Stop learning to speak the language of the CFO
In the next edition of When Theory Meets Tuesday, former Aldi marketing director Kyrsten Halley suggests financial fluency is not enough. In order to truly get finance on board, marketers have got to be able to pre-empt the ‘why?’.
· Marketing WeekBy Kyrsten Halley 22 Sep 2026 6:34 am
You can teach a marketer the vocabulary of finance in an afternoon. The board finds out whether they understand it a lot faster than that.
I found that out early in my career, and it very nearly went the wrong way.
I was still controller-level at ABF, presenting a major proposal to our divisional board. Our MD had a skill that separated the good ideas from the bad: he devil’s-advocated everything, pulling apart every assumption until it either held or it didn’t.
It had been my first big shot with the board. I had been prepped about the grilling I could (quite rightly) expect, and I had tried to think of things from every angle I could imagine. I was determined to impress.
It started well. I managed to bounce off some questions I knew would come, and even better, I handled those that I didn’t. But I couldn’t persuade the MD, who just saw the issue from the other angle. The proposal wasn’t approved.
I walked out of that meeting convinced I’d blown it, and my whole career trajectory with it. Then he came and found me, told me it was one of the best sessions he’d had, that he loved the courage of my convictions, and that they’d clearly been backed by more than confidence. I hadn’t just known the financials. I knew the procurement complexities, the operational impact, the quality and health risks, the capital case. The whole business, not just the bit that touched marketing.
He reassured me that on this occasion the proposal may not have been approved, but it wasn’t for my lack of understanding, and he very much looked forward to the next proposal.
My understanding of “good” changed completely, right then. I’d walked in braced to be picked apart on language. I’d been tested on substance instead, and it turned out I’d earned it. Just not in the way I expected.
The trouble is what happens once you’ve collected the phrases and stop there. Half-fluency isn’t a strength, it’s a trap.
That’s not the advice most marketers are given, though. Marketers are told, endlessly, that the way to win the room is to learn to speak the language of the CFO. Get fluent. Drop the right terms. Talk their talk.
I don’t want to be glib. Of course there’s something right in that instinct. Nobody wants a marketer who can’t read a P&L, and vocabulary is where most people start. It’s just unfinished. The trouble is what happens once you’ve collected the phrases and stop there. Half-fluency isn’t a strength, it’s a trap.
In a recent conversation with fellow Marketing Week columnist Johnny Corbett, we said that it’s like ordering a beer in perfect Spanish and then going blank the moment the waiter replies and asks a follow up question. One line of confidence, then nothing behind it. And when that happens in a boardroom, you don’t just lose the argument, you lose the credibility to make the next one.
So, I went and built my understanding properly. I spent real time with our commercial finance team, not to borrow their vocabulary but to understand what mattered to them, day to day.
It took a while; they were understandably suspicious of a marketer who kept turning up with questions instead of demands, who was just wondering ‘what they might think about x, y and z’.
Many questions, some long evenings and so many biscuits later, once the walls came down, everything changed. They taught me to stop presenting single numbers that were easy to disagree with and instead present a range people could stand behind and find hard to argue with. They taught me the value of a confidence percentage over false certainty. None of that is language. It’s a different way of thinking, built with people who’d stopped being “the function that marks your homework” and started being partners in the decision. I got offered a job in the commercial finance team, I politely but gratefully declined.
My career path maybe wasn’t in finance, but I still use every one of these financial assessments and tools at board level myself today.
‘Get everyone playing on the same team’: B2B CMOs and CFOs on improving alignment
Be prepared
Not everyone gets there. A colleague of mine found that out first hand. She’d handed her agency team the dictionary of finance before a big board pitch, briefed them thoroughly, and trusted the vocabulary alone to see them through. It didn’t.
The questions started, and not the friendly ones. The follow-ups. The “talk me through that margin assumption” ones. The team that had learned the language couldn’t speak it under pressure, because they’d never had to think in it. The rebrand was shelved for six months. The budget went instead to a new piece of factory kit.
I’ve since sat on the other side of that table too, as a board advisor, willing a marketing team on as they presented. You could feel the room wanting it to work. I certainly did.
Then the story ran straight into the numbers and stopped. There was no clear line from the strategy on the slide to what it would deliver financially, and underneath it sat a set of reasonably naive assumptions about where the business, and the wider industry, stood commercially at the time.
I watched the credibility drain out of that room in real time, and there was nothing I could do to argue it back in, because the numbers themselves wouldn’t hold, however much I wanted them to.
That’s the particular disappointment of sitting on that side of the table: not that the work was bad, but that you can see exactly why the room can’t back it, and you still can’t get it back for them. No amount of finance vocabulary would have closed that gap.
What I’m actually getting at
Here’s the bit the “learn their language” advice always misses. Fluency isn’t the same as understanding. You can coach someone through the phrases in an afternoon. You cannot coach them through knowing why the range matters, why a confident-sounding proposal with no downside case gets torn apart, why a number without a “why” behind it is just a guess wearing a suit.
So my advice to any marketer eyeing the CFO with a phrasebook is put it down. Go and sit with your finance team instead. Ask what keeps them up at night. Learn to see the risk the way they see it, not just repeat the number the way they say it. Because the room doesn’t need you to sound like them. It needs you to have already done the thinking they were about to ask for.
If not, the money will go to a piece of factory kit instead. It usually does.