Most advice about getting leadership to back marketing is advice about persuasion: build a better deck, find a better ROI number, tell a better story. That assumes the problem is that the C-suite hasn’t been convinced yet.
Gartner has spent the last two years asking both sides of the table what they think, and the data points somewhere else. Leadership isn’t opposed to marketing. Most of the time it can’t see what marketing is accountable for, it doesn’t share marketing’s idea of what the job is, and it has been asked for money too often with too little to show for it.
That’s a translation problem, not a persuasion problem. Translation problems are fixable.
Less than marketers hope, and for more specific reasons than marketers assume.
When Gartner surveyed 125 CEOs and CFOs, only 27% said their CMO’s performance had exceeded expectations in the past year. Just 34% saw eye-to-eye with their CMO on marketing’s role in supporting growth. Only 54% were confident their CMO could prove marketing’s value at all [1].
Marketers feel it from their side too. In a separate survey of 378 senior marketing leaders, only 52% said they could prove marketing’s value and receive credit for it. Asked which executives were most skeptical, they named the CFO (40%) and the CEO (39%), the two people who control the budget [2]. In another Gartner survey, 47% of CMOs said marketing is viewed inside their company as an expense rather than a strategic investment [2].
And the money reflects it. Marketing budgets averaged 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, up from 7.7% the year before, which Gartner itself describes as effectively flat. 56% of CMOs said they don’t have the budget to deliver their 2026 strategy [3].
One caveat before going further, since it matters if you plan to quote these numbers in a budget meeting: Gartner’s samples skew toward large companies, and the CEO and CFO sample is only 125 people. Read the figures as directional, not definitive. The direction is consistent across every survey, though.
This is the finding I’d put in front of every marketing leader who believes results speak for themselves.
When marketing hits its commercial targets and makes a significant contribution to growth, the share of CEOs and CFOs who say their CMO exceeded expectations rises, but only to 45% [1]. More than half of executives whose marketing team delivered still weren’t impressed.
The same survey hints at why. Only 22% of CEOs and CFOs said they had received significant clarity from their CMO about what marketing is actually accountable for. Only 38% believed their CMO consistently collaborates well with other leaders [1]. Gartner’s Sharon Cantor Ceurvorst summed it up: “delivering results is just the baseline for CMOs” [1].
Read those two numbers together. If leadership doesn’t know what you signed up to deliver, hitting it doesn’t register as a win. It registers as activity. You can’t exceed an expectation nobody agreed on.
Because the ask usually arrives before the evidence does, and leadership has learned to notice.
Gartner found that 84% of companies are stuck in what it calls a “brand doom loop”: they underinvest in measuring brand, so they lack confidence in brand’s results, so brand attracts even less funding [4]. Julie Reeves, a VP Analyst at Gartner, described it as a cycle in which brand is “undermeasured, underfunded and undervalued” [4].
Then comes the prediction that should change how you build your next budget request. Gartner predicts that by 2027, more than 40% of CMOs who push for larger brand budgets will lose influence with the C-suite, because they can’t show an adequate return [5].
I’ve argued before that authority compounds and sales-first thinking doesn’t, and I still believe that. But the Gartner data adds a hard condition: the case for long-term investment only lands if you’ve built the measurement to back it up. Asking for more brand money without it doesn’t just fail. It costs you standing for the next ask.
Gartner’s research is unusually specific here, and most of it has nothing to do with the deck.
A long-term, whole-business view of value. Among marketing leaders, 41% framed marketing’s value over the long term and across other functions. That was the most common approach and the most successful: more than two-thirds of the leaders using it could prove value and get credit [2]. As Gartner’s Joseph Enever put it, a wider view “can mean measuring marketing’s effect across other functions” [2]. Think sales cycle length, retention, win rates and support volume, not just marketing-sourced pipeline.
Metrics a CFO already uses. Leaders who used two or more types of “high complexity” metrics were up to 1.8 times more likely to prove value. Gartner’s examples include customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost and the LTV:CAC ratio, as well as cost per acquisition and return on investment [2]. Those are finance’s words. Impressions, engagement and MQL volume aren’t.
Personal involvement in the data. Marketing leaders who were hands-on with analytics, building dashboards and shaping measurement strategy, were 1.4 times more likely to prove value. Leaders who met regularly with their top analytics people did dramatically better: 62% could prove value and get credit, compared with 30% of those who didn’t [2]. Measurement can’t be delegated and forgotten.
Bringing the market into the room. Gartner splits CMOs into “enterprise operators,” who translate company strategy into marketing plans, and “market shapers,” who bring deeper customer and market insight and help decide what the company should do next. CMOs who are very effective market shapers are eight times more likely to succeed in their role [6]. Companies with effective market shapers are 2.6 times more likely to exceed revenue and profit goals, yet executives rate only 14% of CMOs as effective at it [7].
That last finding is the opening. Leadership doesn’t just want marketing to execute the plan more efficiently. It wants marketing to tell it something about customers that nobody else in the room knows.
Put together, the research suggests a sequence. The order matters more than any single step.
1. Agree on accountabilities before you ask for anything. Only 22% of executives say they have clarity on what marketing owns. Write it down: the two or three business outcomes marketing is accountable for, how each will be measured, and what marketing is explicitly not responsible for. Get the CEO and CFO to agree to it. This is the cheapest step on the list and the one most teams skip. I’ve written about why the outcome is the strategy, and this is where that starts.
2. Translate your reporting into finance’s language. Lead with acquisition cost, lifetime value, payback period and the effect on revenue. Keep activity metrics for your own team’s dashboards, where they belong.
3. Ask for measurement before you ask for scale. If you’re in the doom loop, don’t try to spend your way out of it. Make a small, specific request to fund the measurement that would prove brand’s effect. Then use those results to justify the bigger investment. It’s a slower path, and the only one the data suggests doesn’t backfire.
4. Make your peers’ numbers better. Pick one metric the head of sales or the CFO already cares about, such as win rate, sales cycle length or churn, and show marketing moving it. Cooperation follows usefulness. Only 38% of executives think their CMO collaborates well, so this is a low bar to clear.
5. Bring one customer insight to every leadership meeting. Not a campaign recap. Something about the customer that changes a decision: why deals are being lost, which segment is quietly growing, what buyers are asking that the product doesn’t answer. That’s how you get treated as a market shaper instead of a service department.
6. Keep two scoreboards and say so up front. Short-term demand work gets measured on pipeline this quarter. Long-term brand work gets measured on leading indicators: branded search, direct traffic, share of voice, win rates against named competitors. Tell leadership in advance which is which. A flat quarter on the second scoreboard is only alarming if nobody explained that it would be.
The marketing leaders who get buy-in aren’t the ones with the best pitch. They’re the ones leadership already understands: clear about what they own, fluent in the numbers finance uses, honest about what they can and can’t prove yet, and useful to the people around the table.
None of that requires a bigger budget. It’s what earns one.
Mike Bloomstine helps leaders navigate the shift from activity-led marketing to outcome-based systems. To talk through what this looks like for your business, visit mikebloomstine.com.
I help B2B and B2C teams build marketing engines that compound — strategy first, systems underneath.
