WSJ CMO Sherry Weiss on the power of speaking the language of the CFO in B2B

It’s clear that marketing leaders, for the large part, feel siloed from their counterparts in finance – a problematic finding considering that CFOs control the budgets that marketers so desperately require. This year, marketing budgets will shrink by an average of 15% from last year, according to research from Gartner. More than ever, CMOs and CFOs should be working in tandem to achieve shared goals.

That’s the perspective of Sherry Weiss, at least. Weiss is the CMO of Dow Jones and its subsidiary, the Wall Street Journal, where she manages both B2C and B2B marketing programs and collaborates closely with Dow Jones’s CFO Jared DiPalma and CROs Josh Stinchcomb and David Martin. Two years into the job, she previously helmed strategic marketing efforts on the consumer financial service team at Citigroup.

Weiss recently joined me onstage at The Drum’s B2B World Fest 2024 in Chicago, where she opined on how marketers can maximize impact through closer collaboration with their colleagues in finance and sales. Here’s what she had to say.

Tell us a bit about your remit at Dow Jones.

We have a very large enterprise side of the house, where we have deep verticals for risk and compliance products, energy, wealth and investing. Also, we have our consumer brands: the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, Investor’s Business Daily. It’s been a great two years.

In your view, what misconceptions do you think C-suiters have about the CMO? And, on the flip side, what misconceptions do CMOs frequently have about CFOs and CROs?

For the marketers in the room, oftentimes, we may feel like there is a misconception that we are all about big, bold ideas and creativity for the sake of creativity, but we are not able to tie that back to the actual running of the business or to a revenue metric. And then that turns into, ‘OK, CFOs just see us as cost centers,’ for instance. Or, ‘CFOs just see us as [the folks] doing pens and posters and they’re not willing to invest in us.’

And then if you look at a CRO, [marketers think they believe], ‘Well, we own the conversion. What is this [program or campaign] driving? And why should I advocate to have investment put into marketing if I need extra sales incentives?’

There are all these different misconceptions that can lead one to think that [C-suiters] are not all on the same team and driving towards the same goal. And all of that is, frankly, bogus. And some of those misconceptions can be changed if you just change the vocabulary you’re using to describe what you’re trying to do with your partners.

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What are your tips for budgeting with the CFO?

I talk to my CFO probably every other day. You have to stay very close.

And back that misconception around, ‘The CFO is going to be reluctant to invest in marketing,’ or, ‘[Marketing is] the first area where the CFO is going to cut when under pressure’ – the first thing is: you’ve got to build a strong relationship. And [you need to] position yourself as: ‘I’m not a cost center – I’m a growth center.’ [You have to determine] ‘How am I viewed as a growth officer?’ Our CFO, [fortunately], views investment in marketing as, ‘How do I drive growth, and where do I put my next best penny?’ So we spent a lot of time talking about that.

Measurement is really important. In the beginning, it’s hard to measure, so you have to set expectations around, ‘Okay, we’re not going to know if this works until X amount of time.’

The other thing I would strongly recommend is: don’t ask for everything at once. You come in and say, ‘Alright, invest in me,’ and then you have this huge ticket size and you can’t measure [the impacts of your initiatives], and you’re like, ‘Believe in me!’ it’s not going to go well.

So what we’ve been doing over the last two years is that every year I’m like, ‘Seed fund me. Let me … focus on this. Do some incremental investment here. We’ll measure it, and then next budget cycle, if it works, reinvest in me.’ We have been pretty successful in that. It reduces the risk and it helps you also make sure that you’re proving to your CRO, your CFO and the CEO that your strategy is working.

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Can you share a real-world example of an instance in which collaboration with your CRO and or CFO led to a meaningful outcome that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise?

As I mentioned earlier, I wear two hats, so I am also the CMO of the Wall Street Journal, which is a B2C go-to-market [product]. And I actually come out of a B2C background – I was in consumer financial services. With that [kind of role], you own the end conversion. So, being able to take language around how your marketing is driving revenue is incredibly important to be able to get investment from the CFO and buy-in from the CRO.

This year, we’re going through a transformation on the B2B side of the house. We have significant growth targets in our business intelligence part of the business, and we know that we need to invest more in marketing.

So how we worked through getting that investment when we didn’t have the metrics to show for it quite yet was, it was in collaboration with our CFO and our CRO, we sat down, we looked at the sales targets that need to be driven in that upcoming budget cycle. We brought a lot of information to the table that helped people think through buyers’ habits – like, we know that by the time a buyer hits at one of our sales staff, they are already about two-thirds through their buying journey, and most of the upfront information that they receive is via digital channels [like] website content or social media. And that’s where marketing plays a role. So, in trying to sell that [we] explain, ‘Look, if you invest a little bit here, a little bit there, it will help you close the deal. And here’s how we’ll measure it.’

And then the other thing that we really had to … work through was that we were very lead-generation focused – ‘What is marketing doing to drive leads?’ We were not focused specifically on, ‘What is marketing doing to kind of expand the relationship within your existing customer base?’ But we all know it’s easier to expand a relationship with someone versus landing a new lead. So we worked with the CFO and the CRO to sell this idea of moving … to an account-based and industry-based marketing approach.

And then, in order to get the money, we had to lay out, ‘OK, this is the plan that we’re going to do, and here’s how we’re going to measure the impact.’

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Speaking of measurement, what metrics should the C-suite focus on in order to help evidence marketing’s value in the overall financial performance of the business?

The true north is revenue. That’s what we’re here to do, both as marketers and in support of our sales organizations. But we all know it’s really difficult to say, ‘This marketing campaign, or this marketing strategy, drove X in the B2B area of increase in revenue.’

So we have our eye on revenue, but then we have some supporting KPIs, that we’re tracking. We still track lead gen and the quality of those leads. We also are tracking retention rates … in what we consider our high-value client accounts, are we seeing an increase in retention rates based on … the marketing activity that we are engaging in? We are tracking expansion within an account – if we, as marketers, have engaged with a certain account, have we actually seen our book of business with them grow? That’s another area that we’re tracking.

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Something I hear a lot in the industry is that the traditional funnel is collapsing – or that it’s irrelevant today. Do you feel that that’s true, and as a B2B CMO, how does your perspective of the marketing funnel play into how you’re thinking about collaborating with your colleagues in sales and finance?

When I came into this role, I really did not have much experience in B2B, so I’m just gonna be really honest – I was a little intimidated. This is very different than what I’ve worked with before, and luckily, I have very strong B2B leadership on my team that kind of helped bring me along. But what I recognized pretty quickly is that the go-to-market [approach] is different, but the skills and how you need to think about things are not wildly different. And your end user is still a person. It’s just [about considering], ‘How do you engage with that end user?’

In the areas where we think about B2C go-to-market – like the Wall Street Journal – and then our B2B go-to-market with Dow Jones, it’s becoming even more important in both areas to be leaning into brand for a variety of reasons. You can’t – in either area – depend so much on the legacy referral ecosystem to get people to your site to explain who you are, and so having people understand who you are from a more … emotional level of like, ‘What does Dow Jones bring to you as a business?’ is incredibly important. It’s: ‘Why should you do business with Dow Jones?’ versus, ‘I buy this product from Dow Jones.’ We’ve been thinking through that a lot.

The other thing that we’re bringing over from our B2C skillset is engagement marketing. On the B2C side of the house, in general, marketers – especially if you’re in a subscription or credit card business – you have large engagement and retention teams, and there are strategies that you use to drive your end user to start using your product frequently. [That’s] because with usage, you have a higher likelihood to retain your customer. With our enterprise businesses, that’s a little bit harder, because … you’re distant from [the end user], but we are standing up our engagement marketing teams and strategies to work with our partners to help us engage the end user on that end as well. So we look very closely at usage on our products – is it increasing? Who is using it? If we’re seeing usage drop, how do we work with our clients to drive usage up? That’s another renewed focus for us.

Of course, we have to talk about AI and tech. Are there any trends or emerging technologies that you’re really excited about – and particularly any that might make marketing and sales collaboration more efficient in the coming years?

In the last year, I’ve built out a data and analytics team within the marketing team, and we’ve taken a lot of practices [from] consumer financial services … We used heavily predictive models on the B2C side of the house to determine, ‘If you invest X amount in this segment or this marketing strategy, what would be the outcome?’ And [with that information], you’d be able to then figure out, ‘How do I want to solve for in-year revenue or five-year revenue?’

We’re currently building out some tools and forecasting that would also help us do that on the B2B side of the house by leveraging AI. [If, for example, you] have $2m worth of budget, I have information around the sales cycle, I have information around macro trends, I have information around the cost to be in certain channels, how do you actually start building models that would help you figure out where to spend your next best marketing dollar to drive a return? That’s one area where we’re really excited about AI – and it’s in benefit of both sales … as well as my team.

Looking ahead, what qualities are going to be the most important for B2B CMOs to embody in order to ensure effective collaboration with their sales and marketing counterparts?

The most important quality is [to] put yourself in the shoes of your partner, and how they are viewing the business in the world – and then change how you talk to them and change how you engage with them based on that meaning.

Often, we can all get caught up in what we understand as vocabulary for marketers – ‘awareness,’ ‘consideration.’ I’ve gotten this advice a few times [to not] use those words because … it doesn’t resonate. So, what does your CRO care about? What language does your CRO need? Or how do they talk to you? And how do you then think about, ‘Here’s what I can do to help you drive your goals’ [while speaking] in the language that they understand?

Same with the CFO – how do you really speak with data to be able to explain what you’re doing? Often, it’s the same strategy, but it’s different words. You can’t just sit there and be like, ‘Well, this is going to drive awareness and consideration.’ No, [explain instead], ‘This will help people understand who you are by the time they get to your salesperson and help your conversion go quicker.’ Something along those lines. That’s really important.

And B2B marketers are going to have to start really figuring out [that] your end user is not just a corporation – it’s a buyer, it’s a person, it’s a human. So, how do you humanize your offering and who you are?

Watch the full interview with Sherry Weiss. For more, sign up for The Drum’s daily newsletter here.