One of the most common and most expensive tensions inside growing businesses. Here's what's really going on, and how to fix it.
Picture the scene. The marketing team has had a good month. Open rates are up. The new campaign drove 40,000 impressions. Social engagement is the highest it's been all year. They walk into the board meeting feeling confident.
The MD leans forward: 'So what did we actually win from this?'
Silence.
This moment plays out in growing businesses every single day and it's not a marketing failure. It's a structural problem. One that quietly undermines marketing's credibility, erodes investment, and caps business growth. Understanding it is the first step to fixing it.
Why Marketing and the Board Speak Different Languages
Marketing teams are trained to think in marketing metrics: reach, engagement, traffic, leads. These are real and meaningful but they live at the wrong level of the conversation for a board that thinks in revenue, margin, pipeline, and return on capital.
The disconnect happens because the data lives in different places. Marketing uses its platform. Sales uses the CRM. Finance uses its own spreadsheets. Nobody has built the bridge between them, so when the board asks 'what drove that deal?', the honest answer is often 'we're not entirely sure.'
A third of marketing leaders say proving ROI is the single hardest part of their job. Not because results aren't there, but because the data needed to prove it is fragmented across systems that don't talk to each other.
Add to this the reality of modern buyer behaviour. Most prospects interact with a business six, eight, ten times before they make a decision, a blog post here, a LinkedIn post there, a referral from a contact, an email sequence, a conversation at an event. Last-click attribution. The default setting for most reporting tools captures only the final touchpoint and ignores every interaction that built the relationship.
So the board sees one number, marketing has another, and neither tells the full story.
The Real Cost of This Problem
When marketing can't demonstrate its commercial contribution, several things happen - all of them bad.
Budget conversations become adversarial. Marketing asks for investment and finance says show me the return. Marketing presents metrics finance doesn't find meaningful. Finance cuts the budget. Marketing has fewer resources to perform. Performance falls. Finance cuts further.
Marketing gets treated as a cost centre rather than a revenue driver. The function loses authority. Senior marketers get frustrated and leave, or stop pushing for what the business actually needs.
Perhaps most importantly, the business makes worse decisions. Without understanding what's actually driving growth, leaders can't invest intelligently in the channels and activities that work. They double down on what feels visible rather than what's genuinely effective.
What Good Looks Like
Businesses that solve this problem don't always have bigger budgets or more sophisticated tools. What they have is alignment. A shared definition of what marketing is supposed to achieve and how it will be measured.
Define success before you start, not after
The most common mistake is measuring marketing activity after the fact against criteria that were never agreed upfront. Before any campaign or content investment, the question should be: what commercial outcome are we trying to influence, and how will we know it worked? That might be pipeline value, new business conversations opened, retention rate, or average deal size, not impressions.
Connect marketing data to business data
This requires a technical step most businesses skip. CRM and marketing platform need to be integrated. Sales and marketing need to agree on what a 'marketing-influenced opportunity' means and track it consistently. It doesn't require enterprise-level software it requires a decision to do it.
Report in the language of the room you're in
Marketing metrics are useful for optimising marketing. Board metrics are useful for making investment decisions. The same data, reported differently, tells completely different stories. A senior marketer needs to be able to translate fluently between the two presenting to the board in revenue and pipeline terms, while managing the team in the channel-level data that helps them improve.
Why This Is Hard to Solve From the Inside
Most businesses at the £10m–£50m scale don't have a marketing director. They have a marketing manager - talented, busy, and understandably focused on execution. Building the measurement architecture, having the board-level conversation, and redesigning how performance gets reported requires a different level of seniority and a different kind of thinking.
It also requires someone with enough distance from the day-to-day to see the system clearly. When you're inside it, you're too close to the problem to redesign it.
This is the work that happens before the marketing works. Get the measurement right, and the investment case for marketing becomes almost self-evident.
For many growing businesses, the most effective intervention is bringing in senior external expertise not to do more marketing, but to build the foundation that makes marketing measurable. Once the board can see the commercial contribution of marketing clearly, the conversation about investment changes entirely.
If your marketing team is producing good work but struggling to make the case for it at board level, this is a solvable problem. It just needs to be approached as a strategic challenge, not a reporting one.
This is Part 2 of the Built to Scale series marketing insight for businesses between £10m and £50m. Read Part 1: You've Outgrown Scrappy. You Haven't Quite Got Strategic.
Vantage Marketing Group works with East Midlands businesses ready to move from reactive to strategic.
vantagemarketinggroup.co.uk