The CMO's Guide to the CFO Conversation

How to walk into the budget meeting with numbers that hold up.

Every marketing leader has been in this meeting. The CFO looks at the marketing numbers, looks at the P&L, and the room gets uncomfortable. The work was good. The strategy made sense. But proving it in terms finance actually believes is a different problem entirely.

This guide is about how to solve it. The full guide is on this page, free, no form.

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"Reframing marketing performance through the Marketing Accounting Framework and using causal attribution provided The RealReal the language needed to bridge marketing and finance. It revealed marketing's true contribution and provided the evidence to deploy investments intentionally to drive growth."

Kristen Cho

VP Acquisition Marketing, The RealReal

Take it with you

The designed PDF version of this guide, for sharing with your team or forwarding to your CFO. Direct download, no form.

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About the Author

Written by someone who has run this program for hundreds of brands.

Madan Bharadwaj has spent 17 years in attribution: founding team member at VisualIQ, founder of Measured, and CEO of M-Squared. He has been in the CFO conversation more times than he can count. This is the framework he wishes every CMO had before walking into that meeting.

Madan Bharadwaj

CEO and Founder, M-Squared

The guide gives you the framework. M-Squared gives you the program.

If you want to talk through what this looks like for your specific business, we are glad to spend 30 minutes on it. No pitch. Just a real conversation about where you are and what it would take to get where you want to be.

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