Observations
Good marketing means fewer requests for technical explanations. How to Give Engineers Their Development Time Back
How much does an hour of your lead architect’s time cost? Multiply that by the number of hours they spent last month on sales calls answering the same questions repeatedly about security principles or integration capabilities.
The resulting sum represents direct losses for the company. It is the cost of pulling your most valuable resource away from their core mission—product development.
It is commonly believed that marketing should generate interest and questions. However, for complex IT products, I would argue that the opposite is true. The number of routine technical questions that reach your engineering team is an inverse indicator of marketing quality. The more of these requests there are, the worse marketing is performing.
Good marketing does not create reasons to call your CTO; it eliminates 80% of questions before they arise. Marketing should act as an intelligent “protective buffer” or “firewall” for the IT department.
In this article, we will break down the three levels of this “protection” that systematic marketing provides to shield your team from unnecessary work and give them back what matters most—time and focus to build a better product.
Content as The First Line of Defense: Answering Questions Before They are Asked
The most effective way to solve a problem is to prevent it from occurring in the first place. Most of the technical questions that distract your engineers are not unique. They are the same five to twenty questions repeated again and again by different clients and even by your own sales teams.
The first line of “defense” is to build a system that proactively answers these questions in the public domain. The goal is to eliminate the need for clients or sales managers to come to you. The answers should be easily accessible via Google.
How does it work? It all begins with systematic information gathering. The marketing director should approach the heads of sales and support with a simple request: “Give me the top 20 most frequent technical questions you receive from clients.” These questions may include: “How do you ensure data security?” “How does migration from a legacy system work?” “Does your product integrate with ERP?”
Once this list is compiled, the marketing department turns it into a content plan. For each critical question, one comprehensive piece of material is created. This material may take the form of a detailed blog article, an in-depth white paper, a clear video tutorial, or a dedicated FAQ section.
As a result, a powerful public “knowledge library” is created. When clients have questions, they find the answers themselves through a search engine. Salespeople no longer run to engineers for answers; they send clients links to ready-made articles. Your team stops acting as a “help desk bureau” and can focus on their core work. You answer each question once, and your answer works for you for years.
Sales Enablement: Turning Salespeople into Experts (At Least at the Basic Level)
Public content eliminates 80% of client questions. But what about the remaining 20% that arise during live conversations? Often, a salesperson escalates a question not because the answer is extremely complex, but because they lack confidence in their knowledge or are unable to quickly locate the necessary information.
The second line of defense is the internal training and support system for sales, or Sales Enablement. Its goal is simple: to ensure that every salesperson always has fast, approved answers to 95% of potential questions at their fingertips.
What does this system look like? First and foremost, it is an internal “Wikipedia” for the product, created and maintained by the marketing team in close collaboration with you. It may take the form of a Confluence or Notion knowledge base where answers to frequent questions are stored in a searchable, structured format. This format is now enriched with deeper technical detail for internal use.
It also includes so-called “battle sheets” for competitors. These short documents clearly outline how your architecture or a key feature differs advantageously from a major competitor’s solution. Salespeople no longer “drown” when clients ask: “How are you better than X?”
Finally, this system includes regular internal training sessions organized by the marketing team. Your engineer delivers a product update or explains a new release once to the entire sales team. Marketing records the session, creates a concise summary, and adds it to the knowledge base. Once again, your knowledge is capitalized and scaled.
As a result, your sales team becomes significantly more autonomous and competent. Salespeople evolve from “question relays” into real consultants, allowing you to stay focused on driving product development.
The Third Line of Defense: Thoughtful Onboarding and Documentation
The client has completed all stages, purchased your product, and logged into the system for the first time. It may seem like the job is done. However, this is precisely when a new wave of requests begins to reach your engineers: “How do I configure the integration?” “Where can I find the report I need?” “Why is this button inactive?”
The third and final line of defense is a self-service system that enables users to find answers to 90% of their questions without contacting support. The key components of this system are onboarding and documentation.
Effective onboarding involves more than a welcome screen; it includes an interactive product tour that shows new users, step by step, how to derive value from the product. It also includes a sequence of educational emails sent during the first week explaining the key features.
Technical documentation should not be a dense manual written for developers. Rather, it should be a clear, well-structured, and easily accessible knowledge base for users. It should include search functionality, screenshots, and real-world examples. In this case, marketing’s role (via technical writers and content managers) is to help your team “translate” complex technical knowledge into simple, user-friendly language.
When onboarding and documentation are effective, clients become more successful and loyal, and your IT team is shielded from routine questions that take away from important tasks.
Marketing as a System for Scaling Expertise
There is public content, an internal knowledge base for sales, and a well-designed onboarding process for customers. These three elements are all part of a single system for scaling expertise.
Each time an engineer is interrupted by a simple, repetitive question, the system has failed. This means that the engineer’s knowledge was not extracted in time, properly packaged, or scaled using marketing tools.
Therefore, you can evaluate marketing performance using a new, non-obvious key performance indicator (KPI): the reduction in the number of routine technical requests received by your department. This directly indicates the effectiveness of their work in “protecting” your most valuable resource.
Ask your colleagues to analyze the top ten most frequent questions received by support or sales. Then, work together to create a single content asset that could eliminate 80% of those requests. This is an investment that pays off instantly in the form of hours returned to your developers.
