is doing and why its success is critical to the financial metrics that the CFO monitors.
So when things get tough in a Private Equity-backed company (and they will), there are advocates in places they would never normally be.
The CFO who knows what marketing is accomplishing and has faith in the CMO is a much different variable than the one who views marketing as simply a budget line item to cut back on during hard times.
Many CMOs realize that this relationship is very important. Fewer of those CMOs view this as a “strategic” priority until they lose something by not having done so sooner.
If you’re a CMO of a PE-Backed Company and you’ve not made developing a real relationship with your CFO a top priority yet, the time to do so proactively is sooner than you might think. I've helped many marketing leaders navigate exactly this dynamic.
Fifteen minutes is usually enough to give you something concrete to act on. The link is in the first comment.
