Why finance and marketing don't speak the same language

There are two sides to every eCommerce business. There is the finance side, which describes how the business spends money and how it earns money. And there is the marketing and customer acquisition side, which is everything actively done to drive revenue.

In most companies these run as separate silos. The problem is that every decision made on one side directly affects the other. When they are not connected, you end up making marketing decisions with no financial context, and financial decisions with no marketing context.

This is not a small-business problem

It shows up inside $50 million a year companies with a full-time CFO and a full-time CMO. Finance tells marketing to generate more revenue with less ad spend. Marketing tells finance it needs more budget to hit the revenue target. Neither side is wrong. They simply have no shared information to explain their position to each other, so they argue, nothing gets resolved, and the business absorbs the cost.

When you run the business yourself, the same disconnect exists — it just lives inside your own head, or inside a small team, where it is harder to notice.

What the disconnect actually produces

• •Ad budgets set at whatever feels comfortable to risk, rather than what the business needs to hit its revenue and profit targets.
• •Discounts run to drive volume, without knowing that the margin structure has changed in a way that is crushing profitability.
• •Hires made because the moment feels right, without knowing how marketing performance has to change to pay for that person.

The common thread is timing. You make the decision, then wait weeks for the profit and loss statement, and find out after the fact whether it helped or hurt. By then the thing has already happened and you cannot pull it back.