Right before my presentation at the Association of National Advertisers’ Media & Media Measurement Conference in June, a wonderful marketing team shared one of the toughest challenges in marketing analytics: linking sponsorship to sales. Their team did excellent work. They involved the CFO from the start, got his sign-off at every stage, and built a working model. No issue there.
Then they said something that gave me pause: “We only hired BCG to get the rubber stamp. We could have designed and run the full model ourselves.”
In other words, they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars not because the analysis required it, but because their CFO did not trust the marketing team.
This is not unusual. Investor Karl van den Bergh and Marketo co-founder Jon Miller have a name for it: the CMO Tax. Jon’s post about it got very popular, and for good reason:
Every C-suite leader defends their decisions. Only the CMO must defend the function itself. Nobody asks the CFO to justify finance. Nobody asks the CRO to justify revenue. Yet 6 out of 10 marketers feel pressure to prove the value of marketing as a category, not just their results (The CMO Survey, 2025). CEO confidence in the CMO role has dropped to 43%, with A-grades given to just 15% of CMOs (Boathouse, 2025). CEO-CMO misalignment grew 20% between 2023 and 2025, with CMOs increasingly repositioned as executors rather than strategy-makers (McKinsey/ANA, 2025).
The tax is insidious because it is invisible: It shows up not in the budget but in unnecessary meeting prep, defensive measurement frameworks, and afternoons consumed by stakeholder management instead of actually doing a great job at marketing to the company’s potential customers. Miller’s research from the B2B CMO Project finds that CMOs who reduce this tax operate as business executives first: They know the CFO’s cost-of-capital concerns before walking into a campaign review; they lead executive updates with a customer insight, not a pipeline report; they replace MQL dashboards with metrics the rest of the room already tracks, such as win rate, pipeline velocity, and CAC. My research on KPIs shows that the leading indicators have marketing responsiveness (they change with marketing actions) and sales conversion (they ultimately convert into sales). Do you know which metrics matter for your top and bottom line?
The BCG example above is the CMO Tax made visible, and it is only one version of the problem. I have seen companies run two separate attribution studies because the first one, done by the internal team, was not trusted. I have seen marketing organizations spend more time on governance theater than on understanding customers. McKinsey finds that companies placing marketing at the core of their growth strategy are twice as likely to achieve 5% or more annual growth. That is the return available when trust exists.
The bottom line is direct: If you distrust your marketing team, you are spending money you did not need to spend. The marketing team should earn and keep trust, absolutely. But trust requires something from both sides. Have you given them a real chance? As you push your CMO to speak the language of finance, have you invested even a little time in the language of marketing? Are you following, or even interacting, with folks that marry brand and finance, marketing and the bottom line?
The most efficient thing you can do next quarter may not be another vendor review or another layer of sign-off. It may be this: Follow people who connect brand to the balance sheet, read one insightful piece on marketing measurement, and ask your marketing team what they would do with the hours currently spent proving they deserve to exist.
A version of this article originally appeared in the author’s LinkedIn newsletter, Pauwels on Marketing.
Koen Pauwels is Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Northeastern University.