Karína Dël Carlo has a habit of taking the expensive machinery of B2B growth and explaining it with objects you could find in a garage, a kitchen or a particularly unruly wedding. A pipeline is a water tank. A generic sales message is a digital leaflet. Choosing a marketing channel before understanding the buyer is like asking a car dealer to pick your vehicle without mentioning whether you deliver parcels or move excavators. And proposing a complex enterprise product at first contact? That is marriage on the first date.
The metaphors are cheerful. The diagnosis is not. For Dël Carlo, companies waste money because marketing, sales and customer behavior are discussed in different rooms, with different vocabulary and occasionally different versions of reality. Marketing counts attention. Sales counts contracts. Between the two sits a buyer who did not volunteer to become a departmental handoff.
Her answer is a word with its sleeves rolled up: Vendarketing. In Portuguese, vendas means sales. The portmanteau makes her position plain before the first slide appears. Marketing should be built around revenue, and sales should understand the long sequence of trust, education and timing that precedes a signature.
The executive who kept looking upstream
Dël Carlo’s public biography places her in technology and telecommunications for more than a quarter-century, working across lead generation, product marketing, market intelligence and business strategy. She eventually reached Global Director of Marketing and Growth. A colleague from her time at language-learning company Voxy described her as unusually analytical, able to convert numbers into marketing plans and keep those plans tied to company goals.
That description helps explain what came next. The ordinary marketing career rewards the visible artifact: campaign, event, launch, post. Dël Carlo’s attention kept moving upstream and downstream. What business target produced the brief? What did a prospective customer need to understand next? What happened after the lead entered the CRM? A glossy campaign that creates an untended database is, in her telling, less a victory than a beautifully catered traffic jam.
A lead-generation project she lists from August 2021 to May 2022 stretched across Brazil, Mexico, the rest of Latin America, Spain, Italy and France. The project joined automation with a sales-machine model. The geography is useful because it reveals the scale of the operating problem: a campaign can cross borders in seconds, but relevance remains stubbornly local and human.
Alongside the corporate work, she began mentoring professionals in 2015. By 2023, a 31-minute COACHcast episode introduced her as an entrepreneur and career-and-leadership mentor who had spent more than 25 years climbing to global marketing leadership. Her LinkedIn articles ranged from landing a better job to the errors new managers make. The connective idea was agency: understand the system you are in, then act with more intention inside it.
“Não comece pela ferramenta. Comece entendendo como o seu cliente compra.”Do not start with the tool. Start by understanding how your customer buys.
A funnel is arithmetic wearing office clothes
In one of Dël Carlo’s worked examples, a business needs ten new contracts each month. If 20 percent of 1,000 reached people become leads, 20 percent of those book a discovery meeting, half become opportunities and half of those close, the arithmetic lands at ten customers. Change any conversion rate and the upstream workload changes with it.
Every company will have different percentages. Still, a revenue goal without conversion assumptions is hope dressed as a spreadsheet. Dël Carlo asks leaders to reverse the calculation: how many opportunities must enter today to support revenue 90 days from now? The missed target at the bottom of the funnel may have begun as neglected demand at the top three months earlier.
This is where her water-tank metaphor earns its keep. Companies stare at proposals and contracts, the tap at the bottom, while ignoring whether demand is replenishing the tank. Hiring more sellers or increasing media spend can make the motion noisier without repairing the flow. Her phrase for the result is síndrome do funil vazio, empty-funnel syndrome.
Dël Carlo also uses two routes to R$1 million to expose the folly of borrowed playbooks. A company might sell R$100 to 10,000 customers or R$100,000 to ten. The top-line result matches; nearly everything about acquisition, trust, demonstration, procurement and human contact does not. Netflix can make a low-touch sale while its customer sits on a sofa. Enterprise software at R$500,000 tends to collect committees.
Slash, Chimbinha and the danger of a tidy list
The most revealing of Dël Carlo’s teaching stories begins with two guitarists. Slash and Chimbinha are both men, musicians and players of the same instrument, with roughly comparable ages. On a demographic sheet, the rows look pleasantly aligned. Then arrive the clothes, genres, audiences and cultural contexts. Nobody sensible would market to them as interchangeable.
That contrast is her way into the difference between an ideal customer profile and a persona. The first tells a company which organizations it can serve: sector, size, location, revenue, structure and buying capacity. The second asks how a person thinks, what they fear, where they learn and what must happen before they decide. Know only the profile and you can build a list. Know the person and you may begin a conversation.
Her contempt for generic outreach follows naturally. A mass message with no connection to the recipient is “digital leafleting.” It is efficient in the narrow sense that a machine can annoy thousands of people before lunch. It is ruinous in the broader sense that it spends attention and trust, two assets the dashboard rarely prices correctly.
Context
Help someone who has not named the problem understand what is changing.
Alternatives
Show the routes available once the problem is recognized.
Evidence
Offer cases, proof and reassurance when suppliers are being compared.
Product
Demonstrate the solution when the buyer has enough context to judge it.
Dël Carlo maps content to four levels of awareness: context for those who do not yet see the problem; alternatives for those who do; proof for people comparing suppliers; and product information when a demonstration finally makes sense. The sequence is not romantic. It is considerate. It also explains why the marriage proposal belongs later in the evening.
“Quando a empresa conhece apenas o ICP, cria listas. Quando conhece também a persona, cria conexão.”
From a title to a thesis
In January 2024, Dël Carlo received LinkedIn Top Voice recognition in careers, leadership, performance and marketing. That June, the Opental business hub announced her as an ambassador and credited her approach with producing R$50 million in pipeline for a single company in less than a year. It also described her as the creator of the “Funil Infinito,” or Infinite Funnel, methodology.
The public recognition arrived as her work was moving from executive experience toward a more explicit founder’s thesis. Growphi, founded in São Paulo in 2024, describes its work as an integrated mix of inbound and outbound prospecting, search, content, automation, CRM process and sales follow-up. Dël Carlo’s current public profile is attached to the company, and her recent writing speaks in the voice of someone building and operating the system, not merely observing it.
In a recent example around FEBRABAN TECH, she said a client program generated R$49 million in potential pipeline by extending the life of an event beyond the booth and the captured badge scans. The proposal was classic Dël Carlo: broaden the relevant audience, prioritize signs of interest, recover conversations that stalled and give sales a process for following through. The conference ends. The commercial work begins.
Her targets are often founders and B2B leaders with high-ticket, technical offers. These businesses are especially vulnerable to fashionable shortcuts. A channel that produces attention for a consumer brand may produce little more than decorative engagement for industrial software. An AI tool can accelerate outreach, but it cannot decide whom the company should matter to. Automation multiplies whatever judgment precedes it, including poor judgment.
“O budget não define sua estratégia. A estratégia define quanto e onde seu budget deve ser investido.”The budget does not define the strategy. The strategy defines how much to invest, and where.
The useful impatience
Dël Carlo’s personality on the page is a useful mixture: impatient with waste, patient with buyers. She likes capital letters, worked examples, teasing questions and an analogy with enough color to survive the next meeting. Her writing is not the antiseptic prose of a management manual. One minute she is calculating pipeline coverage; the next she is wondering whether Slash would attend a Brazilian street carnival dressed head to toe in leather.
Underneath the play is an operator’s insistence on sequence. Strategy precedes budget. Buyer behavior precedes channel. Context precedes pitch. Today’s demand precedes revenue three months away. Marketing and sales can keep their specialties, but they cannot keep separate destinies.
The quiet ambition inside Vendarketing is to remove a border. Dël Carlo wants a company to see one revenue ecosystem where it currently sees a collection of teams, tools and weekly reports. In that ecosystem, marketing does more than make people aware, sales does more than chase the warmest five percent, and content does more than occupy a calendar.
The buyer gets a coherent journey. The company gets a number it can explain. And the funnel, mercifully, gets water before anyone opens the tap.