Finance is a binary world. Profit or loss. Up or down.

Marketing is a feel good world. "Doesn't that seem better?" and "Isn't that a more inviting shade of blue?"

A scant 7% of senior-level financial executives surveyed report being satisfied with their company’s ability to measure marketing ROI, according to a study published Tuesday by Marketing Management Analytics, a unit of Carat, and Financial Executives International, an association of senior corporate financial executives.

The entire report and analysis is here.

Surprisingly, I find myself siding with the CFOs. Marketing (PR) is supposed to help reduce the cost of sales, increase the first time order, generate more repeat business faster, generate leads, improve the quality of leads, shorten the sales cycle, defer competitive entry. But I find so many marketing professionals who can't or won't even divide the number of trade show leads into the cost of attending an event, let alone figuring out how many leads from a show converted to a sale. Image ads? Reputation management? Visibility events? Viral marketing stunts? Hey… what's all this doing for the bottom line… and can you prove it?

Finance people have P/E rations; debt to equity formulas, market caps, 52-week highs and lows, average daily volumes. Marketing people have… let's try this?

A CFO I know, like, and respect told me once, "Sterling, there are only ten numbers… get to know them well." He was right.

Not that I don't have my issues with finance people. You can't put an ROI on a kiss. Not everything in life can be reduced to an ROI. No risk, no reward. A world devoid of creativity isn't worth living in. But isn't it about time we find a healthy midddle ground.

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