Growth Activated | The B2B Marketing Leadership Podcast
Growth Activated is a podcast for B2B marketing leaders who want to elevate their marketing strategies, lead confidently, and drive real business results. Each episode offers actionable insights and proven frameworks to help you activate growth for your team, your company, and your career.
Growth Activated | The B2B Marketing Leadership Podcast
Crack the CFO Code: What Marketing Leaders Must Know to Build Credibility and Get Buy-In - with Darko Socanski
#12: If you’ve ever been handed a lead goal without context—or struggled to make the case for brand, budget, or headcount—this is the episode you didn’t know you needed.
In this Growth Activated C-Suite Series episode, I sit down with Darko Socanski, a veteran CFO who has helped early-stage companies raise hundreds of millions in capital and generate over $1.5B in enterprise value. He brings a clear, candid perspective on how marketing fits into the broader business strategy—and what it really takes to earn a seat at the executive table.
We explore how B2B marketing leaders can better align with finance, communicate value beyond leads and MQLs, and step into the role of strategic business partner. This isn’t about becoming a financial expert—it’s about learning how to think like one.
In this episode:
✅ The CFO’s top priorities: runway, value creation, and capital efficiency
✅ How CFOs evaluate marketing investments—and what they expect in return
✅ What strong CFO–CMO alignment actually looks like
✅ Why top-down planning isn’t enough—and the role of bottoms-up strategy
If you're ready to build trust, influence decisions, and lead with confidence—this one’s for you.
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Welcome to the C-Suite Series: Why CFO–CMO Alignment Matters
Mandy Walker: Hey, Darko, it's so great to have you today on our Growth Activated podcast.
Darko Socanski: I'm pumped to be here. Thanks for having me.
Mandy Walker: Yeah, I'm really excited to have you. You are our first CFO as a part of the C-suite series. We've been doing this now for the last couple of weeks. We've talked to CEOs, CROs, CTOs, and I think the marketing and finance relationship is very undervalued or maybe under prioritized in a lot of organizations. having worked with you personally at a startup in the past, I know I've gotten personally so much value out of the relationship and partnership that we've had. So I'm really excited about today's conversation, bringing some of those insights to our audience.
Darko Socanski: That's awesome. That's very high praise. Thank you. yeah, excited to be the first. I hope my colleagues agree with me, I'll share my opinion and hopefully we'll get a different point of view.
Meet Darko Socanski: Startup CFO, Advisor & Value Creator
Yeah, absolutely. So Darko, let's start with your background. Share with us a little bit about how you've come to be in the role you're in.
Darko Socanski: Yeah, yeah, that sounds great. So I've been in finance basically for the last 15-ish years. I feel a little old saying that. But I've been in finance for the last 15 years, fell right into it after college and have always kind of been within the like finance pillar, if you will. And I've just really had the pleasure of working at both public companies and private early stage companies as well.
I really fell in love with the early stage VC environment. And I've been really spending a lot of my time there recently and just a couple bullet points to punch out as far as things I'm personally proud of is having taken three companies out to an exit, raised hundreds of millions of dollars in VC capital and combined across my tenure and...
my colleagues and companies I've worked with have created over 1.5 billion in equity value. And that's one I'm pretty fond of. So yeah, now I'm just continuing to work with companies. Early stage, I started as a fractional CFO and then worked that relationship over time as these companies mature and that role becomes bigger. We grow into that together.
Mandy Walker: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, great experience. And obviously I worked with you at one of those very small, very small early stage startups that had funding. So, great to hear where your perspective, I think, will and your background have how you'll be approaching the conversation today. And, and with that, I'd love to dive into the CFO persona and perspective a little bit more. So share with us, what are some of your biggest priorities as the CFO? What are you consistently thinking about and what is top of mind for you in these organizations that you're a part of?
What CFOs Prioritize: Runway, Enterprise Value & Business Levers
Darko Socanski: Yeah, think the number one role I think of any CFO should really be runway and understanding how much time you have as a team to prove and deliver the amount of value needed in order to secure the next round of finding and keeping the ship growing. so I think priority number one is just understanding how much time you have as a CFO.
I think the second most important responsibility of the CFO is really to understand how value gets created at those companies. And I've had a sort of very colored background in terms of working with B2B, B2C, social mobile, consumer apps to enterprise, B2B sales, and really everything in between software, marketplace businesses. And so...
It's been an interesting experience because you really get to sort of take a step back and just look at how does this machine work? Where does value get created? How does the customer benefit? And so I think those are the two main priorities. You really need to understand your business and you need to make sure you have enough time to reach your milestone.
Mandy Walker: Yeah. And perhaps this is a silly question, but how are you defining value? When you say value creation, is that revenue? Is it other things? What does that mean to you?
Darko Socanski: That's a great question. I think it obviously depends. It's company specific, but ultimately what we're trying to do as executives at a company is increase the enterprise value of the company. How much is the company worth? And so when I think value, I actually think about it through the lens of how much is the company worth and how do we increase the enterprise value for shareholders?
As a function of that and closely related to that is the value that you're bringing to your users, whether you're selling software and providing and unlocking time savings, generating revenue, or you're providing unique connections or whatever the unique offering of the businesses that is very closely related to then what drives enterprise value. But I think enterprise value is first and foremost, priority.
Mandy Walker: Okay, interesting. Well, I'm so glad you brought that up because already I can see that I maybe haven't thought about the enterprise value in terms of that sense, especially at the B2B professional services company I was the VP of marketing for. We knew we had a board and we knew we were always trying to sell, but it was very rare that we talked about what our sort of value creation goals were and how we were going to, what we wanted to hit before the next round. Interesting.
Very interesting. how do you think that those priorities, so Runway is obviously specific in the startup world and in the venture capital world, but how would you say that the priorities change or would change at mid-size to large enterprise companies from a CFO perspective? Or does it change? those still both very important?
Darko Socanski: I think to become even more important to understand and have a grasp around how it gets created. And, you know, if you zoom out at a very larger scale, you know, the role of a CFO when you start getting into the public space is, you know, one of the objectives is really to create liquidity for your, for your stock. And so like you, you're working, you're working with the analysts to, to both
sort of inform and keep them up to speed on what's happening inside of the company, where you're really trying to create the market within the public space to create liquidity and keep the transactions moving. And so through that lens, how much the company's worth is now a real time measure. How you get graded is publicly exposed. And so even more important, the later and bigger you get. think starting earlier just helps bring that into focus sooner. And I think it really helps drive alignment across the team. So it becomes more and more important over time. The sooner the team focuses on it, I think the better.
Mandy Walker: Okay, awesome. So what would be some of the business metrics that you are very top of mind for you that you are measuring the business health by or measuring the enterprise value by that you always have maybe at the top of your dashboard that you're monitoring closely?
Darko Socanski: Sure. And if it's helpful, we can also just pick in an industry or an example, like a SaaS company, and we can dig in if that's helpful. But sure. Yeah. I think at the highest level, the public markets set the comps for the private markets in many ways. so you have a lot of those revenue multiples available to you. And there are tons of resources available that'll benchmark private companies.
Mandy Walker: Yeah. Sounds great.
Darko Socanski: What is your net dollar retention? If you're talking about SaaS, what is your ACV? What's your CAC payback period? Those are all important really inputs and metrics that investors that will be purchasing shares of the company later and setting the value of that company will be looking at. And so you have baseline metrics that are generally just available and our revenue times X or whatever.
multiple for the period of time that we're looking at. So I think that's kind of where it starts, but really important is to dig into the leading indicators. And more often than not, in these early stages, revenue will be the leading indicator to the most correlated metric to enterprise value. And so how we grow and retain revenue then becomes really, really important and solve all the supporting metrics that come along.
Mandy Walker: Yeah. And just knowing that you're so tied into the VC community, how have you seen, obviously the investment scene has changed quite a bit over the last few years, especially for industries like B2B SaaS. How have you seen that model change? Or are there certain metrics that are even more important today that maybe we weren't necessarily looking at a few years ago? Just when we think about like, I feel like it was like a growth, we talk about it being a growth at all costs.
a couple of years ago and then that not being the case today. But what's your perspective on that?
Darko Socanski: Yeah, I think generally as, as there's probably even like public knowledge by this point, you know, we've deviated back towards the mean where like business fundamentals are really important and, know, looking at metrics like revenue per FTE per employee becomes interesting. And, uh, you know, how efficient of a machine can you build with the resources you have? Um, I think in general, of course things have been a little bit more focused on profitability and the efficiency of these businesses. But at the end of the day, the fundamentals are fundamentals. And as a CFO and as the leadership team, your goal is focused on driving value up. Whether you're getting a 20x multiple or 10x multiple or 5x multiple, that's more the nature of the external market and how it's valuing your business. As a team, you're moving the key metrics up and to the right.
in order to increase value. And so, yeah, I think there's been generally a revision back towards the fundamentals, but I don't think that has at least changed my operating behavior within companies.
Mandy Walker: Yeah. Okay. And in your opinion, what would you, is sort of the most basic level, what would you say makes a great CFO beyond the focus on these types of fundamental business numbers?
Darko Socanski: Yeah, that's a great question. Best CFOs that I've worked with, because I look back and look at the mentors in my past, best CFOs, besides sort of checking the two boxes of like, what is our opportunity from a time and resource standpoint? then, you know, how does the business create value? I think the best CFOs are able to bring the team along.
the journey to convey what are, you know, a little bit abstract concepts at first, but being able to really bring the team along for the journey and convey these goals and objectives in a way that is actionable and easily understood by the rest of the organization. And so I think great CFOs are great at aligning folks to the objectives that help create the most enterprise value.
That's one. then two, they're just great at developing people to really aspire and grow into these positions and are able to embrace that as a, our job is to create value for our shareholders and enable them to do their best work. And so I think those two things probably are factors that I would consider things that make a CFO great.
Mandy Walker: Yeah, no, totally. I've had, I've worked with some great CFOs, yourself included, and I've worked with some not great CFOs and the ones that I would say have, and it's only from my perspective, it's not even from like the X's and O's and are they actually doing their job? It's more of the, is there a partnership that exists amongst the key exec, you know, who are their business partners? it, do they stay within finance and at the CEO level or are they working?
hand in hand with other departments. Business alignment or lack of business alignment is one of the things I see all the time when I come into these companies as a fractional. I'm sure you see it as well, where it's just sometimes the CEO has a very clear vision or very clear goals. And then I think as department leaders, we all go off into our silos so often to figure out how are we going to impact that goal?
What's wild to me is like, we all rely on each other. We're all interconnected and should be integrated. And yet a lot of those conversations don't actually happen.
Darko Socanski: You bring up a really good point. When I say like a CFO is great at bringing the company along the journey, that is like implicitly dependent on relationships and strong relationships between the executive team members and you know, the CFO and their ability to help really provide the information that should just intuitively align folks. I think the best
case scenarios are when the numbers and situations are presented and everybody's like, well done. We just have to go do A, B, and C. Great. It may not be easy, but it's clear. And that's a huge win. Driving towards that clarity. yeah, mean, relationships are very, very important to that.
How CFOs Evaluate Marketing Investments (and Why Brand Gets Pushback)
Mandy Walker: Yeah. So let's pivot into the marketing relationship. So I'd love to sort of hear before we dive into maybe how you do or don't partner with marketing or how you have or haven't, how do you view marketing investments as a part of the overall finance and growth strategy?
Darko Socanski: Yeah, that's a really big question. think we'll have to wrap it up. Well, okay. So like the first thing I think of when I hear that question, I kind of split that into two worlds. There are sort of marketing investments that have a very predictable return on those dollars. And I'm like using the like classical, so CFO language here, but it is important because A CFO's job is really to be able to help predict the relevant range of where the company is likely to go if X, Y, and Z happen. And X, Y, and Z being goals, objectives, or metrics that get hit. And so to that extent, you know, marketing investments in one category fall into, they're easy to predict. I know what my return is on this.
and I can rely on the performance of these dollars, or I can rely on the output I'm going to get after investing these dollars in this area. And we can use just like CPL as an easy, obvious metric, but there's other like investments in marketing. And then the other side is the little bit more nebulous where like, we want to invest a million dollars or 10 or a hundred million dollars in brand. And every CFO is like, ugh.
cringes a little bit. And reason is not that they don't believe in the brand of the company. And maybe not every CFO is like that. the reason why I think the traditional or most CFOs will cringe a little is because, no, this is potentially a large or even if it's not a large, but let's say it's a medium sized investment and it's highly unpredictable. so like CFOs don't really like unpredictability. We're ultimately responsible.
you know, saying where the company will end if we do, again, X, Y, and Z investments. And so when those investments are made, the company needs to be at that point, otherwise the CFO messed something up. And so that's why, like, you know, there's like uncertain marketing investments and there's like certain marketing investments. So split that into those two worlds at the least.
Mandy Walker: I love that. And I hear you. And I guess I even just wonder, about the things that are, where would you slot investments that are sort of table stakes, what we would consider table stakes? So like your core marketing technology, software, maybe like your marketing ops people who have to make sure everything is running in the background, things that maybe aren't necessarily tied to, in both of those.
buckets you gave me, I still view those as like tied to revenue and growth. Just one is predictable and one is a little more nebulous to use your word. But then there's like the operating side of like, this is what we need for table stakes operations. How do you, is that a, do you consider that as a part of one of those two buckets or is that a separate line item for you?
Darko Socanski: Yeah, I can speak for myself, but I consider those more as sort of infrastructure investments where you need the team, you need the tools to make the team more efficient. I think what most CFOs will ask when these are like net new or incremental, the question like, how much time will we save or how much more productive will the team be? And I think those are reasonable.
questions because it's not that the company shouldn't invest into those, but generally speaking, know, marketing doesn't operate in a vacuum and the CFO is looking at that infrastructure investment along with five others. And now we have the difficult conversation with which one or which few of these do we need to invest? Or do we want to shorten our runway and how much time we have as a team to deliver on the objectives if we invest in all of them?
And so it is important to understand what the benefits are going to be. One, but secondly, you didn't exactly ask that I'll go there a little bit, but the second important part of such investments are just accountability and just having clear ownership. It's not that did we deliver, we not, but like how close are we to delivering on the goals that we wanted?
Mandy Walker: Yeah, no, totally.
Well, and I loved your point about, like, holistically, you're looking at if we make all of these investments and marketing as one of those and then product and technology and sales and like, are we willing as a team to reduce our runway? And I think so often marketing is, we maybe aren't thinking about the bigger picture. We're sort of just thinking within our function. And that's a really important to be a part of your executive team first. And then, you know, think about your function second in a way.
Darko Socanski: Absolutely. Yeah.
Making Brand Less Nebulous: How to Earn CFO Buy-In Through Testing
Mandy Walker: One of the things I, and Darko, when you talk about the incrementality of like efficiency in that instance, for some of those table stake investments, I also think that there's an opportunity from the nebulous brand, you know, things to leverage the idea of incrementality for that as well. have you seen that done well in terms of, Hey, we're going to run a test or a pilot and see if we get a brand lift from this or like what the downstream impact is. We may not be able to say for 100 % that it was tied to that. But if we reduce the variables to where that's the only thing we tried that was different, we can make the if-then statement. Have you seen, I guess, have you worked with marketing leaders where they've done a great job of making brand a little less nebulous for the CFO?
Darko Socanski: Yeah. And I think in partnership with the finance function, and yeah, I generally throw a brand into that category because it generally gets that's categorized there. But I think there are very, there are clean ways to measure its impact. I'll go back to first highlighting, if you understand how the business is creating value and you understand what those key metrics, key sort of leading indicators are, then By investing in brand, those key levers should move in a favorable direction over a reasonable amount of time. And so the way I've seen this done really, really well in the past is you've structured as a test. And like you may want to spend $10 million in brand over the course of the year, but you could also simulate what a million dollars spent in one week would be, or two weeks, or three weeks, and spend. And let's see how the metrics move. I think the trap that most CMOs and CFOs will fall in is that this is an absolute amount I have to spend. It's a million or nothing. And I don't think that that's the case.
the more you can test your way into understanding how brand has the impact that has on your key metrics, the more confidence the CFO and the CMO will have in the sense that it'll drive the metrics that they want. so, yeah, I think testing is really, important, knowing what those metrics are. And yeah, you can simulate higher spend without actually spending the million or however.
Mandy Walker: Yeah. gosh, I wish I had this report handy so I could actually quote you the numbers because I just was reading this report about a week ago and it was talking about it's not brand or demand. It's like it's actually brand times demand and that brand allows for this multiplier effect that they've done a lot of research on it where your demand programs, your demand and programs actually work like 80 % better when you're investing in brand and demand. And then when you take away brand demand.
underperforms by like 40%. And I may be misquoting. I think those are the general numbers, but I think that's fascinating to think about from a marketing perspective because marketing right now is in this crisis where I see it every day where marketing is getting marginalized to being a lead gen function. And we're losing because I, and I think it's out of CEOs and CFOs not having clarity around like the value that marketing is driving and lead generation is easy to see the input and the output. You know, it's very direct, it's very correlated. And so they just want more of that. We want more of that predictability and certainty. But in doing so, I think we're losing a lot of what the essence of marketing is. And because we as marketing leaders and CMOs aren't doing a great job of communicating the value. But it'd be interesting. I'd be curious to hear if like seeing a report like that or a study that had been done in your specific industry with brand times demand, that, would that resonate with a CFO? Or are you like, nah, still show me the testing, still show me the piloting iteration. I'll see it when I see it.
Darko Socanski: Yeah. Well, yeah, you'll always win points if you bring facts to a CFO and they tend to like numbers because they can easily get entered into a model. And so we like numbers. I 100 % believe it. I am a supporter in that brand does drive a lot of ancillary benefits, whether it's on acquisition or, you we haven't talked about like talent acquisition. Like when we talk about brand investment, it's not just for generating revenue. It's also to make sure we have the best talent around us. It's to make sure investors hear the company name. It's really creating a buzz around the company, that, that has so much, so much value. And, know, I'll even go all the way to sort of going through an IPO, one of the biggest benefits of that is you get this like public market recognition that you have graduated to a public scale. And it's in many ways tremendously beneficial for go-to-market and sales. Sure, it provides liquidity and maybe the company has raised additional funding for their next objectives, but it becomes in many ways a branding exercise really that helps drive revenue and sales. And so I 100 % support it and agree it. You did also say when you take brand away, demand drops and great, let's do that type of testing so that we know what the actual correlation is and how elastic or inelastic that is because can you deploy a hundred million in brand or can you only deploy 10?
So yeah, I believe it of course, and I'm a big supporter of it. just, CFOs really need to understand what those relationships are. And I would say in general, they are supportive because they're ultimately trying to continue to drive value for their shareholders and anything that will help us along that journey should get prioritized. yeah.
Mandy Walker: Yeah. No, think that's a great, I think it's a great takeaway that we could be doing a better job of understanding the relationships because I think intuitively as marketing leaders, we know the value for my gut instinct, but to actually put it on paper and put some numbers behind it, I think a lot of marketing leaders don't do well at the moment. But speaking of the marketing and CFO, I'd love to hear like what a good CFO CMO relationship looks like to you.
What's really, how have you seen this relationship really flourish? What does it look like?
What a Strong CMO–CFO Relationship Actually Looks Like
Darko Socanski: Yeah. Yeah. I've had a pleasure working with a handful of great, great CMOs and others I wish, you know, we would have had a different relationship, but focusing on the, on the great relationships I've had in the past, I think they're sort of common traits they have are one, they're strong relationships, they're strong personal relationships because you need to be able to have hard conversations where like, let's close the door, or let's hop on a Zoom, let's go grab a beer, any of the sort of personalized sort of meeting settings that you want. But maybe you need to have a really hard conversation, like let's talk about brand. Like I'm not sure this is really like helpful. And like you need to have a strong personal relationships. And that starts with trust and it starts with alignment around like what are we both trying to do for the company? And in this case,
the CMO is equal to the CFO and that they're both executives at the company. Their job is to create shareholder value. And so we're both moving in the same direction. so alignment and trust are the most important characteristics of that relationship. And so, yeah, I think that's really key. And then like going just down to like a tactical level.
you know, being able to question each other and is this the best allocation of resources? And really, you know, the best CMOs will like take themselves and like the budget out of the equation. It's like, doesn't matter. I can spend 10,000, a hundred thousand, a hundred million. It's not about the dollars that I get allocated to my budget. It's about how, how we allocate and what will be the best.
return for the company, where I think like more junior CMOs or CMOs that are not the best partners, I guess, in that sense, are territorial around their budget. Like, why do I have less budget? I need more budget. And there's this whole like budget acquisition exercise. that's, that's, if you're in that territory, in that territory, you've completely missed the mark. And that is not the essence of our roles. And so yeah.
the best CMOs, best relationship, you can see that there's no personal attachment to the resources. They know that if we work together, I can get more money and deploy more money. And the reason why the CMO is excited is like, I get to do more cool stuff with my marketing dollars. And the CFO is like, awesome, we get to grow so, fast. And like, you get really like pumped as a team. so I think...
Those are some of the characteristics, I think, of a great relationship.
Marketing’s Real Job: It's Not Just About Leads
Mandy Walker: Yeah, totally. I even just with the sort of insular thinking of why is my budget changing, you know, that defensiveness. One of the other things I know we were talking about last week that I thought was incredibly interesting too is even when you could apply that to marketing goals, if you will, and like lead generation. And I think we were talking about where you were like, hey, it's great that you want to drive a thousand leads, but do we even need a thousand leads right now?
Right? Is that right for the business? Talk to me a little bit about that. Share more about that conversation because I thought that was a great point of view that a lot of marketing leaders are missing right now.
Darko Socanski: Yeah. Listeners and you might get a little tired of me bringing it back to the point of value, but again, the point is to create value. And so if you start from the point of how do we create the most value for the company, then it's not about leads and it's not about like, it's about the combined machine. How do we generate the most in this case, let's say revenue. so maybe you need a CPL, really like low CPL. Maybe you need high number of leads.
But really, like, is it really about leads? It's about converting leads. And then is it about converting leads? Well, it's about converting leads that retain. Well, is it about that or is it they convert, they retain and they expand and then they send a referral. And so really, really starting with the point of our job is not to drive demand for the sales partner and like the CRO. Our job is to just increase the value of the company and
Generally, that's through revenue, improving market demand. And so, yeah, I think it's really important to start with how do we create value and then together figure out where within the marketing function can you get the best return on your time? Because you, as a CMO, you want to add value. You want to move the needle and help the company achieve its objectives, but maybe that's not number of leads and maybe it's not the lowest CPL.
might not even be the lowest CAC because it really then depends on do these customers retain or not. so really having a holistic perspective to where do we get the most value identifying that in a strong partnership and then deploying the resources that go and achieve that.
Mandy Walker: Well, if this doesn't encourage people to have a stronger relationship with their CFO, I don't know what will, because I do think we are being subordinated under sales and the CRO is dictating a lot of what marketing is doing right now. And so I think that's a great, we should be, think partnering with the CFO can really help us lift up. And yeah, go for it.
Darko Socanski: Let's go.
Well, I'll say one more thing on that.
It's as much the responsibility of the CFO as it is the CMO. And that I think the way the stereotypical relationship has come to be what it is, a CFO will come top down here, the lead goals that we need to Why? Because I know on average these number of leads produce those number of sales, those number of sales generate that revenue. so like,
Mandy, go and get me a thousand leads. And I think that's a wrong move from the part of the CFO because it's important to bring the team along for the journey to understand why the numbers are what they are. Because I think the worst place to be in is, these are finance goals. They're not marketing goal. I didn't come up with these goals. And so how am I supposed to deliver a thousand leads if that's the number?
Yeah, I think great call out for CMOs, like go and like, hang out with your CFO and talk to them about numbers. But also like call out to CFOs to do the same because they're equally as responsible to that relationship and to get into a productive output.
Aligning Top-Down and Bottoms-Up Planning for Smarter Growth
Mandy Walker: Yeah, no, totally. And I think that was one of the things that when I think about us having such a great relationship was one of the pieces I so appreciated was of course, finance, you know, is going to do a tops down plan. And then it was really helpful from a marketing perspective and a growth perspective for us to do a bottoms up plan and figure out how do we meet in the middle on this? And so many marketing leaders are not doing the bottoms up plan. I see that they've got this really large target and they have no idea how they're going to hit it or if it's even realistic to hit within their budget. Or even one of the things that I learned really well from you was like thinking about sales capacity. So like, okay, great. We can drive all of these leads from a marketing perspective, but do we even have the sales team in place from a capacity perspective to handle all of those leads? are we just going to be spending a bunch of money that doesn't go anywhere because we don't have the sales team in place to take advantage of all of that work that's being done and really thinking of sort of the through line from a go-to-market perspective. That's something I don't think we are doing. We just sort of have these MQL goals and we don't know how we're going to hit them. We know we've got to do a bunch of shit to get there. And we hope that sales will use them when they have them, but yeah.
Darko Socanski: Yeah,
I'll maybe like pull the curtain back a little bit on the top down numbers. The reason why those even get produced is before you can have sort of a productive conversation with your CMO on the bottoms up, you kind of need to know what the top down number is. The CFO is always responsible for knowing the trajectory of the company. And so they are continuously working and deepening their understanding of what the trajectory is, what the top line numbers have to be. And if we hit or miss or beat those numbers, what the impact is for the rest of the year or my time that I have. And so those are really important because they kind of, it's like a dotted line. Like this is dot, dot, dot where we're roughly going. But that bottoms up is really where, where the value I think does get created in the relationship and that like you get to work through the bottom up plan and really like pressure test what those assumptions are saying and what the top down model is implying because you're right. And in our scenario, we don't have enough sales reps like, oh, well, we need to hire them. Well, how long does it take to hire them? Oh, well, it takes like two or three months. Okay, well, how long does it take to rep? Oh, well, it takes another two or three months.
Okay. So you're telling me we need about five to six months to like have a fully ramped sales rep. Yeah. Okay. Great. Good thing to know today so that we can adjust our marketing dollars today until we have the capacity to grow and yeah, to grow into. And again, I put similar equal responsibility on CMO and CFO to, to come up with the bottoms plan and talk through together.
That's really, really key. And one more thing on that point is all plans are wrong. Even the most detailed sort of bottoms up plans are wrong. They're not meant to be as much of a prediction as they are meant to be a tool for and guide for how you operate the business. It's really...
Mandy Walker: Yeah, no, that's great. Please.
Darko Socanski: its value comes in operating the business because month in month out, either we're hitting the CPLs, either we're hitting the leads that we want or we're not, or the assumptions were right or wrong. And remember when we were working, like we had a handful of assumptions, like, huh, these assumptions are not what we thought they were. Good to know sooner. Like, is it something that we can act on now or are we better served acting on something else? And so, you know, The top down gives you the dotted line. The bottoms up gives you the underlying assumptions you have to have in order to deliver the plan. But month in, month out is where the magic happens because then you can course correct on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.
Mandy Walker: Yeah, I had this, I don't think I had a chance to tell you, but I was interviewing for a CMO role a couple of months ago and I interviewed with the CFO and it was the most nightmare interview I've ever had. It was probably the least strategic CFO I've ever met. But one of the things he said to me in the interview was, don't come crying to me if you don't hit your lead goal at the end of the quarter. Like that's your fault, that's on you. we won't, and I just remember thinking.. my God, what if our assumptions are off? What if there's external market conditions that are impacting the performance and some of the predictability we thought we had and like, we're not going to have an open conversation about that. It's just wild.
Darko Socanski: Yeah, you've just highlighted a really important piece here is that, you know, it's a two way street and like, hopefully you're in a place where the CFO is seeking a partner and both a thought partner and somebody that can foreshadow and identify risks that can get baked into the model and then projected out. But sometimes you don't have that. And so important to you either have faith that that relationship can get there and you can start having productive conversations or in this case, maybe you know to run away from that company as fast as possible. so hopefully that's what you did.
Mandy Walker: Yes, it is what I did. That was one of probably seven red flags during that interview. So yeah, and I'll have to share them with you at some point so you can get a kick out of it. Well, hey, Darko, as we sort of think about, as we wrap up here, I'd love to hear what are some of the four marketing leaders who maybe aren't financially savvy, but should be as we move into much more data-driven, ROI-driven world, especially with the marketing pressure that's coming down.
Darko Socanski: entertaining.
Building Financial Fluency: What Every CMO Should Know
Mandy Walker: What would be some financial skills or recommendations you have that a CMO should develop? Like what should just be a part of all of our, our skill sets.
Darko Socanski: Ooh, that's also loaded. Well, I think the CMOs would benefit from really leaning in to understand, you know, not just from marketing, but across the entire sort of customer journey, where does value get created for the customer? And really understanding the business. What are the levers of the business that make it tick and grow?
And so I don't know that it's any one metric and I wouldn't feel comfortable mentioning anyone like metric or like financial, you know, return on ad spend or whatever. Like, I don't think any one of those are important as really understanding the fundamentals of how the business works, because then you will be in a much better place to both partner with the rest of your executive team and, and work with your CFO to, unlock that value. So I would say like that's one and then two in the rise of AI, I strongly recommend like spend some quality time with your your AI and you know, ask it questions you may not feel comfortable asking your CFO. And, you know, another ask is have it ask you questions if you really want to broaden your skills, but
It all really starts with being curious about how the company works, how you create value, and then being equipped with the just basic knowledge to be able to communicate with your CFO better because most CFOs are really numbers driven, output driven. And if you speak their language, it can just help that relationship. I think the best CFOs do that in equal measure to partner with their CMOs in order to make the relationship work. so, yeah, you try and meet as far as you can.
Leveraging AI: The Next Frontier for CFOs and CMOs
Mandy Walker: I love the AI example. hadn't thought about, I mean, I use AI all the time, but I hadn't thought about it in that sense. Because as you were talking, like really understand the business metrics, I was thinking, for people who are in this level of role, who don't feel like they understand, they're probably going to be too embarrassed to go talk to their partners about it. But what a great point. AI will have the answers for you if you tell it what kind of business you run and how you make money. I'm sure they'll have a starting place. Are you being, are you from a, just while we're on the topic of AI and then we'll wrap up here, I would love to understand like, how are you getting involved with AI and the value it could be bringing inside an organization? Like should we as CMOs or as the C-suite be thinking or be expecting our CFO to come to us and say, hey, where could we be leveraging AI for cost savings and efficiency and.
Like is that, do you foresee that being a conversation that's going to happen between the CMO and the CFO? Or do you think, I just am so curious because AI obviously can do so much. if we aren't, if leaders aren't being forward thinking about it, I just wonder where at what point the pressure is going to come to be forced to think about it.
Darko Socanski: Yeah, I mean, I think it can come from either direction, the marketing or the finance side. There's some active conversations I'm having across the portfolio companies I'm working with where how do we leverage AI to speed up our time to dial and how do we reach more of the opportunities in a shorter period of time? How do we QA our folks at scale?
lot of times, we have really legacy dated pipeline stages of the funnel. It's in contracting and now it's negotiating. And so you all these funnels, but what happened on the last call? How many times did we bring up the upsell if we're talking about a renewal? Yeah, and so I think really leaning into what AI can unlock is important. I think that any org will really just benefit from that. And I would really just like leave everybody with the, I think, fact that most organizations are sitting on a lot of incredibly valuable information for them, whether they're like call transcripts or customer chats or customer emails. There's a lot of really valuable content, I think, that most organizations are sitting on that, you know, with some mild manipulation and access can really unlock a lot of value and insights for teens. So yeah, 100 % pushers, finance and marketing partners to explore AI. I'm a big, supporter.
Mandy Walker: Yeah. Yeah. There's so much, so many fun things happening with even just under better understanding your ICP based on all of this data that we, you know, so often don't have time to do or better understand your buying personas and what they care about. There's the call transcripts are gold for sure. and then all the customer data too. Well, well, Darko, thank you so much for the conversation today. I have so enjoyed this as always, and continue to just learn so much from you.
Darko Socanski: That's so good. So good. Yeah, for sure. Awesome. Thank you for having me. I've had a blast. This is really, really nice. Have a good one.
Mandy Walker: Absolutely.
Where can people find you if they're interested in maybe your services or I you do some executive coaching and advisory. If people want to learn more, where should I reach out?
Darko Socanski: Sure. Yeah,
thank you. I appreciate the TF, Stratton Growth Advisors. It's a boutique firm. We really focus on three things. We do M &A advisory work. lot of the work I have done really ultimately leads to an exit in a period of time where founders have little experience in, but it's high stakes. We'll do CFO services and then some executive coaching if you're just...
learning how to work with your finance professional to begin with. those are sort of three areas I work in. And as far as contact, reach me on LinkedIn. It's just Darko Sokanski and I'll pop up. It's a unique enough name. I don't need to worry about competition.
Mandy Walker: Awesome. Yeah. Well, you might have to do some CMO coaching on how to work better with CFOs.
Darko Socanski: I would actually really enjoy that. when you bring your next CMO to your show, maybe we can both sit in and just have an open conversation. That'll be great. Let's have a debate.
Mandy Walker: Totally. Love it. All right. Thanks, Darko.
Darko Socanski: Yeah, thank you, see you.
