Observations
We Do Not Have “Account Managers.” We Have Marketing Engineers.
Does this sound familiar? A chief technology officer spends an hour carefully explaining a complex technical detail of the product to an account manager from an agency. The account manager takes notes, nods politely, and leaves. Two days later, you see an advertisement with gross errors that distort the product’s essence. The game of “broken telephone,” paid for with your own money, has begun.
The problem lies in the role itself. The classic account manager from the advertising world is essentially a retransmitter. Their job is to relay information from the client to the team and back. This works for simple products. However, for complex technologies, this approach leads to errors, delays, and mutual frustration. It doesn’t add value; it loses value at every stage of the “translation.”
That’s precisely why we abandoned this model. We believe that the person leading your project should be a systems architect who understands your product and business equally well. We call this role a marketing engineer.
In this article, we will break down the four key competencies that distinguish an engineer from an account. You will see that this approach is not only more convenient but also the only way to achieve real business results with a complex B2B product.
Competency No. 1: “Bilingualism” (Speaking the Languages of Business and Technology)
The most important competency of a marketing engineer is “bilingualism.” This means being able to easily switch between the worlds of technology and business. A marketing engineer must be equally confident discussing API nuances with your CTO and defending a business case with ROMI calculations before your Chief Financial Officer an hour later.
Let’s look at how this works using an example.
In the “before” scenario with a classic account manager, the CTO tells the account manager, “We moved to a serverless architecture, which will reduce our costs by 30 percent.” Hearing the key words “reduce costs,” the account manager passes the task to a copywriter. The result is a superficial article with the headline, “Save on the cloud with our solution!” The technical depth, uniqueness, and real advantage are completely lost. The value is not communicated.
In the “after” scenario, with a marketing engineer, the engineer asks clarifying questions after hearing the same phrase from the CTO: “How exactly is the cost reduction achieved? Through an event-driven model? How does this affect speed? What limitations does this approach have?” After receiving the answers, he proposes not one, but two content initiatives to the CMO.
- For a technical audience, he proposes a deep blog article titled “Our Path to Serverless: Architectural Decisions and Conclusions,” which demonstrates technological leadership.
- For chief financial officers, he proposes a simple website calculator called “Calculate How Much You Overpay for ‘Idle’ Servers,” which translates technical advantages into business-friendly financial figures.
Consequently, the CTO realizes that his complex engineering achievement was not “simplified,” but rather revealed from two different yet equally precise perspectives. Instead of one generic article, the CMO receives two highly targeted tools aimed at different segments of the buying committee. This is the work of a “translator” who creates value at the intersection of two worlds rather than losing it.
Competency No. 2: Systems Thinking (Seeing Not Tasks, but “Bottlenecks”)
The second key competency is systems thinking. A traditional account manager thinks in terms of tasks. A marketing engineer, however, thinks in terms of systems and “bottlenecks.”
Imagine you are a CMO who comes to a typical agency and says, “We need more leads.” The account manager replies, “Okay,” takes the task, and passes it to a paid media specialist. The specialist launches more advertising. As a result, you may get more leads, but they are poor quality. The sales team is overloaded, and CAC skyrockets. Although the task has been completed, the business problem has not been solved and has actually worsened.
How would a marketing engineer respond? When asked, “We need more leads,” he responds with a question: “Are you sure the problem is really the quantity?” He asks for access to your CRM and analytics, then quickly diagnoses the entire funnel. He sees that you have excellent traffic, but only two percent of MQLs convert to SQLs. He identifies the real “bottleneck.”
Rather than proposing to “increase the advertising budget,” he comes to you with a different proposal: “Your main problem is not acquisition, but qualification. Ninety-eight percent of our efforts are lost at this stage. Instead of spending more money on traffic, I propose investing 20 percent of the budget in creating a nurture sequence and a scoring system. This will allow us to increase our conversion rate to 10 percent and generate more high-quality leads with the same budget.”
This is systems thinking. A marketing engineer doesn’t just execute your task. They analyze your system, identify the point of maximum leverage, and propose a solution that will deliver the best business results. He fixes the machine instead of just pressing the gas pedal.
Competency No. 3: A Data-Driven Approach (Managing by the “Dashboard”)
This competency is based on managing with data rather than opinions. Traditional marketing often relies on subjective judgments: “I think this creative will work,” or “Let’s try this channel; I’ve heard good things about it.”
A marketing engineer removes subjectivity from the decision-making process. Their main tool is the same dashboard with key business metrics that we create at the beginning of our work. They view every action as a scientific experiment with a clear hypothesis and measurable results.
Conversations with a marketing engineer do not sound like this: “Shall we approve this banner?” It sounds like this: “We launched an A/B test of two creatives. Our hypothesis was that a product image would perform better than an image of a person. However, the data show that creative B has a click-through rate (CTR) that is 30 percent higher and a cost per lead that is 20 percent lower. The hypothesis was not confirmed. I propose stopping creative A and reallocating the budget to creative B.”
This approach completely changes the dynamics. For a CTO, marketing decisions are made with the same logic and rigor as technical ones. For a CMO, it means having confidence that every action is based on facts and aimed at improving overall ROMI. All decisions become provable.
Competency No. 4: Responsibility for Business Results (We Are Part of Your Team)
In the traditional agency model, an account manager’s main KPI is contract renewal. This often causes them to avoid difficult conversations, agree to unsuccessful client ideas, and focus on polished reports about “activity.” This is loyalty to process, not results.
Our marketing engineer’s fourth competency is direct responsibility for the client’s business results. Their success is measured not by “client satisfaction,” but by the metrics on your dashboard.
This means our specialist is empowered to say “no” to you. If you propose an idea that contradicts the agreed-upon strategy or the data, he is not obligated to execute it blindly. Rather, he must explain, with reasoned arguments, why it may harm the result. He acts not as a polite contractor but as the financial manager of your marketing budget. His job is to protect your investments, even from yourself. You don’t just receive an “executor”; you receive an external member of your team who shares responsibility with you for achieving the company’s core goals.
An Engineering Approach to Partnership:
I am a bilingual strategist, systems diagnostician, data-driven analyst, and business partner who is accountable for results. This set of competencies is our solution to the ineffectiveness of the traditional agency model when it comes to complex B2B technologies.
In modern B2B, we believe that results are delivered not by “account managers” who transmit words, but by “marketing engineers” who design systems. These individuals can engage in an equal dialogue with your CTO and CMO because they speak a universal language: logic and results.
Are you looking for a partner who will understand your business system and take responsibility for its financial efficiency? Let’s talk.
