How Finance And Accounting Pros Can Create Incremental Revenue
Marketing and finance/accounting professionals share corporate space. An unnecessary and unproductive tension often exists in small to midsize businesses between them. This obstructs a synergistic relationship. This tension is fed by conflicting perceptions of each department’s roles and responsibilities, and by some classic stereotypes. Removing this tension and creating a complementary relationship will yield significant business benefits. This is how it can be done.
STEREOTYPES
You’ve heard the stereotypes: marketing is creative, unstructured, emotional, liberal in spending, and speaks a funny language. Finance/accounting lacks imagination, is too highly structured, too analytical, too conservative in spending, and speaks a funny language. These stereotypes are often supported by characterizations that marketing types measure almost nothing while financial/accounting types measure virtually everything. As to roles and responsibilities, finance/accounting exists to rein in marketing and save the corporate treasury, while marketing exists to breathe life and vitality into a department that has no grip on consumer reality.
A DIFFERENT CORPORATE REALITY
The reality in large corporate suites is different. Marketing MBAs are highly analytical, fond of metrics, and rational to an extreme. “ROI” is always rolling off their tongues. Similarly, the finance and accounting department is embedded in marketing activities from their onset and can be effective analysts of consumer data.
It would be a positive development, therefore, for businesses that depend upon marketing success to duplicate the large corporate environment where marketing and finance/accounting work collaboratively toward corporate objectives rather than antagonistically and at cross-purposes. There will always be tension, but this tension will be constructive, based, for example, on different interpretations of data, not on the credibility and reporting of the data itself.
A FOUR STEP APPROACH
Four steps are required to remove inter-department tension and align the efforts of marketing and finance/accounting.
STEP 1: DEFINE MUTUALLY SUPPORTING ROLES
STEP 2: DEFINE A COMMON APPROACH
STEP 3: IDENTIFY WAYS TO INCORPORATE FINANCE/ACCOUNTING INTO MARKETING
STEP 4: START THE PROCESS WITH A CONVERSATION WITH THE OWNER/CEO
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Mission: To help small and mid-size businesses capture the power of big-picture marketing.