From Doing It All to Building Your Team: Marketing, BD, and Sales for Growing Companies

By Luis Aguilar

Founder and CEO — Esquema Tech

www.esquematech.com

December, 2025

When I was a business owner, I was doing Marketing, Business Development, and Sales without knowing it. This is a very common condition for new companies, startups, and especially SMEs. Once your business is set up, the natural thing to do will be to draw people in, reach out, and (especially) talk about your product as an innovative solution to a problem. In these efforts, we rely on the fact that your entire operation was well-calculated, well-suited, and framed within a given market. If that was the case, people will come to seek your products many times, hopefully because it was a disruptive product or an innovative service that did not exist previously in any given segment or geographic area for that matter.

However, in order to survive, keep your numbers in the black, pay your bills, and match the growth you have predicted in your SOM, you will have to prioritize activities. But what if you cannot hire as many staff as you need?

You possibly have to hire a marketing agency to secure your image, strengthen your brand, and be able to construct the marketing funnel for your company to acquire leads that translate into sales. But to support this process as an innovative business, you must do it all yourself. Your logical order is to do marketing work teaming up with an agency, then undertake Business Development activities that will pave the way for your sales team to act. Nonetheless, this is all done by you. In the best of cases, coworkers or cofounders will divide the work and take up responsibilities in close communication. The most common thing is that administrative staff also takes on repetitive manual and technical tasks in their agendas so that everything is connected (and yes, it is a bit discomforting for staff at some point). Hopefully some AI agents can already help with this, but as a small company this is harder as of yet.

Now, once this period has passed and sales have rolled in and you feel you can expand your activities further after lessons have been learned, it is time to stop the experimental stage and take your operations to a higher level. This is what should take place once the root system of your company or startup has solidified and the whole operation is ready, after a sharpened business model is casted. A strong trunk (or tree log) is ready to be built as per Esquema Tech’s Mahogany Tree methodology (check our post).

In the case of long-life cycle products that have been demo-launched, or find themselves in TRL (Technology Readiness Level) 7 through 9, and where the product tests and company structure are robust, you might not want to wait to use your own capital. You want to be proactive in seeking funding from investors, pitch rounds, and more especially if you know the product and company development have promising prospects.

Both scenarios in any way are valid instances to battle and build from.

At this stage, when you have to draft a plan to present either to get funding as equity or to use your own accrued revenues, what will you do with the money? If you are in a new sector or disrupting with a new product, you might want to set a path where the marketing agency is not adequate for all former tasks and you might want to hire a marketing specialist or assistant. Marketing is such a key aspect that many CEOs in this case hire the assistants first to train them themselves, learn from it, and delegate that work afterwards to a newly hired marketing manager. The opposite can also be done if the CEO deems that to be the way. There is no recipe.

When materials are ready and there is a clear strategy, and depending on the amount of funding a company has amassed to invest, the number of processes and staff to be settled are established.

Therefore, generally:

• What we know is that products with short sales cycles and repeatable functions generally build a sales structure.

• Products that have long sales cycles and that are uniquely crafted, isolated, or disruptive in nature tend to build a business development structure that is based on key account management.

Likewise, it goes without saying that all companies need revenue (sales), but not all need a separate BD function; BD is a strategic layer often added in B2B/complex/scalable contexts to create new channels and opportunities beyond the core sales process.

The clearest sign of a true BD function is when the role is not measured primarily on immediate closed revenue but on strategic milestones that enable future revenue. That is why people talk about Business Development being the function that builds the roads and Sales are the ones who drive the car.

Once these teams are settled or in the process of settling, the mahogany tree trunk has started to grow. New branches will appear in it once the whole system is fully functional and especially once the business model has proven to be successful and income productive for a reasonable period of time. Therefore, some trees will be taller than others before they can spring up a canopy, but that does not mean taller is better, smaller trees can develop a more voluminous canopy, the analogy here is that vegetative volume equates to revenue.