From Clicks to Closures: How AI is Helping B2B Marketers Prove ROI to CFOs

Marketing is no longer about brand visibility alone – it’s about business accountability. As CFO oversight grows sharper and budgets get tighter, B2B marketers face mounting pressure to prove tangible business impact. As a result, marketing’s role is shifting – moving beyond vanity metrics to show clear links between investments, revenue, and long-term customer value.

In the latest episode of CNBCTV18-Storyboard18’s Decoding B2B: Marketing That Means Business, co-powered by LinkedIn, Sachin Sharma, Head of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, India, and Krishnan Chatterjee, Head of Marketing at Google Cloud India, discussed how AI is helping B2B marketers drive measurable ROI in an era of heightened accountability.

Recasting Marketing’s Role in the P&L

In the episode, Chatterjee explained how marketing, long perceived as a cost centre buried in the “bottom half” of the P&L, must now position itself firmly in the growth-driving “top half.” Calling out an imbalance in spends, he shared that nearly 90% of incremental revenue typically comes from existing customers, yet most marketing spends disproportionately target the 10% of net-new acquisitions. “Unless marketers impact that existing 90% increment, they’ll face tough questions from CFOs,” he said.

Building on that, Sharma explained that the pressure on proving long-term value is being accelerated by macroeconomic pressures and changing buyer behavior. “There are a lot of innovative solutions powered by AI. But the first question to ask is whether you have clean, accurate data.”

AI – an Enabler of Smarter Measurement

The leaders highlighted how AI is emerging as a critical enabler in this shift from marketing’s traditional focus on new customers to a more sustainable model of driving growth from existing accounts. Beyond creative optimization, AI is helping B2B marketers with smarter targeting, predictive analytics and more meaningful measurement. From identifying ideal customer profiles across fragmented datasets to personalizing content for thousands of micro-segments, AI is enabling efficiency and value creation at scale to align with CFO expectations.

Sharma outlined three major barriers marketers must overcome to prove value: attribution challenges, weak industry benchmarks and siloed data. “If your datasets don’t talk to each other, you can’t present a unified picture of value to your CFO or CEO,” he explained. Chatterjee added that breaking internal silos and investing in customer data platforms is essential to treat every buyer as a single entity rather than individual touchpoints.

Measuring What Truly Matters

Both Chatterjee and Sharma emphasized the shift from volume-driven vanity metrics like clicks and leads to value metrics such as customer lifetime value, account expansion and pipeline predictability. “It’s not about generating 10,000 leads and closing 50,” Chatterjee observed. “CFOs want efficiency. They want 100 high-quality leads that deliver 50 closures.”

Pointing to the need for unified data solutions, Sharma stated that technology is only part of the answer. “There are a lot of technical solutions, but all of that only comes in if there is philosophical alignment,” he said. "One is that you’re a customer focussed business. But the second is that you start with accurate first party data.” Speaking of how LinkedIn helps B2B marketers pair data and technology to drive measurable output, Sharma shared, “We have an API that integrates with a CRM. It can help you track how your marketing investments are yielding results. We have something called revenue attribution that helps you attribute offline and online revenue to your marketing influence."

Speaking the CFO’s Language

With AI enabling predictive measurement and tighter alignment of marketing with sales pipelines, B2B marketers are now better positioned to speak the CFO’s language of efficiency, impact and long-term value. The age of vanity metrics is fading fast; today’s CMOs must show measurable contributions to growth if they want to secure CFO trust and future-proof their budgets.

Catch the second episode of Decoding B2B: Marketing That Means Business on 31st August at 11:30 a.m. on CNBC-TV18.

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