This is the third episode of the “Marketing and Selling Effectiveness Podcast.” Every other week, the IEPS posts a new show with Selling Essentials Marketplace partner Julie Murphy from Sage Communications.
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On today’s show, Fred and Julie meet with Zhenia Klevitsky, Chief Growth Officer (CGO) at ITC Federal.
Find Zhenia on LinkedIn.
ZHENIA’S TIP: “Thought leadership beats capture. If you’re not shaping the conversation early through targeted content, community engagement, and true mission understanding you’re already behind.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: This is a special episode of the Sales Game Changers podcast. It’s the Marketing for Selling Effectiveness show that we do with Julie Murphy from Sage Communications. Julie, this is our third show that we’re doing. Every other Tuesday we’re posting a brand-new show where we’re talking about the convergence that must be happening with sales leadership and marketing leadership. It’s historically been siloed, it’s historically been a conundrum. We’re doing today’s interview in July of 2025. Today, we’re going to be introducing Zhenia Klevitsky, a VP of Sales, to talk about things that she’s done in her career to bring things together. Julie, this is our third show.
Julie Murphy: Yes, and I couldn’t be more excited to bring on our very first sales leader guest, Zhenia Klevitsky, currently Chief Growth Officer at ITC Federal. She has been a personal friend and client for almost 20 years. She’s one of the best in the business when it comes to leading high-growth teams, especially in government contracting. She’s worked with companies big and small, from ASRC Federal, to Sev1Tech, and as I said, now she’s at ITC Federal. Welcome, Zhenia. We’re so excited to have you on the show.
Zhenia Klevitsky: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. I’m so excited to speak with you both.
Fred Diamond: We’re excited, too. Why don’t you get us started here, Zhenia? What does ITC Federal do, and what is your role there?
Zhenia Klevitsky: ITC Federal drives transformation and application development, DevSecOps, cloud deployment and infrastructure automation, and federal financial systems. Those are our capabilities, but our approach is always mission-first. That’s what the company was founded on, and we’re always trying to find innovative ways to harness the power of technology across the broad spectrum of government missions and domain areas. You can see that all across our contracts within the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice. My role at ITC Federal as the Chief Growth Officer is being responsible for leading growth across business development, capture, solution architecture, marketing, and proposals.
Julie Murphy: Zhenia, I know that you’ve been in this government contracting community for most of your career. It’s a very niche space. I’m curious, what do you love the most about sales leadership in this government and technology space?
Zhenia Klevitsky: Th thing that I love the most about government and the technology space is that it’s both extremely challenging, but on the flip side, it’s extremely rewarding. First and foremost, we’re not just selling services or software to the government. We are really helping agencies solve problems that impact mission. For us at ITC Federal, that’s in the National Security space but other missionaries can include public health, infrastructure, the war fighter. That sense of mission alignment is really hard to match in the private sector, in my opinion. I really love that we are able to give back in a way in government consulting.
The other thing that I love about government is that it’s not just sales, it’s not just transactional, it’s strategic. Every deal involves complex procurements, complex cycles. Everything from needing to understand the Federal Acquisition Regulations, different IDIQs or vehicles GWACs set-asides. There are always multiple stakeholders, whether that’s the technical folks in the government, or contracting. There’s always that mission aspect, that political aspect. It involves deep-trusted relationships that you develop over time, like you and I, Julie, who’ve known each other for almost 20 years. This means long-term thinking. It means integrity, consistency, skills that you don’t just have, cultivate as a good seller, but it makes you a better leader and partner.
Because this space is so complex, I also think that mentoring rising sales leaders, account managers, capture professionals becomes a huge part of my job, for example. The legacy of developing others while delivering results is one of the most gratifying parts of government in the technology space. It’s not just the capabilities, it’s the mission, it’s the people, it’s mentoring. There’s something exciting also about bringing new technology like AI, Cloud, or cybersecurity to legacy-heavy environments. Being in our space allows you to be that change agent helping government modernize.
Fred Diamond: You covered a lot of interesting things there. We’re well over 780 Sales Game Changers podcast episodes, and we’ve interviewed many sales leaders from large companies that have served the government like Salesforce, Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft, et cetera. The one thing that keeps coming back is the mission. The government customer is not about profits, they’re really about serving the citizens, their safety, infrastructure, health, whatever it might be. Like you also mentioned, there are a lot of long-term relationships because a lot of the customers want to work for government. They do it for the mission. A lot of things take time, they take a lot of people involved with that decision, which is why there are a lot of sales professionals who have been successful, have had long careers serving a handful of customers. They get to know their mission. They get to understand how they operate, et cetera. I’m curious, now, sales and marketing needs to be much more in tune to show the government customer that.
Julie, this just occurred to me. That’s another reason why we’re bringing sales and marketing together here. Zhenia, how have you seen the relationship between sales and marketing evolve through your career?
Zhenia Klevitsky: Thanks to Julie, I learned a lot about marketing. I would say that the relationship between sales and marketing, especially in government and technology sectors, has really evolved dramatically over the past decade. In the past, my view of sales and marketing is that it often worked in siloes. Marketing focused on brand, events, collateral. Sales focused on relationships and opportunities. Coordination was limited. The hands-off were clunky. I think it’s evolved in that now, there’s an increased alignment around shared pipeline goals across organizations. We have account-based strategies, data-driven insights. The best organizations operate as a revenue team, not separate departments. I think marketing has a big role in that.
For example, marketing is no longer about just pushing a message. It’s about arming the business development or sales team with mission-aligned thought leadership. We’re talking a lot about mission today. Capability narratives tied to customer pain points. What is the government really trying to solve? How can things be better? Marketing is about differentiators that map to evaluation criteria in request for proposals, for example. We see marketing as the long road. There’s content that supports early shaping with respect to opportunities and capture strategies. It’s not just about awareness, it’s become this iterative loop that leads to better targeting and faster course of correction. In my opinion, the best sales and marketing teams meet regularly to share insights on customer pain points, win themes, and code developing those messages. They’re not single-threaded like they used to be. It’s more holistic. That’s how I view it.
Julie Murphy: Absolutely. I agree with you wholeheartedly. What are some of the most effective ways you’ve seen sales and marketing collaborate to really drive those results? Obviously, you’re new at ITC Federal. You’re probably in the process of setting up that structure. What are some of the criteria you’re going to put in place to make sure that that collaboration really drives results?
Zhenia Klevitsky: That’s a great question, Julie. I think sales and marketing collaboration in government contracting, GovCon, is most effective when it’s intentional, when it’s integrated, and when it’s aligned to the buying process. We now focus on what we’re calling account-based marketing or ABM for priority pursuits. Business development or the sales team will identify target agencies or opportunities early on in the business development lifecycle, and then marketing will build and customize outreach related to those agencies. For us, currently that’s DHS and DHA. What that marketing customized outreach includes is white papers. Maybe there’s a landing page specifically dedicated to an account on your website. Webinars, capability briefs specific for the agency. Not just capability, but again, back to that mission need. This shapes customer perception before the competition ever comes out. Not the competition, but the RFP or even an RFI, or even before an opportunity shapes, we’re already building that perception in advance.
For me, thought leadership beats capture. For example, executive ghost writing or podcasts like we’re doing today, speaking on panels and webinars positioned by marketing to help shape the narrative around a company’s technical edge or niche capability. Then business development uses these assets to credibly engage technical and program stakeholders early in that acquisition lifecycle. Sometimes, customers will reach out to us just because we’ve had an expert speak on a panel, webinar, or podcast. It’s about building that snowball approach of putting everything together so the market understands what the company is all about.
Fred Diamond: It’s interesting that you bring that up. More than ever, the customer can find information. If the customer is going to engage with sales or BD, the BD or the sales professional need to be talking about things that the customer specifically is focused on. It can’t be broad things like, “Our technology will help you be more productive,” or, “Our technology is great for government.” It has to be specific to what that human being or those specific people in the buying process need to be aware of.
There’s no excuse. We say this all the time, Zhenia, on the Sales Game Changers podcast: there’s no excuse for sales professionals who aren’t speaking specifically to the customer which is where marketing comes in by helping process the message, helping figure out the best ways to get it across. I’m curious, do you have an example of a time when marketing content and awareness building all came together and directly contributed to a big or complex win?
Zhenia Klevitsky: I do. Fred, I want to go back to something you said where you mentioned that the information is everywhere and people can find it. The example that I want to talk about is interesting because the type of information we needed to flow for an opportunity wasn’t available. It wasn’t something that the government could find. I’ll give you more details around that.
When I worked for another firm, we spent almost two years on the capture effort around an opportunity in Albuquerque, New Mexico. That’s a very tight niche community there. The government and industry are connected in their community. They go to church together. They do a lot together. They didn’t know us because we were in the DC area, so they couldn’t find that information that typically, you would find. They just saw a typical DC type of company integrator. We needed to make sure our message, who we are, what we do, and what we represent really got to them.
The first thing we did was we ingrained ourselves in the community. We thought it was very important to get to know people for who they were – people, not just customers. The timing was so perfect that we were trying to get into the community, because at that time our firm was exploring more ways in which we could give back from philanthropic type of ways. We chose a specific foundation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We knew that we weren’t just going to donate, we weren’t just going to volunteer, but we would get ingrained with the community. It was a win-win. We got to know the individuals, for the people and for us, who we were. We were becoming part of that community.
Back then, I’m not sure if that’s still the case today, but billboards were really big in that area. We also invested in a billboard, and we didn’t make it about the capability. We really understood what resonated with that market. Our billboard was more about how we were part of the community. We found panels for our experts to speak on that resonated with the pain points of the customer at the time. That’s when we started to build around our capability set. We talked about microsite. We launched a microsite specifically focused on Albuquerque. This customer, specific case studies in terms of what they were looking for. This effort took me 18 to 24 months.
By the time the opportunity came out, they knew who we were. We had established ourselves not just as the next integrator, but part of the community. We understood their pain points and they knew we understood. By the time the request for proposal, RP came out, the agency language actually closely mirrored the themes and differentiators we had been talking to them about during our campaign. We ended up winning that opportunity. At the end of the day, we came out on top because we really tried to understand and speak their language, both from being involved in the community and through the marketing aspect of it all.
Julie Murphy: I love this example that you gave because it shows how important it is to really be embedded in the community and to understand your customer when you’re talking about messaging. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen from a messaging standpoint is if it’s done in a vacuum in marketing and it’s not done in collaboration with the sales teams who are actually talking to the customer day in and day out. I would love to hear thoughts about hearing directly from the customers. How do you go about collaborating with your marketing teams to help shape the messages? What is sales’ role in the process of setting up the company positioning?
Zhenia Klevitsky: That’s a great question. Because in GovCon the most successful growth teams aren’t just pursuing opportunities, they’re actively shaping the market and educating the buyer community long before the solicitation ever drops, I feel that sales teams should come together to shape messages and educate future buyers. There are multiple ways to do that. First, I think there needs to be tight collaboration between sales solutioning and marketing. You want consistent strategic messaging that reflects the actual customer pain points and your differentiated value, not just siloed, generic talking points.
Secondly, I think that publishing and promoting insight-based education is important. It’s not just capability-centric. It has to tie back to messaging that directly supports not just the mission, but also agency-strategic plans or GAO reports, or inspector general findings. These often signal funding and priorities, and when you’re talking to the customer you get that kind of information anyway. Instead of just reacting to solicitations, growth teams should proactively educate the market. We talked about hosting webinars with subject matter experts, white papers, even point-of-view briefs, but also participating in government industry forums. Julie, I know you and I, especially you, but we were both part of Women in Technology. There’s AFCEA, NPSE, and many others.
Not just participating but trying to become a leader in those organizations. Use a feedback loop to constantly involve the messaging. Coordinate messages by acquisition stage in the business development lifecycle. Develop shared messaging libraries. These are more tactical things, but I think these are some of the ways that sales growth should come together to shape messaging to educate future buyers.
Fred Diamond: I love the way you said before that you need to embed in the community. The reality is customers just don’t need you if you’re not bringing value. I’ve said this many times, the two most uttered words in the history of the Sales Game Changers podcast, number two is empathy, and number one is value. You need, as a sales professional, to be successful today. We’re doing today’s interview in July of 2025. You need to know where the customer is going two steps ahead of where the customer is because your competitor is possibly thinking that way. You need to get really deep and smart and work with marketing to ensure that you get those messages across. I’m curious, we spend a lot of time trying to educate the marketing profession about what sales needs. That’s a common question that we ask when we do panels. I’m curious, Zhenia, what’s something you wish more marketers knew about how sales teams operate so that they could be more effective?
Zhenia Klevitsky: Marketing is different in government consulting because it’s a long game. Sales is a long game. It’s not transactional or constantly looking for opportunities, which we are, but it’s different in the commercial space where the timelines are shorter in terms of delivery, but also the sales cycle. It is the long game. If marketers understood the high stakes and that it’s deeply relational, I think that’s key. This isn’t just transactional, it’s about shaping opportunities months and sometimes years ahead of an RFP. It’s about navigating for us complex organizational charts, inside agencies, and earning trust over time with technical and mission buyers, and on the contracting side.
Marketing content and campaigns that help us stay visible, credible, and trusted during the shaping process. It’s important for marketing to know that it’s not just one-and-done, it’s a long business development lifecycle. It should focus less on volume and more on targeted sustained engagement with key accounts, and timing is everything. That goes without saying. But if marketing doesn’t support the map, the pursuit calendar, it might be too early to shape or too late to matter. These are very important.
It’s important to align campaign calendars to the procurement lifecycle as well. Government contracting sales is a slow burn, trust-based and driven by timing relationships and credibility. We talked about that. Marketing needs to understand this becomes a true force multiplier, companies aren’t just trying to be a service provider. All of those things are the difference between what you see in the commercial space and the government space being involved in that long cycle all the way through.
Julie Murphy: Zhenia, you’ve been in this space now for a long time in government contracting. I’m sure you’ve seen it evolve through the years. I’d love to get your thoughts on trends you see on the horizon both. How has selling and marketing to government changed through the years? What do you think is coming next?
Zhenia Klevitsky: That’s another great question. I think the government buying landscape is shifting fast. We’re in an unprecedented time. But at the same time, I think successful sales and marketing teams all need to evolve with it. Some of the key trends that are already reshaping how both sales and marketing deal with the current environment, or as trends change there are multiple things. The first is the rise of an educated or self-directed buyer.
These days I feel like we see more government buyers, especially those that are technical and mission leaders, consuming industry content earlier in the process like Fred mentioned. Information is everywhere. AI is everywhere. You can just type something in and find information quickly. In the past, it was harder for government buyers to get that information. It’s at the tip of their fingertips now. We need to understand that and evolve with that. Engaging vendors later, often after an RFI or market research doesn’t work. We have to do it long before. Essentially, marketing has to deliver credible, searchable, mission-relevant content so that buyers can find things on their own because we already know that they’re doing that. We have to provide insightful information, not just information. That’s changed, that’s evolved.
Procurement cycles sometimes these days are compression. We’ve seen some memos come out of DoD where they would like to use more OTAs, more commercial solution offering, SBIRs, those are often very compressed timelines, very quick. We need to evolve with that. We need to be able to understand how to respond to those in market in advance. When technology changes so quickly, we have to be ready to shift with that. It goes back to shaping long before an opportunity even comes out. That includes shaping like we talked about, with talk leadership that aligns with what the government is seeking to do.
We talked about account-based marketing. There’s account-based everything. It seems like that’s become the norm. It’s a combination of those long sales cycles, the narrower buyer groups that we’re seeing today, and specific agency missions. That just means that blanket marketing campaigns don’t work anymore. They really need to be targeted to those types of things. Those agency missions, those buyer groups. We need to build together sales and marketing account-based strategies around program agencies and mission that has tailored content and targeted outreach.
We talked about AI and automation. They’re changing buyer expectations completely. That’s been something that’s been around for a while, but it’s really taking off. Agencies are piloting AIML, RPA, and intelligent automation, but they still need help to find use cases. They still need education on risk and governments, and they need to have outcomes, not just have these platforms to have them as well. Growth and marketing need to be more consultants, not just transactional. Marketing has to help position us as a trusted innovation partner, not just a technical vendor as well.
Fred Diamond: I agree with you. You’re so on-target with that. You’ve done a great job today, Zhenia, talking about how the marketing and sales organizations should be working together to demonstrate to the customer that you’re there for them and you understand them specifically, and you understand what their challenges are. You also need to understand what the specific person is dealing with. What is their role? One of the things with government as well is that there are a lot of people involved. You mentioned before it’s not just a transactional sale. There is that in some parts once everything else has happened. You need to educate so many people throughout the process and the message needs to be specific to them.
Julie, this is our third Marketing for Selling Effectiveness podcast. I thought it was great. I thought Zhenia did a fantastic job. I want to thank you for the insights you shared through the process and how both entities, marketing and sales, need to be even more effective right now than ever before with all the things that are happening. The challenges that are facing them, how AI is playing a role, we started to touch on that towards the end. Can you give us a specific action step to wrap up the show briefly? You’ve given us so many ideas. Give us one specific action step that people listening to the show today must do to take their sales career to the next level.
Zhenia Klevitsky: To take your sales career to the next level, to wrap everything up that we’ve just talked about, first and foremost, don’t think about things from a transactional perspective. Think about them from a holistic perspective. Think about, like you said, Fred, we’re not just talking about agency mission, we’re talking about the problems that agencies want to solve, but they’re people as well. Think about the people you’re dealing with. Build those trusted relationships. If you think about it from that perspective, not just, “I need to sell a capability,” or, “I need to make money,” “I need to close my next deal,” you’ll be way more successful.
Fred Diamond: That is excellent. Julie, any final thoughts?
Julie Murphy: Zhenia, you’re a walking billboard for that. You’ve built so many great relationships through the years, and you’re right in the middle of this ecosystem of being involved with industry associations, your collaboration with partnerships and customers. You’ve always had that sophisticated marketing mindset. It’s been a pleasure working with you all these years. Thanks again for all of your insight today.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo