Why marketing doesn't sell: lessons from Smartney's marketing and sales director
The campaign has launched. The budget is being spent, the dashboard is filling up with data, and sales... still don't look the way they should.
Why doesn't marketing sell? In our conversation with Tomek Głodowski, marketing and sales director at Smartney, we go back to things less glamorous than a new channel or creative. To strategy, sales processes, shared KPIs and consistency.
The shortest answer: marketing stops supporting sales when it starts working as a separate island. It may still generate traffic, leads and nice reports, but it doesn't lead the company to a shared result.
Watch the conversation (in Polish).
Full episode of SUURowo o marketingu (in Polish).
Marketing without strategy lives a life of its own
I start by asking Tomek what kind of marketing he doesn't like. The answer comes quickly: the kind that drifts away from the company's strategy.
"What you end up with is a monster: one thing, then another, green one day, red the next, cheerful one time, gloomy the next."
If strategy goes one way, marketing another, and decisions are made somewhere else again, campaigns become a collection of random ideas. In the conversation I call them "beer insights" - they sound great over the CEO's beer, but don't necessarily bring the company closer to its goal.
This isn't about rejecting creative ideas. It's about being able to answer one simple question: what is this campaign supposed to change in the business?
Marketing and sales need one shared result
Tomek has worked in financial services for 25 years, in sales, product and marketing. His conclusion from all of it is simple: separating marketing and sales is not a good idea.
When the two teams work in silos, the blame game starts quickly. Marketing says sales doesn't close. Sales replies that the leads are weak. Everyone has their own KPIs and their own version of the truth.
At Smartney the starting point is different: first the sales target, then the funnel, media cost and marketing activities. Sometimes the data also shows that it's not yet time to increase the budget. Sometimes you need to build a solid foundation that doesn't necessarily rely on marketing.
Before you add another channel, check whether your sales process is ready to handle extra demand. Otherwise the campaign won't solve the problem - it will just expose it faster.
Data should lead to decisions
Smartney is a strongly data-driven organisation. But it's not about simply having a dashboard - it's about a shared understanding of what it shows.
The conversation comes back to an anecdote from a training session during which the team launched a new campaign in the evening. Tomek refreshed the report so often that the term "binge reporting" was born.
It sounds funny, but there's an important practice behind it: data needs to be viewed from several angles. A whole campaign's result can look good until you break it down by channel, customer group or cohort.
So the question isn't "Do we have data?". A better question is: "Do marketing and sales draw the same conclusions from this data and know what to do next?"
Performance marketing alone is not enough
Smartney relies heavily on performance marketing. But Tomek doesn't try to turn it into the whole strategy. As he puts it: "You can't do without performance. But performance has to be fed with brand awareness. One works for the other."
Conversion-focused activities need to deliver results. The brand needs to make sure the company makes it into the set of options the customer is considering at all. If the whole budget works only at the bottom of the funnel, at some point there's no more room to grow.
Tomek calls marketing focused solely on quick sales the "buy a brick, mister" approach. Short-term goals are necessary, but they shouldn't destroy what the brand is meant to stand for in five or ten years.
"Da się" ("It can be done"): from campaign to company culture
Smartney entered the market with an idea for a simpler, more convenient process for customers. Where others said "it can't be done", the brand wanted to show the opposite.
The "Da się" claim started with a TV campaign. Over time, though, it went beyond advertising and into the company's everyday language. Employees began using it in meetings when looking for a solution to a problem.
That's when a slogan becomes more than a copywriting idea. It describes not only what the brand tells customers, but also how the company itself wants to work.
What to check in your own marketing
Because the problem often isn't that marketing does too little, but that strategy, sales, data and brand aren't playing for the same goal. We talk more about how Tomek Głodowski connects marketing with sales, works with data, builds a brand in a regulated industry and chooses partners in the episode "The real reason marketing doesn't sell" (in Polish).
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