Why Most Marketers Can't Actually Prove ROI – And What's Changing

Marketing budgets have been flat at 7.7% of company revenue — and over 40% of CMOs pushing for more are losing C-suite influence. Why? They can't prove ROI.

In this episode, Francesca Roche sits down with Marie Bahl, CMO of Uptempo, to unpack why enterprise marketing still lacks a proper system of record, how the breakdown between planning and measurement costs brands millions, and what it actually takes to earn a CFO's trust.

The pressure on marketing leaders isn't just internal — it reflects a wider industry shift. As AI reshapes how businesses operate and boards demand greater accountability across every function, marketing is being held to a standard it was never structurally built to meet. With martech stacks growing in complexity and economic headwinds forcing leaner operations, the teams that will come out ahead are those investing now in a proper data backbone — not more point solutions. The conversation is moving from "what did we spend?" to "what did we build?".

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Hello everyone and welcome back to CX Today. My name is Francesca Roche. I'm a technology journalist today discussing the ever-increasing budget tightening for marketing teams globally. Now a Gartner report has revealed that marketing budgets have remained flat at 7.7% of overall company revenue in 2025. And over 40% of CMOs who pushed for larger budgets are expecting to lose influence with the C-suite due to an inability to demonstrate clear ROI. This has forced many marketing teams to get creative with their chastities to keep within these tight budgets despite increasing system complexity. And helping me unpack this is Marie Ball, the CMO of Uptempo, a SaaS company that provides marketing operations and planning software whilst also focusing on budget performance tracking and ROI measurement. But before we get into the discussion today, Marie, how are you doing? I'm great. It's a lovely day in here in Colorado. Thank you for having me. That's lovely to hear. Lovely to meet you. Now, just so we get into the first, so I want to first get into the discussion is how are enterprise teams adjusting their ROI measurement approaches and what patterns are emerging as they consolidate tools and simplify their Martex steps in alignment with this budget tightening?

SPEAKER_00 1:30

Well, the question pre-presumes that marketers actually can get to ROI, which has always been a very difficult thing for marketing. There are reasons why that exists, and I can go into that in a little bit. But generally, most marketers can't get to ROI. They tend to lean on proxy indicators from a myriad of different systems, but none of which actually truly speak finance. So the reason that this has happened primarily is as a result of poor enterprise marketing. So I I was raised in enterprise software in the mid-90s. So I'm dating myself here a bit, but um enterprise software used to um essentially define the entire function that it intended to replace and the outcomes that it required. So all of the others that have crossed over in finance or HR or inventory or any other large ERP system that you can imagine really had to consider the end-to-end requirements. And it was, you know, took two to three years to deploy. By the time that marketing was stopped being considered a pure cost center, which was crazy to begin with, but and was stopped being considered a cost center and started being considered critical to the business, um, we are already in a SaaS age. So I shared a link with you. Um there are somewhere on the order of 15,000 uh point solutions being being given to marketing. There is no kind of single source of truth. So in addition to being marketers, strategic marketers, most uh teams have had to also become systems integrators. That's why you saw marketing ops spring up. Performance actually doesn't live inside an enterprise system, it lives separately and tends to only measure things like media. So uh media mixed marketing uh is kind of the, I would call it the science project in the back room where PhDs crunch numbers and ingest all kinds of data. But if you're talking about an enterprise system that literally everyone else at the C-suite has, marketing does not have it. And that is what we propose to bring to them for up to at Uptempo. Uh and then what what that requires is uh ingesting the data sets, reconciling that, so getting a really solid data backbone and an ability to query that.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Thank you very much. And I'll make sure to include the link below in our CX Today uh article. But thank you very much. Um where do teams typically lose this measurement precision? And what are the most common breakdowns when trying to connect marketing activity directly to revenue outcomes?

SPEAKER_00 4:25

I mean, it breaks down at the very beginning of the cycle, which I'll describe for you, right? Uh at the beginning of the year, whatever the beginning of the fiscal year is, we get into a budgeting process with the finance team. Generally, that comes out of their systems. We receive it in some form of a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet then gets interpreted into plans that are built in PowerPoint or uh another spreadsheet. Uh, and then those, once that's allocated to large global brands, the execution arm kind of kicks into gear. Um, so you have a bunch of people deploying uh campaigns across myriad different systems, uh, or in some cases, even live in the world, you know, uh we're we're creating stuff for uh retail stores, uh branding, advertising externally. So all of that complexity, as you can imagine, from a you know, billions of dollars in revenue company, um, then comes back in the form of eight million different types of data. Uh, and the data is can show up in a spreadsheet, it can be gathered by your agency, it can come to you in a pipe if you're lucky enough to have it plug into some kind of a system. Um, and no one has really offered us a way to true that up. So you imagine the breakdown comes as soon as all of that data comes back. So if you're me and you're sitting at the at the board table and my CFO says, you know, how did that uh pro the program campaign that you just deployed into MIA go versus, you know, the the uh European one? Can you tell me what that measurement was? The answer is let me get back to you a quarter later, after I have everybody uh, you know, kind of organize the data. So you can imagine this is an incredibly broken system, and brands who are not technology experts have been, I mean, they're it from their perspective is that this is the way that technology is supposed to serve them, which is literal insanity. Um, so what we do is actually provide a platform, a backbone for that. So they we plug into the back office, um, we plug into those budgets as they're coming in, they're reconciled to the GL codes, the proper GL codes, they're reconciled to your inventory system. So if I'm doing a campaign in APAC and all of a sudden the inventory has lagged, I know to pull that back. We give marketers a command center of sorts that allows us to plug all of the um the execution elements into the system. And in some cases, people are planning directly in our system. So if you've got an event, for example, sometimes C Vent doesn't actually give you everything you need. So some of the event planners will plan inside of our system. So each stakeholder in the business, every VP underneath the CMO now has their own command center where they can see all of their campaigns side by side, they can see what they estimated uh the return on investment would be, they can see where they're stacking up today, they can move money around. And what we've found over time uh with some really giant brands is that without a system of record, marketers are roughly 75% accurate, which is, you know, without a system of record. But 25% of that can be optimized for greater performance. Um, and we've found, uh I know that you said at the onset, that uh the requests for additional budget um have been resistant. And sorry, I said that the wrong way. Sorry. The rat the requests for additional budget have um been met with, you know, resistance from the finance team. But our brands actually have gotten increases uh in budget because they can prove where the money's going and they can prove what return they're getting against revenue.

SPEAKER_01 8:10

Absolutely. And what you sort of briefly mentioned there now with tightening budgets also comes increased scrutiny from those financial teams to ensure costs are being applied in the right places. What does CFO level scrutiny change in how marketing performance is defined and valued?

SPEAKER_00 8:29

CFOs have very little understanding for what marketing does, candidly, right? There are buckets of dollars that are being allocated, and they're very far removed from the strategy that we use to execute and drive return. What they want to make sure, though, is that they're seeing a consistent return on investment. So the three the two things that have to happen is one, you have to be able to prove that measure and that measure alone. Marketers are fooling themselves if they think there is any other measure in business. Every other part of the business maps to ROI. Marketing has to map to ROI. So if you're pushing, you know, click-throughs, open rates, and you know uh vanity metrics, you're not gonna have the stakeholders in finance bought in. Uh, our system allows uh you to reconcile back to their finance system. So it basically pushes into their system and they can see on a weekly, daily, quarterly basis exactly what's being spent where and where that return is most valued. So now you can, I, my CFO and I can have a conversation that says, hey, it looks like this is working a little bit better than that. And we talk about, okay, well, it could be seasonal, maybe we'll change this, but we get to have an active conversation about it. Prior to that, there is no ability to have that conversation. We're not revealing enough of what we do to them, and therefore, uh, they can't really weigh in, which feels very uncomfortable for anybody in finance. Um, but what's also required on his end is my my CFO has changed the GL codes by which I've uh, you know, to basically to be mapped to my effort. Um, you it in some companies there's maybe five GL codes for a$200 billion business. And so you have these giant buckets of meaningless dollars that don't actually tell the story of the company. So our GL codes have been amended now that we are able to prove our way all the way through. And his GL codes are now married to strategy. So at the board table, everybody can have an educated conversation about what's happening.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

Thank you very much. I think that's really refreshing to sort of see um quite a strong relationship between um a CMO and a CFO, just particularly in marketing, there's usually a lot of uh back and forth, so that's really uh nice to hear. Um, now there's also growing pressure to deliver faster insights, as even many teams are still working with systems that were not designed for real-time accuracy. What role does real-time or near real-time reporting play in addressing the gap between expectations and infrastructure?

SPEAKER_00 11:09

Yeah, near real-time is just standard. I mean, that's you know, if you're not heading toward it, then you're not doing the right thing. Um, there are certain things that take a minute for us to deploy. An event, for example. We could fund it in the year prior, we could be getting MDF funds for it. So we we're working with partners and we need to see how much that there, how much value there is there. Then it's deployed the following year, it impacts several other different programs. So, you know, there is there's merit to seeing the stuff that you can see in real time in real time. And then you want to kind of aggregate other functions so that you can see it maybe quarterly. So I can see the investment quarterly. There may not be a return until the following year. But once you're in this system, imagine where you've done this for a couple of years, you tend to go to the same event over and over. So you can now actually forecast the cost and impact of that event because you can see it in real time inside inside your system. So then that near real time, that data can be broken down into near near real time measures so that you can actually forecast even better inside your system. It's a question of having a holistic view and a holistic set of data that's able to be queried in a way that empowers CMOs uh in better planning, better forecasting, benchmarking within their own category or sector, benchmarking within the program itself, benchmarking events, so seeing what others derive from those events. And we we host billions and billions and billions of data sets of information of marketing activity. And when you have that ability to query something that's that's expert, expert on marketing in call it a million different verticals, you you can start to get insights from that that actually prompt marketing leaders to make different decisions.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

Just before we end our discussion today, where do you see the biggest structural barriers that prevent marketing and finance teams from sharing a single source of truth from ROI?

SPEAKER_00 13:15

Unified data. Um AI is here. And uh I, for one, uh would like to lobby for it not to create six-finger uh videos and take away the M-dash from writers. Uh, I want to see it applied across a data infrastructure and backbone that gives empowers marketers with greater insight so that they can make better decisions and literally justify their reason for being to the board. Marketing is the mechanism of execution for the vision and the goals of the business. It is critical. If anybody thinks it's going away, they're they're not really in this world. So that function has to prove its value. And that starts first and foremost with a data infrastructure that can be queried effectively, whether it's queried by a software platform or agents, which is the direction we're headed. So we're creating agenc models inside the systems that people will be able to leverage and query the data. But if you haven't got your data in one place, um you're already behind. And the management, I just want to touch quickly on this snowflake notion that you will deploy Snowflake and run ChatGPT on top of it, and somehow that will solve all your problems. I call that diving into an empty pool. Uh, there's a layer of modeling that requires sophisticated understanding for how marketing is executed successfully. And without those models and without maturing those models on the regular basis and agents that are designed to do that, you'll have a lot of trouble trying to maintain this thing on your own.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

Absolutely, I agree. I think despite the budgets not necessarily reflecting it, I think marketing still has um a lot of value in a business, especially now. I think it's increasing almost. Um, now, unfortunately, that is all we have time for today, but I would like to thank Marie for being here. It's been really insightful to get an idea on how marketing operates in this era of flat budgets and higher CFO scrutiny and the alignment challenges between finance and operations. So thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. Have a wonderful day. And from all of us at CX Today, thanks for watching. Goodbye,