Stop Defending Your Numbers

This is what happens when trust is transactional. Finance approves spending because cost-per-lead looked good last year. 

Now it doesn't, and your problem has shifted from a budget issue and become a stunted relationship that was never built to survive a market shift.

Erica Gunn, CMO at Canto, has been in this position. When AI-powered search began reshaping how B2B buyers research software, paid search cost per lead at Canto doubled over two and a half years. Web traffic dropped nearly 40%.

The internal pressure that followed wasn't just about adjusting tactics,  it was about convincing colleagues that the metrics they were reading no longer meant what they used to.

"The way we built our pipeline two or three years ago is so fundamentally different from today," she says. "It's easy to just look at it on the surface and say, you're so much less efficient than you used to be."

But this is reading it wrong. And leaving it unchallenged is costing you in more ways than one. 

The Market Has Changed While Metrics Stay The Same

The standard B2B measurement stack was built for a buying journey that has fundamentally shifted. Cost per lead, per conversion, and opportunity were precise instruments for a world where buyers arrived at your site to do their research.

According to Forrester, the average B2B buyer now completes roughly 70% of their decision-making process before engaging a vendor directly. If a growing share of that research happens inside LLMs rather than on Google, the metrics tied to website behavior are measuring a narrower and narrower slice of what's driving the pipeline.

Gunn's cost per lead doubled as a result of buyers changing their buying habits. The ones who used to click through are now doing their homework somewhere else, arriving at a decision in a higher cost-per-click market.

Presenting that as a performance problem is how budget conversations go sideways.

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Stop Translating And Start Reorienting

The standard advice for CMOs navigating finance conversations is to translate marketing into financial language. Lead with ROI, efficiency ratios, and cost per opportunity. But Gunn takes a different approach in that she reorients before she translates.

I actually spend less time talking to them in their language and more time educating them on my language, because it doesn't fit cleanly in a spreadsheet.

Translating marketing performance into finance terms requires that you first establish something vital. The measurement environment has changed. So, you're now presenting a clean story built on a flawed premise. The numbers add up, sure but they don't reflect what's truly happening.

What Gunn does instead is bring market context into the room before her own numbers. She looks at things like competitive spend data, along with industry-wide cost trends in paid search categories. Plus, she has walks in with a sound market analysis across her competitive set.

"It becomes less about my marketing strategy, my decisions, my budget," she says, "and more about what I'm seeing overall in the space that we're competing in. And here's what our competitors are up against too."

This shift moves the conversation from your judgment to conditions the whole market is navigating. That way, Finance isn't evaluating your decisions in isolation. Instead, they're looking at a market dynamic you're managing, and managing well.

Kristin Steele, founder of Launchpad Creative, works with financial services and fintech firms on the same problem from the outside. She doesn't have the luxury of internal authority. 

We really rely on our case studies and successful campaigns to show that. They're all about data. If you can show them the numbers, it helps them understand there is some value here.

The underlying principle is the same regardless of where you sit. You don't win the budget conversation by defending your performance. First, start by defining the context your performance should be measured in. This is how you win the budget you need.

Brand Investment Is Structural

Here's where the measurement problem becomes a strategy problem.

Brand marketing has always been the hardest line to defend in a budget meeting. The ROI is real but slow, and it rarely maps to a quarter. What's changed is that the case for brand investment is now tied to something concrete and that's LLM visibility.

Buyers are forming their shortlists inside AI tools before they ever reach a search page. This means that the brands showing up in these answers win the consideration set before the race starts. This is measurable proof that warrants budget. In fact, it directly contributes to pipeline. And Gunn admits this is hard to accomplish.

Brand marketing is so much more important now than it was 18 months ago because of the role that LLMs are playing in how people search, but it's really hard to show that ROI sometimes."

Steele sees the same dynamic from the agency side, particularly in a sector where trust is the entire product. "Thought leadership is definitely still the cornerstone of marketing for financial services companies," she says, "and just being consistent, not posting an article in January and then your second one comes out in October. People forget about you by then."

Consistency isn't a content calendar problem. It's a brand presence problem. And in an environment where LLMs are drawing on the aggregate of what you've published across years, the brands that show up reliably are the ones that have been building that presence for longer than the current news cycle.

That's a multi-quarter investment that doesn't pay out in the current earnings call. Getting finance to accept that requires the groundwork Gunn describes — but getting the board to understand it is where the real work happens.

The Board Is The Real Conversation

This is where Gunn deviates from the conventional CMO playbook. Finance matters, she says, but only up to a point. 

I do protect the spend and the strategy a bit. At the end of the day, if they don't really understand it, that's okay, because it's my budget."

The relationship she's prioritizing is the one she has with the board. 

"The people I'm really answering to are the board and the shareholders," Gunn admits, "that's where the conversation needs to be at the right level."

Make sure you're articulating what's changed in market, why that's changed, why the numbers and the dollars are being deployed the way they're being deployed."

Her logic is sound. A CMO who has board-level trust has room to experiment, to invest in brand over a longer horizon, and make bets that won’t necessarily pay out this quarter.

Without this level of trust, every line item becomes a negotiation with finance, and no amount of metric reframing solves that problem.

"When you see bookings fall off, that's a different conversation completely," she says. "To me it's more of: what is my relationship with the board? Do they understand what I'm doing? Do they have trust in what I'm doing?"

The CMOs who build this trust early, before performance dips that require explanation, are the ones operating with the most latitude right now.

What you bring into the room

Gunn's practical starting point isn't a new framework. It's competitive intelligence.

"There are so many tools out there today that let you look at not only what you're getting out of paid search despite the increased investment, you also need to be able to show what your competitors are likely spending and what share of the market they have," she says.

"It becomes less about our costs going up. It's like everyone's costs are going up."

This reframe is within reach for most marketing leaders. Tools that give directional visibility into competitor spend and category cost trends exist. Using them to contextualize your own numbers isn't spin. Instead, you’re painting an accurate story of what's happening in the market.

Aim to set this context before you put your own metrics on the table. Let finance or your board understand the external conditions first. Then show what you're doing within those conditions, and how it's translating to pipeline and growth.

The number that matters at the end of the day is still the confirmation. How you get there is what's changed.

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