Tuesday, August 18, 2026  ·  5 Min Read

WELCOME BACK!

It’s a sunny Friday afternoon and I’m sitting here with a cup of tea while my 9-month-old catches her 2nd nap of the day. I spent the majority of the day working with the Wolke founders on our growth plans and it got me thinking about why growth plans always land on the same question.

Who is bringing the dollars in…

It’s the same question being asked in every budget review I have sat in, most times in a much more polite way.

Boathouse ran their fifth annual CEO study in January, 150 CEOs of major US companies. Roughly 43% are confident in their marketing leaders and in the same year the percentage of marketing being termed as a profit centre dropped from 65% to 40%.

The interesting part is that the same study claims CEOs now believe their CMOs understand the business and speak its language compared to the marketing lingo thrown at them five years ago. Progress but something tells me we aren’t moving fast enough. You see it is not about the language or whether we understand the business it’s the bottom line of that P&L that truly matters.

Obviously, it is one survey in the US and from a firm that consults to CMOs, so take the precision with a grain of salt. But this matches every conversation I have sat in. Nobody questioned my numbers. They questioned how much of the total closed won/ARR marketing was bringing in.

The ask increased but nothing underneath it did.

The last time I built an annual budget, the starting point was last year's budget. Not what had worked. Not what we had learned. Last year's number, then adjusted.

And to be fair, it was adjusted upward. The regional pipeline target had gone up, so the ask went up with it, worked backwards the way these things always go. We need this much pipeline to land this much closed won, so marketing needs to source this much, so here is your number. We even baked a safety factor in on top, because everyone knows the model runs optimistic.

So the ask scaled.

Here is what did not.

The company was not fully set up in one of the regions we were selling into, which meant the BDR team sat as a bottleneck between a field event and anything you could honestly call pipeline. That team was also brand new. The people whose conversion numbers were sitting inside the model, the ones who had done that work the year before, had left. And the process the new team inherited was to chase every lead and convert it no matter what, which is not really a process, it is an instruction.

Sales had been through enough change in the same window that product knowledge and training were not where they needed to be either.

I do want to be clear that none of this is a verdict on anybody. The new team was new. That is not a failing, it is a fact, and the plan was the thing that should have accounted for it.

So we put more money into the top of a funnel that had quietly got worse at collecting. And field events, which is reliably where my best ROI comes from, did not perform the way it should have. Not because the events were wrong. Because there was nobody downstream in a position to catch what they produced.

The target went up. The budget went up. The assumption underneath both of them, that we could still convert the way we did last year, went completely unexamined, and nobody wrote it down.

So when the pipeline came in short, the question that came back was not whether the conversion layer had changed. It was whether marketing was really driving growth.

It was the wrong question. And I had nothing on paper to point at.

Language gap, check! But the belief is still pending…

Learn the P&L. Speak the CFO’s language. Translate your metrics into their metrics. It’s been 10 years of telling marketers to learn finance so the C-suite takes them seriously.

The Boathouse data indicates we are moving in the right direction with 72% of CEOs confident their marketing leader understands the P&L, up from 61% a year ago.

But the gap isn't comprehension. It's belief.

You can walk in fluent in gross margin and still lose the room, because the question in their head was never whether you understand the business. It was whether marketing brings the revenue in, or just happens to be close to when sales does.

That is a different argument and it needs different evidence to support it. More attribution will not win it, because attribution is the exact thing they already do not believe and most B2B companies do not have multi-touch attribution built in.

This one move changes the conversation, and it’s the one I would have laughed at three years ago.

Here is what has worked for me, and I want to be honest. It feels genuinely awful the first time round. I want you to walk into the budget conversation with a budget cut you are going to propose yourself. Name the tactic you would kill then say what you expect to lose by killing it. At the end say what you would do with the money instead.

Two things happen; you stop defending every dollar, which is a position nobody has ever won from and you demonstrate the thing they actually doubt, which is that you can tell the difference between spend that moves the number and spend that simply exists.

On the other hand, if I were to play devil’s advocate, propose a budget cut and they will take the cut and give you nothing back. That does happen and it has happened to me. My honest view is that the cut is inevitable so when it happens to the person who defended everything equally, they lose the budget and the credibility with it.

Btw the cut has to be something real, not a tactic you never supported anyway. If it does not cost you something you would rather keep, they can tell, and then you have spent the move for nothing.