“If the product is good enough, customers will come on their own. We don’t need fancy marketing; that doesn’t work anyway.”
Meanwhile, R&D soaks up extra budget like a sponge. No questions asked. Just the CTO saying “We need this.”
In many tech companies, there’s always someone who is responsible for something essential, yet chronically underfunded. They wait months for decisions and run into walls over and over.
Collision of worldviews
The cause isn’t malice. Marketing and technical development see the world in fundamentally different ways.
A technical mind prefers the world clear and predictable: you build something, you test it, you measure whether it works. There are specifications, protocols, data. Everything is reproducible. When something goes wrong, you can pinpoint exactly where and why. Ideally, everything can be reduced to an algorithm.
Marketing – especially the creative side – is in many ways the opposite of that predictability. Creativity is chaotic. Through experimentation, new forms and ideas emerge. If the process becomes too methodical and predictable, so does the result. The value lies precisely in the unexpected, in combinations you didn’t foresee.
But in a tech company, where algorithmic thinking is the norm, that creative process doesn’t feel like value creation. It feels like chaos without guarantees.
So distrust emerges. Not because marketing has no value, but because the process works fundamentally differently from what tech companies are used to valuing. That perception is especially strong after earlier disappointments with agencies that promised a lot and delivered very little.
The result:
- Budgets remain limited to the bare minimum
- Marketing decisions get endlessly postponed
- The marketing team gets blamed when leads dry up, but doesn’t get the resources to fix it
Why marketing feels so unreliable
The distrust isn’t entirely unjustified. The marketing world did a lot of this to itself.
Most agencies eagerly say “yes” when you ask them to build a website. They don’t ask critical questions. They don’t dive deep into your market and your real challenges. Instead, you get a stack of ideas that are mainly cool for the agency itself – not for you, the client. Ad people hunting for awards.
In short: lots of talk, very little result.
The essence of good marketing lies in your back-end infrastructure: the system that ensures potential customers can find you, understand what you do, and know why they should work with you.
What you actually want is simple:
- A proposition people understand in 30 seconds
- A website that builds trust instead of raising questions
- Tools that talk to each other
- Data that shows what works (and what doesn’t)
- A visual identity that matches the level you deliver
The blind spot
Tech companies treat their product with extreme discipline, but marketing as something that “also needs to happen.”
You see the same pattern everywhere: 50 people working on the product, with budgets in the millions per year. On the other side: 1 or 2 people who have to handle all of marketing, with a budget of a few tens of thousands. The product is what everything revolves around. That’s where the expertise is, where the time goes, where the focus lies.
This logic has a blind spot: customers don’t experience these as separate components. Product, service, branding, content – it’s all one thing in the customer’s mind.
The systems around the product therefore have to grow with the same discipline. An excellent product that people can’t find, don’t understand, or don’t trust ends up at the same place as a mediocre product.
There’s a massive graveyard full of great products and services that never found their market.
Let’s roughly calculate what this inefficiency costs.
Take a sales team of 10 people. Without a clear proposition and trustworthy presence, a typical deal cycle takes an average of 6 months.
With a solid foundation, that drops to 3 months. Leads come in with prior knowledge, trust is already partly built, and conversations get substantive faster.
A simple calculation might look like this:
If a 10-person sales team closes $2M annually (avg $200K per person) but spends 3 months extra per deal, improving the cycle by 50% (from 6 to 3 months) effectively doubles their annual capacity. That’s $2 million in hidden lost capacity.
And that only counts efficiency gains. It doesn’t even include:
- Leads you never see because they can’t find you
- Leads that drop off because your proposition and marketing don’t convince them
- Prospects who go to competitors who do this part better
So how do you convince your skeptical colleagues?
By treating your branding, marketing channels, and data sources as essential components of your product.
The challenge isn’t just fixing the marketing system. The real challenge is doing it in a way that gives your technical colleagues confidence.
That means: speak their language. Make the process predictable, measurable, and incremental. Don’t treat marketing as a creative party, but as systems development.
Treat marketing like engineering
Approach marketing processes the way you approach engineering processes. Control the chaos. Create a roadmap, a feature list, and a solid blueprint of your marketing machine before you start.
Learn from product development and how they build new features. What steps do you need to take to reach a reliable result?
Step 1: Map your current system
Document exactly where you stand now. Not in vague terms, but concretely:
- Where do leads come from? (sources, numbers, conversion rates)
- Which tools do you use? (and do they talk to each other?)
- What does each lead cost? (time, money, resources)
- How many leads drop off, and where? (funnel analysis)
- What’s the average conversion time?
Make this visual, with a flowchart of your current system that clearly marks the bottlenecks. That’s where you see the leaks.
Goal: Don’t just shout that “marketing needs to be better,” but demonstrate exactly where the problem is. Share data, not opinions.
Step 2: Prioritize based on impact and feasibility
You can’t fix everything at once. So ask:
- Which bottlenecks cost the most? (in time, missed revenue, or frustration)
- Which are fastest to solve?
- Which depend on other changes?
Often, it starts with clarity:
- Is your proposition sharp? Do people understand what you do in 30 seconds?
- Do your website and branding reflect the right level?
Then comes technical optimization:
- Sharpening or renewing your visual identity
- A website that converts (not just beautiful, but effective)
- Tools that sync and share data (CRM, marketing automation, analytics)
And only then comes scaling:
- Content that structurally generates traffic
- Automation that takes over manual work
- Space and time to develop further in directions that prove effective
Goal: Show your CTO this isn’t a vague “let’s brainstorm about our brand” project, but a systematic approach with clear phases.
Step 3: Test, measure, iterate
Start small. Pick one item from your priority list and test it thoroughly. For example:
- New website? A/B test your homepage copy and measure conversion.
- Proposition unclear? Test two different versions in your outreach and measure response.
- Tools don’t talk to each other? Fix one integration and measure the time savings.
- Collect data. Not after a year, but after a month. What works? What doesn’t? Why?
- Share those results with your team. Not in vague marketing terms (“we have more engagement!”), but in their language: “Conversion time dropped from 4 to 3 months. That saves sales about 120 hours per quarter.”
Goal: Build trust by showing that marketing isn’t gambling, but disciplined iteration based on data.
Step 4: Make the process transparent and predictable
Tech companies are allergic to black boxes. So show how the machine works.
- Share your dashboards. Show in real time what’s happening.
- Show your process. What are you testing? Why? What are the hypotheses?
- Report the way development reports: What did we build? What worked? What didn’t? What’s next sprint?
Goal: Make marketing as transparent and predictable as product development. No surprises, no vague promises – just structured work.
You don’t have to like marketing. You don’t even have to believe in it.
You just have to treat it with the same discipline you treat the product: systematically, measurably, step by step.
