Marketing as a Service (MaaS): How It Works For Your Tech Business for One-Off Campaign Anythings

If your business is a small software startup or recently early funded, you are probably hard at work creating lead generating campaigns for your sales guy/gal/team to start filling pipeline. If you’re selling to large, government-regulated enterprises, that sales journey is undoubtedly a long one. You likely have someone with marketing experience helping you but like everyone else in your organization, they are wearing multiple hats. Perhaps your sales leader is spending 10-15 hours per week helping this marketing person. Maybe as a company leader you’re doing some of that too, in addition to working on interviewing new hires, creating budgets, and sitting in meetings.

Maybe you have a conference where you are sponsoring a booth in the next few months and are working hard to get product demos and sales promo sheets completed, along with email campaigns and a PR to announce your presence at the event. And maybe this work is just temporary until after the conference is over, when you and the sales leader can focus on lead follow ups.

Prepping and executing planning for such events is where Marketing as a Service (MaaS) could make great sense for you. Next week, PMI will celebrate 14 years in helping startup technology vendors with a game-changing business model that provides a team of on-demand tech marketing resources at a fraction of the cost of hiring a single FTE. MaaS is designed to help you keep costs for human resources at a minimum, adding and removing those marketing resources throughout the year as your business needs.

How does it work? 

To preface how it works, it is worth nothing that over the past 25 years I have worked closely with tech product management and sales leaders building campaigns and helping fill pipeline. We work in three simple steps.

1. Free Consultation: For interested startups, I offer a free 30-minute consultation. In that 30-minute discovery, because of how well you know your business and how well I know the right marketing campaign questions, I can quickly grasp key and differentiating selling points that define your offering. I can start messaging and campaigning for you right after that meeting.
2. Non-Binding Services Agreement: If you are interested in moving forward, we will execute a marketing services agreement (MSA) that has no long-term requirements and that is cancellable at any time. I do not require any up front retainer. We work on an hourly rate and upon agreement of the hours that you have in your budget, we will commence work. At the end of the month I will invoice you for the hours consumed that month and each subsequent month for the duration of the project. We have great processes and technology to help manage projects and you will always know where we are with your project’s progress and how aligned to your budget it is.
3. You Get Marketing Resources: With MSA in hand, me and my team will fill whatever resource gap you need filling:
   1. Emails for a campaign (copywriting, graphic design, CRM/Marketing Automation system input)
   2. Help coordinating a conference, webinar or customer get together (copywriting, graphic design, conference project management, logistics)
   3. Quality tech presentation for conference or webinar, highlighting your key selling points and areas of differentiation (copywriting, graphic design, thought-leading subject matter content)
   4. Press release or blog writing and distribution (copywriting and newswire service distribution)
   5. Video or webinar production that promotes your company or its products/services (copywriting, graphic design, audio and video production)
   6. Product sheet creation/updating (copywriting, graphic design, website publishing)
   7. White paper or technical paper research writing – what’s hot now is data security, consumer privacy, and application modernization. I have extensive experience writing about and speaking on these topics on the tech trade show circuit. (market research, copywriting, graphic design, website and other online publishing)
   8. Good news for your business if you have a solution that helps in these disciplines. If you aren’t working in this space, you can likely message to the market about these disciplines and get marketplace response. I can help here as well.
   9. Website building or updating (copywriting, graphic/web design, website security certificates, database management, etc)
   10. Social media writing and publishing (copywriting, graphic/web design, distribution across multimedia)

I am also a certified HubSpot solutions partner. We specialize in selling and using HubSpot and other leading CRM/Marketing Automation systems. If you have other CRM/Marketing Automation tools, there is no learning curve for us; we can jump right in. If you don’t have a CRM/MA, I can provide a HubSpot demo at your discretion.

Why PMI is different than other marketing or PR agencies?

We are different than traditional marketing or PR agencies in that we have specific enterprise tech expertise going back 25+ years. We understand the DNA of software, from where it has come from in the 1990s to where it is going based on industry trends mentioned in number seven above.

The enterprise software space is seeing unprecedented consolidation. You can survive and likely thrive in this fast-paced here-today-gone/acquired-tomorrow environment if your products help in the right enterprise disciplines (InfoSec, Consumer Privacy, Application Modernization). I have been researching, writing and speaking in these disciplines for about 10 years now.

And, speaking of InfoSec and Consumer Privacy, there are lot of bad cyber actors – armies really –  out there, and most IT departments at the companies you may be selling to are too over tasked to identify breach as it happens. With IT departments’ inability to identify a breach in real time (it actually takes months!) and with 70% of all breaches involving human error or bad human actors you can see why this segment of software is most needed. Additionally, now that the consumer has become king where his/her/their data is concerned, privacy is now front and center in the United States. Europe led the way with the commencement of the GDPR 10 years ago and now the United States has jumped on board with multiple state-sponsored legislation about consumer data and privacy. There is also ISO 42001, which was the first international standard for AI systems learning models.

What triggers a software purchase is simple to understand if you’ve been around.

PMI is also different because I’ve spent the last 25 years working alongside some great product and sales people who taught me the value of sales and marketing teams being closely aligned. I also learned a lot about software deals, both in the wins and losses. There are  many ways to land a deal with a large commercial or public organization, but the one constant is time. It takes a long time to sell a six- or seven-figure deal and this concept is not likely to change anytime soon. What you need throughout this long sales journey is stickiness and that stickiness is content marketing. Some marketers call it drip marketing. I call it touch marketing. You need touch your prospects throughout this long sales cycle every week with something – email, eNewsletter, social post, event announcement – that has your logo/brand on it.

Working with ISV clients selling into large organizations, it is not uncommon for a deal to take 12-18 months, sometimes longer. For this sales journey, it’s good to have marketing content – both salesy and educational –  so you can touch the market with frequency and with multiple buyer types. The key to enterprise software sales is frequency and brand recognition because the people who make software decisions don’t show up to work everyday and say, “I think I’ll buy some software today.”

The trigger for a software purchase is most times an event – a breach; something breaks; something needs an update; new management comes in and wants it a different way; a mandate forces you to adhere to a standard or do something different than the way you used to do it. These are opportunistic events, moments that if you are seen online and are relevant, you’ll get considered. This relevance could be an email, a Google search ad, a conference or webinar you did last week, anything in 1 through 10 above that I mentioned that we can help with.

As a small tech firm, you don’t have to hire extra people to give your business the recognition that reach and frequency will bring. But you do need help, and this is where MaaS from PMI can play a role.

We have created an infographic that shows where we fit in the lead-generating workflow of your software business. Click here or the button above to download the infographic. If you want to take me up on a free 30-minute consultation (or however amount of time you have, 15 minutes is fine too), click the button below.

I hope this blog was helpful, even if you don’t reach out. Helping you was my main intention.

Tony Perri, CMO, PMI