The 10 Advertising Questions Every CMO Must Answer Before the CFO Cuts the Budget
Organic search is collapsing. Content is drowning in AI noise. Buyers aren’t clicking through.
The inbound engine that fueled B2B growth for more than a decade is breaking down. Google hoards the clicks you earn from SEO. The flood of content buries the thought leadership you publish. And if an email even hints at a sales pitch, buyers delete it without a glance.
The Predictable Revenue playbook erodes in effectiveness year after year, making the grind heavier and the returns smaller.
It worked once—that’s why the model still lingers and why CMOs are still measured against it. You’re told to generate MQLs, fill the funnel, and hand leads to sales. But the system those metrics were built on is quietly collapsing underneath you. That’s the trap.
When performance drops, the reflex inside most companies is predictable too:
📉 Finance and ops begin asking tougher questions about marketing’s effectiveness.
💬 Sales grows frustrated chasing leads that never should have been passed in the first place.
❌ When performance drops, brand is the first budget to get nuked — even though it’s the only investment that builds future demand.
For one of our clients, “brand” has become a forbidden word.
We are entering a new cycle where advertising and events once again become the primary engines of demand generation.
The problem is that most CMOs are still stuck on the demand capture hamster wheel: pressured to produce leads, judged on outdated attribution models, and forced to justify budgets in metrics that don’t convince a CFO.
Breaking out of that cycle takes more than an org chart shuffle or another Martech tool. It requires a reset in how the business sees marketing’s role — starting with making the CFO your ally.
If you can reframe advertising in CFO terms — not as spend, but as investment — you change the conversation.
Waste is a given, but what matters is how you mitigate it, stay on top of performance, and show how today’s spend captures demand while also creating tomorrow’s.
Tie it to engagement metrics that connect the dots across channels, and you’ll defend your budget while earning permission to build the long-term demand engine every modern CMO knows is essential.
That’s what these 10 questions are designed to do.
They’re not just a checklist for advertising efficiency. They’re a framework for resetting expectations with leadership — proving accountability in the short term, while building the case for brand and long-term growth.
Ask them. Answer them. And you won’t just protect your ad budget — you’ll reclaim your role as architect of a GTM motion built for how buyers actually buy today.
1. Are we targeting the right accounts — and proving it in CFO terms?
Most ad programs are doomed before the first dollar is spent. The old playbook — push ads, chase clicks, dump names into a database, score them as MQLs — still props up the Predictable Revenue model. But it’s a funnel buyers have already learned to ignore.
A modern approach starts with account tiering:
CMO lens: The job isn’t to generate “leads.” It’s to shape the market and build tomorrow’s buyers — while capturing today’s demand by identifying the opportunities that sales actually wants: buyers who already agree with the problem, are qualified, and are actively looking.
CFO lens: Targeting isn’t about “awareness.” It’s about efficiency. And it goes beyond the persona work we were all taught — today, AI makes it possible to zero in on triggers and behaviors that signal intent. With account tiering, you reduce waste, prioritize resources, and protect the future pipeline. But this only works when marketing and sales operate as one team, not in silos. The old handoff model is gone.
2. Are we engaging full buying committees, or still celebrating leads?
No deal closes because one person clicked an ad. Complex sales close when enough stakeholders inside an account align that a problem is worth solving now.
Yet many marketing departments still celebrate the single “lead.”
In a complex sale, that metric is misleading. If advertising only warms up one contact, sales is left blind to the dynamics inside the account — who the real champions are, where the blockers sit, and how consensus will form.
CMO lens: Campaigns should be measured on their ability to warm entire accounts, not just generate form fills. That means building tight integration with sales so neither is operating in a silo.
It also means educating yourself on the modern solution sale described in The Challenger Customer — where champions need to be innovators, blockers can derail momentum, and messaging must help build consensus.
CFO lens: One lead doesn’t equal pipeline. Account engagement shows depth, breadth, and buying power. Marketing has to demonstrate it’s working hand-in-hand with sales to identify the buying committee, map the hierarchy, and drive engagement across the roles that matter — not just accumulate isolated names.
3. Is our advertising fully integrated with email, outbound, and brand voice?
Most companies still treat ads, nurture, SDR cadences, and PR as separate efforts. Marketing pushes out vague taglines (“all-in-one platform”), feature pitches before anyone agrees there’s a problem, “thought leadership” that adds no insight, and SDR scripts that copy the masses — and are painful to read. And no, AI isn’t going to fix that. The Predictable Revenue model didn’t solve this either; it entrenched it. By rewarding volume over alignment, it left both sides chasing activity instead of building conversations.
When everything is aligned, messaging flows from ads to content to SDR sequences, reinforcing the same story at every touch. That’s how you generate customer insight and real conversations. And when everyone is focused on driving problem agreement — even if you solve multiple problems — you’ve got a strong place to start.
CFO lens: Siloed spend looks like inefficiency. Integrated spend looks like strategy. Show how unifying ads, email, and outbound enhances a holistic program — each channel supporting the others to maximize impact and protect the budget.
4. How are we surfacing validated buyer intent — not just false signals?
Not all intent is created equal.
Third-party data often promises to surface “in-market” accounts, but many of those signals aren’t reliable. Keyword spikes or site visits without context don’t prove buying intent — they just add noise. A single signal can’t justify a full-court press from sales.
The best evidence comes from first-party intent, validated across multiple dimensions: repeat site visits, activity on review platforms, engagement with competitors, and the role of the contact. Only when these signals align do you know an account is truly in-market.
CMO lens: Sending sales on wild goose chases burns credibility. The only leads worth surfacing are those backed by real evidence of interest.
CFO lens: Curiosity is not commitment. CFOs don’t fund “random spikes.” They’ll fund proof of intent that advances pipeline.
5. Are we measuring brand lift in ways performance metrics can’t?
In B2B, brand isn’t built on logos or clever slogans. It’s built on delivering customer insights — over and over again. Trust comes when you educate buyers on the real problem and they buy into your reframe. In Challenger terms, it’s teaching for differentiation — showing buyers a perspective they hadn’t considered. That’s what makes paid campaigns more efficient and outbound more effective.
But here’s the urgency: inbound is collapsing. Organic search sends fewer visitors. Content is lost in AI noise. Buyers enter the journey later than ever — often making decisions before they’ve touched your website. The reality is you’re going to have to pay to play. Advertising is no longer optional — it’s the way you get your message in front of the right people.
If they don’t already trust your brand, you may never get the chance to compete.
CMO lens: Brand creates demand long before buyers hit your site. You can’t win at capture without investing in creation.
CFO lens: Don’t position brand as a luxury. Show it as efficiency. Without brand, every performance dollar works twice as hard for half the yield.
6. Do we have a rigorous process for finding and fixing advertising waste?
Waste hides in plain sight. It’s the $50,000 newsletter sponsorship with vague targeting and zero conversions.
The irony is this: the companies that bring media in-house because they think it’s cheaper usually end up paying the most for waste.
What looks like savings on an agency fee often turns into bloated CAC, lost pipeline, and missed opportunities you’ll never see on a spreadsheet.
A good agency runs with a fiduciary mindset and usually pays for itself quickly — spotting inefficiencies early, negotiating better buys, and reallocating spend to what’s working.
CMO lens: You need an always-on process that surfaces leaks before finance does. Validate signals, benchmark against the market, and prove how you’re reallocating budget in real time.
CFO lens: Waste isn’t a marketing problem — it’s a business problem. Show how your team protects spend with the same rigor a fiduciary would: holding every dollar to account, cutting losses fast, and reinvesting in proven growth. That’s how you turn “agency fees” into efficiency, not overhead.
7. Are our ads sparking problem recognition — or just pushing product?
Most B2B ads are disguised brochures: feature dumps, demo offers, vague promises of “efficiency,” and buyers scroll right past.
Great ads do something very different: they make buyers stop and think, “Are we missing this?” Pipeline grows when advertising creates problem recognition — not when it parrots product features.
That’s the power of problem agreement.
If a buyer already believes the problem is real, half the battle is won. Pointing out deficiencies, reframing the issue, and positioning your product ahead of your competitors all flow naturally from there.
Problem agreement shifts the dynamic: once buyers believe the problem is real and start talking about it, the features that matter reveal themselves naturally. The conversation becomes about solving the issue, not pitching features.
CMO lens: Ads should surface problems, sow doubt, and force the status quo into question. Problem agreement is the hinge point: once buyers believe, the rest of your message lands with force.
CFO lens: Features don’t open wallets. Problems do. Show that your ads are designed to trigger recognition of costly problems — the kind that drive revenue. That’s how advertising justifies its spend, not as a brochure, but as the front end of a predictable pipeline.
8. Are we balancing demand creation and demand capture?
Focusing only on demand capture is a trap — a hangover from the Predictable Revenue model. Yes, you’ll win some deals in the 3% of the market already in play — those who agree with the problem and are actively looking. But if that’s all you do, you’re ignoring the 97% who aren’t buying today but could be tomorrow. That’s massive. You can’t sustain growth rates by endlessly competing over the same sliver of in-market demand.
On the flip side, demand creation isn’t always measurable in the short term. Some of it never will be. But that doesn’t make it optional — without it, you’re starving the future. The Challenger Customer makes this clear: moving buyers means disrupting their status quo, surfacing deficiencies in how they work today, and reframing the problem in a way they can’t ignore. That’s the kind of insight that builds tomorrow’s pipeline.
The balance is the point. Demand creation drives problem awareness in the 97%. Demand capture secures problem agreement in the 3%. Together, they compound into predictable growth — and without both, you’re either burning cash or starving the future.
CMO lens: Both demand creation and demand capture are your responsibility — even in organizations where “brand” is a dirty word. Leaning only on capture makes you look like a short-term marketer. Leaning only on creation makes you look disconnected from revenue.
CFO lens: Balance isn’t theory, it’s efficiency. Show how creating demand reduces CAC and compounds the ROI of capture campaigns — turning today’s spend into tomorrow’s pipeline.
9. Are our systems and reporting aligned to sales in real time?
Too often, marketing celebrates engagement that sales never even sees. Ad platforms and marketing automation light up with activity, but if that data doesn’t make it into the CRM in real time, it’s useless. Reps can’t act on what they can’t see.
One source of truth is non-negotiable. Sales needs to know who’s leaning in, what creative triggered the action, and how that activity fits into account-level engagement. Without that, marketing’s signals die in silos instead of driving pipeline.
CMO lens: The work doesn’t stop at the dashboard. If sales can’t see and use the signals you’re surfacing, your spend isn’t driving pipeline — it’s just reporting activity.
CFO lens: Fragmented systems mean paying twice — once for the click, again for the waste that comes from missed follow-up. Alignment isn’t a “tech stack” question; it’s a financial one.
10. Can we show a new revenue waterfall that leadership will trust?
The MQL-to-SQL funnel is dead. Buyers self-educate, loop in committees, and shift mid-cycle. Reporting on MQLs sets CMOs up to fail.
The modern waterfall:
CMO lens: Your role is to reset the model. Old funnel metrics only reinforce the perception that marketing isn’t accountable.
CFO lens: This isn’t marketing spin. It’s reality. Show how ad spend moves accounts through this modern waterfall, and you’ll turn attribution debates into revenue conversations.
Why Advertising Matters More Than Ever
The inbound era is ending. The channels that once powered Predictable Revenue are losing effectiveness by the day. Organic search drives fewer visitors. Content drowns in noise. Buyers enter later, often having made up their minds before they ever reach your site.
Advertising and events have moved back to the center of demand generation — but under tighter scrutiny than ever. Finance wants proof. Boards want predictability. And if marketing can’t show both, budgets will shrink, influence will fade, and the function gets pushed back onto the hamster wheel of “leads” that never turn into pipeline.
That’s the risk. But it’s also the opportunity.
Use these 10 questions and you reframe the conversation. When the CFO asks where the money went, you won’t be pointing at clicks. You’ll connect the dots — how ad dollars built trust, how trust opened conversations, and how those conversations turned into revenue.
This is how you defend spend today while earning the permission to invest in the longer-term demand motion you know is essential.
It’s the lever that restores marketing’s role as architect of a GTM motion built for the reality of today’s buyer.
Love 2 and 3 especially!!
Great article - Right on - this is a world were self education and buying committees are the so called "defense" and GTM teams need a great "offense" in place to win
Jason Myers great read, a big challenge that most CMOs face in from Invalid / non human traffic that influence the matrix. Today, more than 2/3rd of digital traffic today is Bot driven. They fake engagements, behave like human and also many at times impersonate and punch in fake data. 90% of the time teams get mislead to go into the wrong rabbit hole just because they deal with fake/ impersonated/ mis attributed and non intended data. Having a measurement model to guard data and the mitigate risk is thus crucial. Once you measure what's maters and mitigate the risk, the journey and resources invested do much better. #AdFraud #InvalidTraffic #BrandSafety #CMO #Marketing
Totally agree on the need to rethink metrics. I’ve seen how focusing on ‘leads’ alone backfires... shifting to pipeline impact made budget talks way smoother. Curioushow do you approach creating tomorrow’s demand without overloading current efforts?