Many buyers now reach a vendor's site with their shortlist already built inside an AI assistant, arriving to confirm a decision they made elsewhere. Website traffic counts visits from people who have already decided, and lead volume counts arrivals without saying whether a sales team can work any of them. The familiarity marketing builds before the first call is what the SDR inherits when they dial. Companies that route what those calls turn up back into targeting and messaging get a second pass at both, and one number both teams can report.
Nikolay Tsonev is Head of Marketing at Businessmap, a PPM software for enterprises looking to track projects across teams and connect strategy to execution. Out of university, he took a sales internship at HP, supporting its account managers, and joined Businessmap in 2019 through content and then product marketing. He led the positioning that took the company's two largest releases into the OKR and project portfolio management categories. Tsonev moved into his current role in August 2024, after spending the first half of that year in customer success and sales enablement.
"If your brand is weak, it's going to be much harder for the salesperson to do outbound. You can pull the stars from space and offer them to the customer, but it's a different conversation when they know your name and they've seen you at events," says Tsonev. He treats brand visibility inside a niche as the input that decides what an SDR walks into on a cold call. Building it is marketing's work, and the sales team's conversations are the evidence.
Visibility before the first call
Traffic is now losing its value as the measure of whether marketing worked. Tsonev puts Businessmap's own site traffic down by almost 50%, and describes a zero-click environment where the company's mentions now surface inside ChatGPT and Gemini. The older route of a search, a blog post, and then a website has thinned out, and he counts impressions and follower numbers as equally unhelpful. "It's more about brand visibility these days within a specific niche," he says. "Marketing teams used to measure the effects of their marketing just by generating traffic to their websites. Now it's about how visible and popular your brand is within a specific niche."
Branded search is what Tsonev measures in its place. He takes more people typing the company name into Google as evidence that the brand is being recommended inside AI answers, and he expects the next three or four years of visibility work to be decided there. A category of AI visibility trackers has grown up to measure the same thing. "If more people are looking for our brand on Google or through the traditional search engines, then this means that our brand is appearing more often in AI search engines," Tsonev explains. "We're going to start measuring branded traffic instead of overall traffic."
Buyer behavior is the piece Tsonev expects to keep moving. He thinks buyers will hand more of the comparison work to AI agents, asking them to pull pricing and line up competitors without working through vendor sites themselves. Marketing still owns demand creation. "Marketing people are in charge of campaigns and where our budget goes, events, social media, digital PR, all of these things where our brand becomes visible," he says.
Intelligence from the conversations
Businessmap measured marketing on free trials and software signups before Tsonev ran the function. Sales pushed back on the quality of what those campaigns delivered, and marketing kept the same target. The company sells into long enterprise cycles, and a free trial sat a long way from a buying decision. "Most of the time the sales team had feedback that the trial accounts we were bringing them were not qualified, and then they were just junk," Tsonev recalls.
Businessmap's salespeople meet leads at events and through digital channels, and some of those leads turn out to sit outside the company's ICP. An SDR or account executive finds that out first. Tsonev pairs each salesperson with a marketing counterpart, so the rep's account of a bad-fit lead reaches the person who sets the targeting. "The intelligence about the marketing should be coming from the sales teams, because the sales teams are running the conversations," he notes. "And the marketing teams are the ones who create the strategy. Where do we play? What's our market? Who is our target persona?"
Tsonev routes that feedback into positioning, the target persona, which events the company attends, and where the budget goes. He wants marketing and sales inside one team so the feedback moves between them without a handoff. "My view is that marketing and sales should work under a single team called a growth team, and that growth team should own the pipeline," he says.
One number for both teams
Opportunities is the metric marketing and sales both report on at Businessmap, and Tsonev uses the word interchangeably with sales qualified leads. Demo requests and sales requests still get counted as inputs to the number he reports. A white paper download can make someone a marketing qualified lead, but an opportunity exists only once sales has spoken to that person and agreed. "Once we have that opportunity metric, we see how the marketing activities actually contribute to the pipeline," Tsonev says.
Marketing and sales meet weekly at Businessmap, with a fuller review each quarter. The weekly meeting opens on what the pipeline did the previous week, then splits its time between sales items and marketing items. Tsonev wants customer lifetime value and the cost of getting an opportunity on marketing's side of that agenda, and he notes both have traditionally belonged to sales. "Once marketing understands that, they can redefine the positioning and the messaging to target the right leads," he concludes. "They might take more time to convert, but at the end of the day it will be worth it."
