If you expect your marketing team to bring in signed contracts — you’re not building a business, you’re gambling.
Here’s the painful truth:
Many fast-growing IT companies burn through budgets, leads, and time… not because their offer is weak, but because they confuse marketing with sales.
In this post, we’ll break down:
- The clear (and often misunderstood) responsibilities of marketing vs. sales
- Where most companies sabotage their growth
- And how to build a system that scales globally — with math, not magic
Marketing and sales are not the same — but they must work together like a well-oiled machine.
- Marketing builds visibility, trust, and interest. Think: ads, SEO, landing pages, lead magnets. They’re the engine behind inbound and outbound attraction.
- Sales turns that interest into real deals. Think: discovery calls, demos, negotiations, and closing. They interact directly with leads and help them decide.
If marketing brings people to the door, sales invites them in and seats them at the table.
Where It Breaks: Common Mistakes Companies Make
Especially in the IT outsourcing space, companies often fall into one of these traps:
- Hiring marketing staff and expecting them to close sales (they’re not trained for that).
- Hiring an agency and blaming them when sales don’t come in (they generate leads, not revenue).
- Pushing technical teams to handle sales when no actual salesperson is in place.
- Not tracking conversions across the funnel — so no one knows what’s actually working.
The result? Lost leads, misused budget, and stalled expansion.
The Math of Scaling: Know Your Funnel
Here’s where most CEOs miss a massive opportunity. When sales and marketing collaborate, you can create a measurable customer acquisition engine:
- 1,000 visitors from Google Ads
→ 500 download your whitepaper
→ 100 become qualified leads
→ 10 receive a proposal
→ 1 signs the deal
Now, you can calculate:
- Cost per lead
- Cost per client
- Revenue per campaign
- Time-to-close from first touch to signed deal
That’s how you scale smart.
The Fix: Align Teams + Assign Shared KPIs
How do you bring sales and marketing together?
- Hold weekly syncs to exchange feedback from the field and campaign performance.
- Let salespeople tell marketing what problems customers are really asking about.
- Involve marketing in post-sale surveys to inform better messaging.
- Most importantly: assign revenue KPIs to marketing, as suggested by entrepreneur Tomasz Onyszko.
Why? It forces collaboration. When marketing is measured partly on revenue — not just impressions or downloads — they naturally align with sales to win deals together.
Final Word: Don’t Mix the Job Titles
Sales and marketing are different. But when they operate in sync, your business becomes a lead-converting, revenue-generating machine.
👉 See more details in the full podcast here