Why Your Marketing Team Needs a Finance Partner Who Actually Gets It

Marketing and finance maintain polite distance in most organizations. Each side slightly suspects the other’s priorities. Finance wants predictable ROI. Marketing argues that brand building can’t be reduced to spreadsheets. The disconnect leads to chronic underinvestment in what matters most.

Taylor Thomson represents a different model: a finance leader who actively shapes marketing strategy because he understands how it actually works.

This credibility comes from unusual background. Before leading finance at WITHIN, Thomson worked in business development and sales. He’s reported to heads of marketing and heads of sales in previous roles. Neither side can easily dismiss his perspective because he’s experienced their challenges firsthand. His professional trajectory demonstrates how cross-functional experience creates credibility that pure finance backgrounds can’t match.

“Marketing teams are basically, for all intents and purposes, they care about getting a lead in the door and then they kind of wash their hands,” Thomson observes. He’s not criticizing—he’s describing how incentive structures create behavior. When marketing is measured on lead volume, they optimize for lead volume. When finance demands quarterly ROI, marketing resorts to tactics that show quick results.

The solution isn’t better attribution modeling. Thomson argues that precise attribution is impossible and focusing instead on whether the overall commercial engine is improving makes more sense. Are pipeline quality, conversion rates, and client satisfaction all trending positively? Then marketing is probably working, even if you can’t prove which campaigns deserve credit.

This perspective comes from managing WITHIN’s company-wide P&L reporting while developing forecasting strategies that connect marketing spend to business outcomes across longer time horizons. The work involves building dashboards that multiple teams actually use rather than reports executives ignore. Taylor Thomson’s Denver-based leadership shows how finance can support marketing rather than just measure it.

One area receiving particular focus: client satisfaction measurement. WITHIN achieves over 50% quarterly response rates on surveys—unusually high for B2B contexts. The agency uses AI to analyze open-ended responses, identifying patterns that inform both client success and marketing strategies. This creates feedback loops between marketing positioning and actual client experience.

Thomson also challenges typical measurement windows for marketing ROI. “You need six months, nine months maybe, depending on your sales cycle,” he explains. “You might not actually ever see a direct one-to-one correlation to your revenue until a year.” This longer time horizon requires different financial planning than quarterly reviews allow.

For CMOs frustrated by finance teams that don’t understand marketing, Thomson’s advice is pragmatic: stop trying to prove ROI for every campaign and start demonstrating that the system as a whole performs better. That requires different conversations—about methodology and trend lines rather than campaign-specific metrics.

But it also requires finance partners willing to engage with marketing’s actual challenges rather than just demanding spreadsheets. Thomson’s work at WITHIN’s revenue operations demonstrates what’s possible when finance understands marketing well enough to be helpful rather than just demanding.

The opportunity for marketing leaders: find finance partners who’ve worked across functions and understand that marketing’s contributions can’t always be reduced to immediate ROI. His documented perspective on marketing effectiveness challenges the short-term thinking that undermines long-term brand building.