Why One Finance Leader Thinks Companies Waste Money on Marketing

Companies are hemorrhaging money on marketing that doesn’t work, and most don’t realize it because they’re measuring the wrong things. That’s the argument from a finance executive who has spent years watching organizations confuse activity with results.

“Marketing teams are basically, for all intents and purposes, they care about getting a lead in the door and then they kind of wash their hands,” explains Taylor Thomson, who leads finance and revenue operations at Denver-based agency WITHIN. The problem isn’t that marketing teams are incompetent—it’s that their success metrics often diverge from what actually matters to the business.

The Attribution Problem Nobody Wants to Solve

Thomson puts it bluntly: “If you figure out the attribution question wholly, you’re good.” He laughs when he says this because everyone in marketing knows attribution is essentially unsolvable. Was it the first touchpoint that mattered most? The last one before conversion? Some weighted combination of every interaction? Different models produce radically different answers about which activities deserve credit.

This ambiguity creates space for marketing teams to claim credit for outcomes they may not have actually influenced. A lead that was going to buy anyway—because your company already had strong brand recognition in that prospect’s industry—gets attributed to whichever campaign last touched them before they converted. Marketing declares victory. Finance sees budget spent on someone who likely would have bought regardless.

The inverse also happens. Marketing generates genuine interest through thought leadership, content marketing, and brand building—activities that create conditions for sales success without directly causing specific conversions. These contributions become invisible in standard attribution models focused on last-touch measurement. Finance sees marketing budget without obvious ROI. Marketing feels underappreciated for work that actually matters.

Thomson’s solution involves looking at revenue operations holistically rather than trying to attribute specific outcomes to specific activities. Did overall business metrics improve after implementing new marketing initiatives? That’s a better question than trying to assign precise credit to individual campaigns.

Why Business Development Shouldn’t Report to Marketing or Sales

Most organizations structure business development as either a marketing function or a sales function. Thomson argues this creates systematic dysfunction. BD teams reporting to marketing optimize for lead volume—their job is to feed the funnel regardless of lead quality. BD teams reporting to sales optimize for conversion rates—they avoid anything that might not close, even if those opportunities could become valuable clients.

Neither approach serves the organization’s actual interest: attracting prospects who are good fits and likely to become successful long-term clients. “You fall into that trap and then you see your open rates drop to 40, to 30 to 25 to 20,” Thomson explains, describing what happens when volume pressure leads BD teams to sacrifice personalization for quantity. “The volume increase just doesn’t make up for the fact that you’re cheapening the value of the people that you have, which are having good conversations with your prospects.”

At WITHIN, business development operates as an independent function that serves both marketing and sales without being beholden to either team’s specific metrics. This requires someone credible to both sides—someone who understands marketing’s need for pipeline and sales’ need for closeable opportunities. Thomson’s background includes roles reporting to both marketing and sales leadership, giving him the political capital to maintain this independence.

The Morning Intelligence Ritual Most Executives Skip

While other finance leaders are reviewing management reports, Thomson spends 15-20 minutes each morning scanning approximately 15 industry newsletters. He’s mining for intelligence: Which companies just raised capital? What supply chain issues are emerging? Where are trends accelerating or reversing?

This isn’t personal curiosity—it’s operational infrastructure. Thomson’s business development team uses his curated intelligence to inform their prospect conversations. When a retail company announces strong earnings, their competitors immediately start questioning whether their marketing strategies are adequate. These moments create openings—but only if your team understands the context.

“You can pull so much interesting information from how people are thinking, what they’re doing, what their challenges and pain points are,” Thomson notes. When a startup IPOs, that signals not just one company’s capital influx but competitive responses across their entire sector. Smart BD teams connect these dots. Most organizations don’t bother.

What Agencies Misunderstand About ROI

Thomson takes particular issue with how agencies think about return on investment for marketing infrastructure. Organizations underinvest in marketing foundations—the content, positioning, and thought leadership that create conditions for sales success—because leadership demands immediate ROI. But the payback period for effective marketing is typically six to nine months.

“That’s a hard pill to swallow,” Thomson acknowledges. “Especially with things like that, really high value content and things that drive relationships in that way, you might not actually ever see a direct one-to-one correlation to your revenue until a year.” Finance teams push for faster returns. Marketing teams resort to tactics that produce quick metrics but little lasting value.

The solution Thomson advocates sounds radical: create genuinely valuable content and don’t gate it. No registration forms. No lead capture. Just information that helps people solve problems. “The more of that that marketing teams can really do, where you don’t have to enter the sales funnel,” he argues, “the better everybody’s going to be at their jobs because it’s just information sharing and knowledge sharing.”

This contradicts standard practice. Marketing teams justify their budgets through lead volume. Ungated content doesn’t generate leads—at least not in ways that CRM systems can easily track. But Thomson argues the second-order effects matter more: people remember brands that helped them without demanding contact information. When they eventually need services, they think of companies that previously provided value.

The Technology Trap

Thomson describes himself as someone who “lives and dies by Salesforce,” positioning himself as “the annoying person that’s like if it’s not in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist.” This insistence on systematic data capture drives colleagues crazy. But it’s foundational to understanding what actually works versus what just feels productive.

The mistake many organizations make isn’t insufficient technology—it’s insufficient discipline about using the technology they already have. Salesforce becomes useful when everyone consistently logs activities, outcomes, and context. When only some people update it consistently, the data becomes unreliable. When leadership doesn’t actually use the data to inform decisions, the whole system becomes performative rather than operational.

At WITHIN, the technology stack extends beyond CRM to include Outreach for sales engagement, Pathmatics for competitive intelligence on social media spend, and OpenSense for signature marketing. But Thomson emphasizes that tools alone don’t create results. “I’m a huge fan of automation. We’re lucky here in that we have a really great tech stack,” he says. “But there’s temptation when you get to that point of, oh, I’ve got to triple my outbound outreach because I don’t have anybody driving me interest.”

That temptation leads to the death spiral of business development: sending more emails because you’re not getting responses, which leads to even worse response rates because your emails are less personalized, which leads to sending even more emails. The volume might look impressive in activity reports. The outcomes look terrible in revenue reports.

What Performance Branding Actually Means

WITHIN positions itself as a “performance branding” agency, which sounds like consultant-speak for “we do marketing.” But the terminology reflects something more specific: the collapse of traditional separation between brand marketing (build emotional connections) and performance marketing (drive measurable outcomes).

Traditional agencies separate these functions. Brand teams create emotional campaigns. Performance teams optimize conversion funnels. They have different budgets, different KPIs, and often contradictory ideas about what success means. WITHIN’s model integrates these approaches, arguing that every campaign should simultaneously build brand equity and drive business results.

Making this operational requires different infrastructure than traditional agencies. You can’t measure “performance branding” success using only brand lift studies or only return on ad spend. You need integrated analytics that connect brand health metrics to business outcomes. That’s where Thomson’s role becomes critical—building the operational and financial infrastructure that makes integrated marketing accountable.

The Client Success Problem Marketing Creates

One underappreciated consequence of traditional marketing approaches: they create unrealistic expectations that client success teams must then manage. When marketing promises capabilities the organization can’t consistently deliver, or when sales closes deals with clients who aren’t actually good fits, client success inherits the resulting problems.

Thomson’s expanded role now includes overseeing client onboarding processes—the transition from closed deal to active engagement. For agencies, this transition is critical. You’re not selling a product that clients use independently. You’re positioning yourself as a strategic partner whose value depends on sustained collaboration. Get the onboarding wrong, and clients never fully commit to the relationship.

“We really truly believe in a holistic approach from channel strategy,” Thomson explains. “We’re not just yes men. We’re in there really looking at the accounts strategically and making recommendations and really thinking at a high level about the long-term health of our client’s business.” But establishing that credibility requires time—time that gets wasted if the onboarding process doesn’t build trust quickly.

This connects to Thomson’s broader argument about marketing waste. Organizations spend heavily on acquiring clients but underinvest in ensuring those clients become successful. The economics are backwards: acquisition costs are front-loaded and certain, while lifetime value is back-loaded and dependent on execution. Better client screening and stronger onboarding would improve overall returns, but most companies optimize for closing deals rather than ensuring good fits.

The Education Nobody Gets

Thomson’s path to revenue operations leadership included stops in financial services research, customer data platforms, and several roles at previous companies. But the actual training for what he does now? That came primarily through self-education and programs like Pavilion’s Rising Executives Course and Revenue Operations Summer School.

Traditional finance education doesn’t prepare people for integrated revenue roles. MBA programs teach financial analysis and strategic frameworks, not how to build operational infrastructure across marketing, sales, and client success. The gap means most finance leaders either stay narrowly focused on traditional CFO responsibilities or learn through trial and error how to expand their influence.

Thomson’s interdisciplinary undergraduate background—political science, economics, Spanish—proved more useful preparation than conventional pre-business training. Learning to synthesize information across domains, recognize patterns in different contexts, and communicate insights to varied audiences matters more than deep specialization in any single discipline.

Where Agency Economics Are Heading

Thomson sees challenges ahead for the agency business model. “Mid-sized venues struggle, as huge clubs take so many tickets out the market,” he notes, drawing a parallel between music venue economics and agency markets. Large agencies with enterprise client relationships will survive. Boutique specialists serving niche markets will thrive. Mid-market generalist agencies face existential questions about differentiation.

WITHIN’s answer involves building methodology that delivers consistent results regardless of which specific practitioners are executing. This is different from traditional agency economics, which often depend on access to famous practitioners. Can you systematize excellence sufficiently that clients pay for your approach rather than your team’s pedigrees?

The question matters because the alternative—agencies competing primarily on roster credentials—leads to unsustainable talent bidding wars. Top practitioners command inflating compensation. Agencies pass costs through to clients. Mid-market clients eventually decide these agencies are too expensive and look elsewhere. The business model becomes viable only for the largest engagements.

The Real ROI Question Nobody Asks

Thomson’s critique of marketing waste ultimately raises a deeper question: What should organizations actually be optimizing for? Quarterly lead generation? Annual revenue targets? Three-year client lifetime value? Five-year brand equity?

Different time horizons suggest radically different strategies. Marketing that looks wasteful over six months might be building foundations that pay off over six years. Conversely, activities that generate immediate leads might be burning long-term brand credibility for short-term results.

Finance leaders are supposed to help organizations think clearly about these trade-offs. But most finance organizations are structured to measure short-term outcomes. Quarterly reporting rhythms, annual budgets, and immediate ROI expectations push toward tactics that produce measurable near-term results regardless of long-term consequences.

Thomson’s morning intelligence ritual, his advocacy for ungated content, his insistence on building operational infrastructure rather than just optimizing existing processes—these reflect a longer time horizon than typical financial planning. The approach makes sense if you believe sustainable competitive advantage comes from organizational capabilities rather than temporary tactical advantages.

Whether that approach actually works at scale remains an open question. WITHIN’s client roster suggests something is working: Foot Locker, Ben & Jerry’s, and The North Face represent significant enterprise relationships. But extrapolating from one agency’s experience to broader conclusions about marketing efficiency requires caution.

What’s clear is that someone needs to ask uncomfortable questions about whether marketing activities actually drive business outcomes. And that someone needs enough credibility with both marketing and finance to have those conversations productively. Thomson’s career suggests this role is increasingly necessary—even if job titles and organizational charts haven’t fully caught up to the reality.