The PMM director listened to her VP describe product marketing in the budget review meeting. Seven minutes into his presentation, he hadn't mentioned positioning, competitive intelligence, or sales enablement.
Instead: "Product marketing represents 18% of marketing spend. We believe we can achieve similar outcomes with 15% through efficiency improvements and scope optimization."
She'd spent the year building competitive programs that helped close $6M in deals. The year being described as "18% of marketing spend" that could be "optimized."
This is what happens in budget season. The function that leadership calls "strategic" eleven months per year becomes "overhead" when finance asks where to reduce cost.
Not because PMM stopped being valuable. Because budget conversations operate in different language than operational conversations. And in finance language, PMM is cost center, not revenue driver.
The Language Shift
The enterprise SaaS PMM tracked how executives described product marketing across 2025.
January through October: "Strategic partner for go-to-market." "Critical for competitive differentiation." "Key enabler for sales productivity."
November (budget season): "Marketing overhead." "Indirect function." "Support resource."
Same work. Same team. Same outcomes. Different framing.
The shift happened because budget season requires categorizing all expenses as either revenue-generating or supporting. Sales generates revenue. Demand gen generates pipeline. Product builds what gets sold.
Product marketing? Supports sales, supports product, supports marketing. In budget taxonomy, support equals overhead.
She tried pushing back in one budget conversation: "PMM helped close $6M in competitive deals this year."
The CFO's response: "Sales closed those deals. Your team provided supporting materials. That's valuable, but it's support function cost, not revenue generation."
Accurate in budget semantics. Misleading about actual business impact.
Research on corporate budget language shows this pattern: functions with indirect revenue correlation get categorized as "overhead" or "support" in 68% of budget planning materials, regardless of measured business impact.
The categorization isn't about value judgment. It's about how finance organizes P&L. But once PMM gets labeled "overhead," the budget conversation shifts from "how do we invest in this capability" to "how do we minimize this cost."
The ROI Trap
The cloud infrastructure PMM prepared detailed ROI analysis for her budget defense. Calculated PMM cost per deal supported, competitive win rate with versus without PMM intelligence, sales cycle reduction from strong positioning.
The numbers looked strong: $380K team cost, involvement in deals worth $14M, average 23% improvement in win rates for PMM-enabled opportunities.
Her CMO took the analysis into executive budget review. Thirty seconds in, the CFO stopped him: "These metrics show correlation, not causation. How do we know those deals wouldn't have closed without PMM?"
Fair question. Impossible to answer definitively.
The CMO tried: "We see consistent pattern—deals with PMM support show higher win rates and faster sales cycles."
CFO: "Correlation. Sales also touched those deals. So did our product quality. So did pricing. You're claiming credit for outcomes that have multiple contributors."
Meanwhile, demand gen presented different math: "We spent $2.8M on campaigns, generated $24M in closed pipeline. Here's the attribution model showing our contribution."
The attribution wasn't more accurate than PMM's correlation. But it looked more definitive. Marketing automation tagged every lead source, tracked every campaign touch, and assigned revenue credit algorithmically.
PMM's "deals we supported" looked subjective against demand gen's "leads we sourced."
In budget conversations, precise-looking attribution beats honest correlation—even when the attribution is based on equally uncertain assumptions.
Studies of B2B budget allocation show functions with instrumented attribution models receive 35-40% higher resource allocation than functions with narrative-based impact measurement, controlling for actual business contribution.
The ROI trap isn't that PMM can't demonstrate impact. It's that PMM impact exists in forms (deal support, competitive intelligence, positioning clarity) that resist the attribution frameworks finance understands.
You lose budget battles by being honest about correlation when competitors are being precise about attribution.
The Comparable Cost Problem
The developer tools PMM defended her 2026 budget request: three PMMs at $420K total loaded cost.
The CFO asked a different question: "What would it cost to get similar outcomes through alternative models?"
She hadn't considered alternatives. Her budget case focused on justifying current team.
He'd already modeled options:
Contract PMM support: $120K annually for competitive intelligence, $80K for launch support. Total: $200K versus her $420K.
Reallocate to product marketing agency: $240K retainer for comprehensive coverage.
Shift responsibilities: give positioning to product management, competitive intelligence to sales ops, launch support to demand gen.
She tried explaining why those alternatives wouldn't work as well. He cut her off: "I'm not saying they'd work better. I'm asking if they'd work well enough at 50% cost."
That's a different question. And she didn't have a compelling answer.
Research shows this pattern in budget season: 43% of PMM budget cuts in 2024-2025 came from finance identifying lower-cost alternative models for delivering similar outcomes, not from challenging whether outcomes mattered.
The comparable cost problem isn't about proving PMM value. It's about proving PMM is the most cost-effective way to deliver that value.
Most PMMs never address this because they assume their job is to justify the work, not to prove internal team is better than alternatives.
But finance assumes every function should justify why it exists in-house versus contracted, outsourced, or eliminated through responsibility redistribution.
The Advocacy Disappearance
The fintech PMM had strong executive support throughout 2025. Her CPO regularly praised positioning work. Her CRO cited competitive intelligence in deal reviews. Her CEO referenced her messaging in external presentations.
She felt confident entering budget season. Leadership valued product marketing.
The budget meeting happened November 7th. CMO, CFO, CPO, CRO, CEO discussing 2026 resource allocation.
Product marketing came up forty minutes into the conversation. The CFO proposed 25% reduction: "Product marketing does good work, but given growth targets and cost constraints, this is addressable spend."
The PMM waited for someone to object. The CPO who'd praised her work. The CRO who'd cited her competitive intelligence. The CEO who'd referenced her messaging.
Silence. Then the CMO: "We can make that work through scope reduction and efficiency improvements."
Meeting moved on. Her budget cut by $110K, reducing team from three PMMs to two.
She asked her CPO afterward why he didn't defend PMM budget. His answer: "I value your work. But when the CFO proposes a cut, arguing against it means accepting that cut elsewhere—probably in my product budget. I wasn't willing to give up a PM headcount to save your PMM headcount."
This is the advocacy disappearance. Executives who support your work in operational contexts become silent in budget contexts because defending you costs them resources.
Your executive "champions" are champions when championship is free. In budget season, championship has price: protecting PMM means accepting cuts to their own priorities.
Research on budget advocacy shows that executive support for cross-functional teams drops 60-70% when supporting that function requires real resource trade-offs versus costless endorsement.
Most PMMs have executives who appreciate their work. Almost no PMMs have executives willing to sacrifice their own budget to protect PMM allocation.
Appreciation evaporates when it becomes expensive.
The Utilization Question
The B2B platform PMM's budget got challenged on a metric she hadn't considered: utilization rate.
The CFO had analyzed her team's calendar. PMMs spent 35% of time in meetings, 25% on communication (email, Slack), 15% on research and analysis, 25% on deliverable creation.
His calculation: 60% of PMM time goes to coordination and research. Only 25% to output that directly supports revenue functions.
His question: "If we're paying for three full-time PMMs but getting 0.75 FTE worth of direct output, why not hire 1.5 PMMs and reduce coordination overhead?"
She tried explaining that coordination and research aren't overhead—they're necessary for quality output.
He countered: "Demand gen has 40% of time in direct campaign execution. Sales ops has 55% in direct sales support. Your 25% direct output ratio suggests inefficiency or scope bloat."
The utilization question reframes PMM work through manufacturing lens: input (PMM hours) versus output (deliverables). Any time not producing deliverables becomes inefficiency.
This ignores that PMM work quality depends on the coordination and research that look like inefficiency in utilization analysis.
But in budget season, finance applies utilization metrics that assume all knowledge work should optimize for output ratio.
Industry data shows utilization rates becoming more common in PMM budget reviews: 31% of companies applied some form of utilization analysis to marketing functions in 2025, up from 12% in 2023.
The trend reflects broader pressure to quantify knowledge work efficiency using metrics borrowed from manufacturing and operations.
You can argue the metrics are wrong. Finance will apply them anyway.
What Actually Protects Budget
The marketing automation PMM approached budget season differently in 2025 after losing 30% of allocation in 2024.
She stopped trying to prove PMM was strategic. Started proving PMM was necessary.
Her budget case focused on one question: "What stops working if you cut PMM?"
The analysis was specific:
Competitive intelligence: Sales currently gets battlecard updates within 48 hours of competitor changes. Without PMM, competitive information comes from reps encountering objections they can't handle. Average time to response: 2-3 weeks.
Product launches: Current model delivers positioning and enablement aligned to launch timing. Without PMM, product team writes positioning (engineering-focused language), demand gen creates enablement (campaign-focused materials), sales gets inconsistent messaging. Historical pattern from pre-PMM era: 6-8 week lag between launch and sales readiness.
Win/loss intelligence: PMM currently conducts structured interviews and distributes insights. Without PMM, win/loss becomes ad-hoc sales feedback with no systematic analysis. Competitive intelligence gaps remain invisible until deals are lost.
Not "PMM drives revenue." "PMM prevents specific failure modes that cost more than PMM budget."
Her CFO responded differently to necessity framing than value framing. Value claims were debatable. Necessity claims were verifiable: "Here's what broke when we had no PMM in 2021."
Research shows budget cases focused on "cost of absence" (what breaks without this function) perform 40% better than cases focused on "value of presence" (what this function enables).
Cost of absence is concrete and verifiable. Value of presence is abstract and disputable.
Some PMMs are using platforms like Segment8 to make necessity more visible: tracking response time for competitive requests, measuring sales readiness post-launch, documenting how quickly intelligence reaches field teams.
When you can show "competitive response time increased 340% the last time we cut PMM headcount," you make the cost of cuts more concrete than theoretical value claims.
The Real Budget Season Question
Budget season reveals how organizations actually think about product marketing—not what they say in strategy meetings but what they choose when resources get constrained.
The language shift from "strategic" to "overhead" shows PMM's vulnerability: valued in operational contexts, discretionary in financial contexts.
Your 2026 budget won't be determined by proving PMM is valuable. It'll be determined by proving PMM is necessary, cost-effective, and more defensible than alternative models.
Most PMMs enter budget season trying to prove value. Finance already assumes you're valuable—that's not the question.
The questions are: Is PMM necessary enough to protect during cuts? Is in-house PMM more cost-effective than alternatives? Does PMM deliver outputs at utilization rates comparable to other functions?
Value doesn't protect budget. Necessity does.
The PMMs who protected allocation in 2025 weren't those with best impact stories. They were those who made the cost of cutting their budget more concrete and immediate than the benefit of reallocating resources.
That's less inspiring than "prove your strategic value." But it's how budget battles actually get won.
Budget season is when PMM becomes overhead in executive conversations. The question is whether you've made yourself necessary enough that cutting overhead costs more than keeping it.
Most PMMs haven't. That's why most PMM budgets get cut.