CMOs: Secure Marketing Budget for Your 2025 Planning Cycle

Hear from Alex Venus, Head of Digital and Web Marketing at Personio, and Graham Wylie, CMO at Activpayroll, on how to gain the CFO’s buy-in for marketing.
Marketing budgets were cut by 15% on average in 2024. Add to that the continuous struggle to demonstrate marketing ROI to the board, and it’s no surprise CMOs are feeling the pinch.
So, how can CMOs gain the CFO’s buy-in for marketing? We spoke to Alex Venus, Head of Digital and Web Marketing at Personio, and Graham Wylie, CMO at Activpayroll, to find out.
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Fewer than 3% of CMOs worldwide make it to board-level positions — making it incredibly difficult to influence conversations about budget allocation and alignment of business goals with marketing objectives.

Align growth forecasts with business goals
Venus believes that before you can make accurate cost projections, step one is to consider your business’s wider objectives and “look at any planned transformational shifts in your strategy” and align your plans accordingly. “If the business aims to halve customer acquisition costs, or enter multiple new markets with little brand recognition, marketing teams must factor in these shifts before projecting channel performance,” he advises.
“The big question to know the answer to is: where do we need to land as a company to thrive next year?” says Venus. Once that question is answered, marketers have a foundation to build their plans. “Start with a bird’s eye view before you even look at your North Star metric,” he advises. From there, teams can refine key elements like ideal customer profile definitions, conversion rate targets and forecasting models.
Reset with a zero-based budgeting
For Wylie, zero-based budgeting — that is a budget where all expenses in a department must be justified for the upcoming period — helps CMOs to challenge assumptions and rethink the status quo. Wylie suggests asking key questions to identify what needs to change:
- How do we deliver against the demands of the company?
- Do we need to change the resource model for the team?
- Do we need to change the agencies that we’re working with?
- How has our model evolved over the previous 12 months?
Crucially, this process isn’t just about cutting costs; it’s about ensuring expenses align with the company’s strategic priorities for a data-driven and constructive conversation with your CFO about marketing ROI. “It’s about understanding what’s worked well in the past year, what we want to continue doing, and what’ll be relevant in the next 18 months — then develop a budget requirement starting from zero.”

Don’t over-index on long-term value assumptions
According to Venus, one of marketers’ biggest mistakes is building forecasts on shaky foundations. “What I see a lot of the time is marketers who are going to run an integrated campaign next year to an audience they’ve never spoken to before, about a product that didn’t exist 12 months ago, using a channel they’re testing out.” He explains there’s too many unknowns to have a useful conversation with your CFO: “Good luck measuring what that’ll do to the bottom line.”
To create a compelling and defensible case, Venus recommends using a scenario model with three distinct forecasts: A base case, a best case, and a worst case. Each scenario serves a specific purpose, providing a more complete picture of potential outcomes.
1. The Base Case
The base case is grounded in what Venus describes as things you can control. “You don’t want to base it on product-market fit, virality, or the hope that influencers knock on your door and drive massive results.” Instead, the base case should be modelled on tangible factors like channel performance, conversion rates or known efficiency improvements. This approach gives CFOs confidence in the stability and reliability of the forecast.
2. The Worst Case
While it’s important to anticipate potential challenges, Venus suggests avoiding doom-and-gloom scenarios. “Maybe you shouldn’t predict the worst things in the world,” he says. Instead, be realistic about the risks and possible underperformance factors. This shows CFOs that the marketing team is prepared for uncertainty while being pragmatic about what can be achieved.
3. The Best Case
The best case is where marketers can be more aspirational, looking at high-impact initiatives like brand awareness campaigns, product launches or untapped growth channels. Venus advises benchmarking against industry standards or performance data to ground these projections. This approach lends credibility to what could otherwise seem like wishful thinking.
Connect with other departments
Drawing from personal experience, Wylie recalls a time when he faced little resistance in securing budget approval — an exception to the norm. “That happened because we’d spent years building the plan and consensus across the business.” For Wylie, this experience highlights a crucial lesson: Buy-in is easier to achieve with better collaboration and alignment across the business.
At the heart of this approach is transparency. Wylie built trust and credibility across functions by being open about the marketing strategy, clearly communicating objectives and meticulously measuring performance and marketing ROI.
This cross-functional collaboration changed the nature of the budget approval conversation entirely. “It wasn’t just the marketing team asking for funding,” he explains.” It was sales, operations, regional finance and marketing” with a unified proposal. The decision to approve the budget became a business-wide initiative rather than a marketing-specific one.
39% of CMOs worldwide say they attended and/or presented at every company board meeting, with just 44% presenting revenue-oriented metrics.

Confirming CFO support
The lessons are clear: Focus on hard numbers and provable returns to make a compelling case for marketing investment; Align marketing metrics with the wider business strategy; Work as a team with other senior leaders in the business.
With a compelling case for marketing investment, you can instil confidence in your CFO so the requests are easy to approve and seen not as likely costs but as probable opportunities. A data-first approach doesn’t just justify the budget — it can actually increase it.
Drive Loyalty and Account-Based Engagement.
Discover AI, data, and personalisation trends from nearly 5,000 marketers worldwide.


