‘Massive superpower’: What do we mean by financial fluency?

B2B marketers say they value financial fluency, but what does that really mean?

Marketing Week’s 2025 State of B2B Marketing research found nearly four out of five (79%) of the 450 B2B marketers surveyed believe financial literacy will become a critical skill over the next three years.

At companies big and small, marketers named a number of motivations behind this belief. Having the vocabulary to make a stronger case for marketing investment was the prime reason, cited by more than 90% of respondents. Optics – looking like a business leader – were a concern for 56.9%, while more than a third wanted to build a stronger relationship with their CFO. Slightly less than a third are hoping to ease their own transition into general management.

However, for some B2B marketers an understanding of finances is far more important than that – and it is never too early to start learning.

“My view is that if you don’t understand your clients and markets, you can’t be an effective marketer,” says Leor Franks, chief commercial officer at law firm Kingsley Napley.

However, there are financial truths closer to home marketers should learn, he says. For example, he suggests marketers sometimes lack a basic understanding of how their own company makes money.

You’ve got to be the biggest friend of the most junior finance analyst who will tell you where all the skeletons are.

Mary-Anne Russell, Trinity Square

“Throughout my career, all of the marketing training I’ve been on has extolled the virtues of bringing the outside in. Understanding the mindset of the client, understanding their journey with your brand, understanding the markets and segmenting them. Rarely does that marketing training actually say understand your business, because not all clients, not all customers, are equal,” explains Franks.

For example, revenue is clearly important, but profit “generally is even more important”, he adds. Franks suggests marketers should develop a clear understanding of the business model their company works to, so they understand who their most valuable customers, or potential customers, are. This can be vitally important when deciding on the most effective tactics to attract those buyers.

“I would advocate, even at an entry level, understanding the basics of corporate accounting, so that you can read the financial statements of your company,” he says.

While many marketers reach a stage part-way through their career where they realise that a lack of financial fluency is holding them back, the most profitable time to invest in gaining that fluency might be earlier on.

When it comes to upskilling “there might be less pressure, but there’s probably more benefit” to starting early, argues Franks. He entered marketing via an unorthodox route, starting in journalism before completing an MBA and then qualifying as an accountant. This investment in skills soon paid dividends in his marketing career.

“I observed that my career moved more quickly than many of my peers at a junior level. The business leaders I worked with would often say: ‘You seem to get the business and other people don’t,’” he recalls. “It was because I qualified in finance.”

B2B: Financial literacy ‘critical’ to secure investment

While other marketers would talk to the business leaders about colour and brand, Franks was talking to them about clients and revenue. His career progressed quickly as a result.

“It wasn’t because I had more technical knowledge or more interpersonal capability. It was because I had more business knowledge. I would argue for, at the most junior levels, getting that understanding. I try to help my team do that,” he says.

This can include simple team exercises to identify where turnover comes from, and how elements such as volume and price work together to achieve it.

“You should learn that as soon as you get into a marketing career, not wait for years,” adds Franks.

Fractional CMO and Trinity Square founder Mary-Anne Russell is in agreement. Working extensively with B2B companies, often ones funded through private equity, Russell is well-versed in speaking a language her clients and colleagues understand.

“There are some things about marketing that I actually don’t talk to the CFO about,” she says.

“When it’s things like vanity metrics – click-through rates, open rates, what’s gone viral – their eyes glaze over. They actually don’t care about it. What they do care about is revenue, EBITDA, what makes the business tick. What’s making us money, what’s losing us money.”

Going ‘under the hood’

Russell seconds the point that an understanding of profit is an essential marketing skill. She notes that as businesses become more complicated, so do the sources of profit.

“If, for example, it’s a subscription business, there is not just that one level of profit. It’s one level of profit, plus customer lifetime value, and then that client becomes profitable,” she says.

“If you can’t talk about that, you don’t have the commerciality to know if your marketing is actually worth doing. That’s what it comes down to. How much of this stuff is worth doing? We know a lot of it works, but is it worthwhile? Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

Russell describes a “massive gap” in marketer training where financial fluency should be. It’s a gap marketers may need to fill themselves, through training courses if they can get them, or self-directed learning if they can’t.

As a revenue-driven marketer my goal is to know as much about the business’s financial position as possible, both where we are and where we are going.

Jess Hawkins

“Marketers really need to be much more curious and find a pal in the finance team,” she says.

“While it’s important to understand the EBITDA, the profit and the revenue, it’s also important to understand all the other aspects that go into making up the numbers of the business.”

Thus, marketers in a property company should understand commercial leases and the levers that can be pulled to make deals more or less attractive, for example.

“The only way you’ll really understand that is if you get under the skin of what’s happening in the finance team. One of the things that we keep talking about is how the CMO is going to be the biggest friend of the CFO, but it’s deeper than that. You’ve got to be the biggest friend of the most junior finance analyst who will tell you where all the skeletons are,” says Russell.

“To me, this isn’t a skillset that only arrives when you’re at CMO level. If you can start having these conversations in your most junior stages, it’s a massive superpower.”

Russell views financial fluency as having multiple benefits, including all of those named by the State of B2B Marketing respondents, plus others. Gaining marketing investment, looking like a marketing leader, launching careers more effectively and recognising early warning signs are all benefits of greater financial understanding, she suggests.

For example, marketers who are offered a ‘great deal’ of company equity instead of a pay rise are in a better position to judge the value of such an offer if they have better financial fluency, says Russell.

“You’re on a better footing, if you actually understand what’s going on under the hood,” she adds.

Transparency needed

Jess Hawkins, another fractional B2B CMO, moves between companies on a frequent basis. She has worked hard to achieve a good level of financial understanding and benefitted early on in her career from working with a managing director who shared the financial details used in strategy decisions.

She also put herself through a course that covered the financial knowledge required to craft effective marketing strategies.

“As a revenue-driven marketer my goal is to know as much about the business’s financial position as possible, both where we are and where we are going. I ask my fractional clients all those awkward money questions as well. My idea of marketing success is a progressive growth in revenue,” she says.

Of course, understanding cannot be applied without access to financial details, meaning it is vital marketers have sight of the books if they are to be most effective.

“With my last in-house role I had full transparency over the entire pipeline, as well as guaranteed income, and it was great to know exactly where our shortfalls were as well as potential areas for growth. We were really hot on forecasting based on past income trends and pipeline velocity, so it meant we could be on the ball with predicting income high and low months,” says Hawkins.

I would advocate, even at an entry level, understanding the basics of corporate accounting, so that you can read the financial statements of your company.

Leor Franks, Kingsley Napley

This kind of knowledge allows marketers to be proactive rather than reactive, meaning fewer awkward chats with sales teams asking for more leads, she says.

“I’d imagine it’s hard to work out a business growth plan when you don’t know where you are or where you’re going to,” she adds.

“Plus, when it comes to setting the marketing strategy one of the most important things to know is what the company’s financial goal is that year. Without financial literacy, being able to work out how to reach it would be impossible.”

Previously managing director of retail POS display supplier Frontline, Martin Kelly has seen his role evolve into CEO for parent company Big Group. He explains financial fluency is an important topic, but the knowledge required is changing fast for all involved.

“[Financial fluency for marketers is] something that gets discussed a lot,” says Kelly. “It can depend on where a company is on its journey.”

Unfortunately for many established marketers in service industries, it is also a fact that understanding of traditional business models, and the place of creative within them, is in flux.

“Being creative always has a commercial cost, but you would hope that being creative would mean people beating a path to your door,” says Kelly. “But the value proposition is changing now.”

For example, the advent and rapid adoption of AI means billing clients for hours worked will no longer be a viable business strategy for many service sector companies, he says. The idea of billing clients for hours spent at a desk by staff is increasingly not viable when that is not how much of the work is done.

“That’s not going to be the model going forward. The model is going to be far more value proposition-led, around the quality of the thinking, the quality of the idea, the quality of the output,” says Kelly.

The subsequent shift of business models will demand a shift in marketing strategies.

Marketers brought up on traditional B2B business models will have to learn new ways of doing things, says Kelly. The one consolation may be that everybody else in the business is learning those new business models too.

Marketing Week will continue reporting from the State of B2B Marketing survey over the coming weeks.