Are finance and marketing getting closer? The evidence is promising, but at many companies, the two sides still don't communicate well, a new survey of financial executives finds.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: MARKETING ROI

HemCon Medical Technologies Inc. in Portland, Ore., is a maker of medical products for the military, especially battlefield wound dressings. Its challenge is to move more into the commercial market and reduce the reliance on military contracts. Mike Williams, vice president of finance, says the company received 90 percent of its revenue from the U.S. military last year and plans to reduce that to 70 percent this year.

To do that, it needs to spread the word about its product lines. Williams, an FEI member, says the commercial marketing effort began only last fall, and the marketing department has just two people. But HemCon has started to market at trade shows, and did a "door knocker" dropoff at a show that included a reply postcard.

"These things are not inexpensive," Williams says, adding that he has asked the marketing vice president there to try to assess the response on the postcards and whether they resulted in any orders. The company's targets include hospital emergency room trauma units, EMT and EMS services, oral surgeons and police and fire departments.

"There's a real push to get [marketing] data, which we're not really set up to do," he adds. "We've looked at some CRM (customer relationship marketing) software, and using some outside providers."

While good lines of communication between finance and marketing are important, Williams says, "I've worn a hat as a doubting Thomas, I'll say to the marketing people, 'Show me some examples'" of how marketing has worked. He calls marketing a "black box" that often asks for a lot of cash, but "you don't really know what you're getting."

Unfortunately, that's a common scenario at many, many companies, large or small--and the frustration for finance executives, accustomed to making decisions based on numbers and metrics, can be considerable.

Financial executives' uncertainty about the return on marketing dollars isn't new, but it remains strong. In fact, that's one of the key findings in a new survey done to assess corporate attitudes toward marketing return on investment (ROI). Financial Executive joined with Marketing Management Analytics (MMA), a consulting firm in Wilton, Conn., which developed an email survey that was sent to FEI members; MMA collected and tabulated the responses.

MMA found that 36 percent of FEI respondents could be categorized as "metric-averse." This group reported very low levels of success and satisfaction in terms of assessing ROI, and they tended to view...