When is the last time you heard CFOs whine about being misunderstood?
It may be disheartening to hear, but
80% of CEOs don’t trust Marketers.
They believe that Marketers “are too disconnected from the…financial realities of companies.” They think that Marketers spend too much time “in their creative and social media bubble”, and when Marketers start trying to justify marketing expenses, they get sucked into the processes and lose sight of strategy.
Yet 90% of those same CEOs do value the work done by their CFOs.
Why? Because they usually have the data to back up their actions. They can show the effect of every dollar spent and the positive or negative impact on the business. Besides, most CU CEOs also came from the CFO side, so they understand the data.
CEOs want Marketers who understand the connections between marketing spending and the profit generated from it (ROI), and are able to provide the right information to help with the right decision-making at the right time. They want Marketers to be 100% focused on “generating, tracking and boosting customer demand.”
(Granted, all of the stats and quoted phrases above were taken from a survey of 1,200 large corporations across 20 countries produced by the Fournaise Marketing Group. And yes, they do research like to this to help them sell a product/service to large corporation marketers.)
Most of your Credit Union CEOs likely believe the same things about Marketing.
How else would you expect them to react when you start talking about things like “branding”, “social media”, and “likes”, “tweets”, “feeds” and “followers”?
If you want to earn the trust of your CEO, you need to regularly demonstrate positive impacts to the CU’s bottom line before anyone is going to take you seriously.
Either that, or “forever remain in what 65% of CEOs told us they call Marketing la-la land.”
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