X-Sell: Sales Channels Need a Shared Brain

Nikita Burkov is CTO for Marketing and Sales X-Sell at T-Bank. He grew up in Vladivostok, studied mathematics and computer security at Far Eastern Federal University, and sold goods at a flea market as a child. His software career began with university systems and Cardpay's payment back office.

After moving to Moscow, Nikita worked on the Moscow Exchange's Finuslugi marketplace, then joined Tinkoff to build a sales domain from scratch. He shipped its first journey engine alone in six months; direct communication and a precomputed-offer platform followed. The progression led to the X-Sell CTO role.

The discussion frames marketing and sales through three questions: what to offer, how to sell it, and to whom. X-Sell connects offers, customer events, segmentation, channels, and feedback without losing journey context. The speakers also unpack LTV, loyalty, experiments, and the difference between a business platform and a set of services.

The technical tour covers triggers, offers, ML ranking, and a sales platform with different reliability classes. Nikita describes CTO work as strategy across business and technology, explicit processes, delegation, and cross-team coordination. His advice is to adopt product thinking early and identify the consumer of every engineering service.