How IT Services & Software Companies Market Successfully

0:00Welcome to IT Mastermind Talks, your access to insights and experiences from thought leaders in the IT services industry and those that support the industry. Our podcast features not only the seasoned professionals charting their start to exit journey, but also the key contributors who help ensure their success. We delve into the diverse challenges encountered within the IT services realm, encompassing both professional hurdles and personal obstacles. Join us. Be part of our growing community and engage in the conversation hosted by Ian Markram of Loading Growth.

0:36Hi, good morning everyone. It's Ian Markram from IT Mastermind Talks and today I have Angelique from ITVA and ITVA is an awesome marketing organization and a talent resource organization in the Philippines. I am a co-founder of that organization with Angelique and we do some amazing things for our clients and today we're going to talk a bit about the marketing side of it. We spoke a bit about resourcing and this is sort of the second video that we're going to make out of this to help people understand what we do from an offering perspective. The reason why we started out with marketing many years ago at the ITJ is because as a coach all you people know I've been coaching a lot of people. I have nine levers when I coach organizations and one of those levers is is really around sales and and the precursor to sales is marketing and unfortunately marketing in the western world and the clients I work with are in the US, UK and Australia, it's too expensive to do the marketing in those countries directly and more importantly what we really found out is IT services is a unique offering around marketing.

1:36So a lot of people will go to a marketing company not really understand what IT services really means and how they actually work as as organization. So what we decided to do about 6 years ago is spin up a team or IT services marketing and that's also doing our software marketing as well and a few other things as well. But they started to realize go deep niche and understand what IT services companies really need. So that problem we were solving there is around understanding IT services because it's unique. agencies agencies think they know it but they don't and they don't really want to know and they don't want to learn about your industry to be honest. The next thing is having affordable and playbooks that we've created around delivering these services and accelerators so we actually get some really awesome accelerators and playbooks out to our clients around marketing at affordable price where my clients are quite small move through with that marketing and actually get more sales out of it. That's really the fundamental challenge that we had 6 years ago and the IT VA services team has been doing an awesome job. So I'm going to ask an to just do a quick intro there in your side an

2:39So Ian already gave a very brief introduction about how ITVA came to be really most IT firms like what Ian mentioned it's really run by technical founders but not really marketers so most of their time goes into delivery that's where ITVA actually comes in. So these are the four things that we run for our clients. So I'll just give you a brief overview of each one and then we will talk about the details later. One is the strategic marketing that's the AI powered content engine pipeline growth and brand authority work that we do. Number two is the extended marketing services that includes webinars, lead magnets, ads, customer journeys. Basically the activities that help support the main strategy that we carry out for our clients. Number three is the back office operations. That's the operational machine behind the business. So that includes accounting, invoicing, project allocation and others. And lastly, we've got the technical resourcing which we spoke about last time. That includes sourcing, hiring, and embedding the people that delivery team actually needs. What we always say is that we are not a generalist agency.

3:48We are the operating partner that IT firms turn to when they need to scale without scaling overhead. So that's what ITBY actually does. It's fantastic. And and just on that note, the technical resourcing, we went through that last session and we talked about the reasons the different models between the three different models and the tips and tricks that we've seen between those models. It's really important, more educational than anything else to watch that video. So yeah, great.

4:12Let me just take you through the process that we are actually selling here in ITVA. When clients come to us, they're not just buying noise or random marketing activities. They're actually buying a pipeline that moves. The thing about it buying decision is that nobody signs a managed services contract or an SAP project off the back of one ad. Interest has to turn into intent and that takes a process, not just necessarily a single post. So that's the whole thesis behind how we work in ITVA. So, we're not just chasing MQLs or market qualified leads for the sake of a bigger number in a dashboard. When we say a marketing qualified lead, that means someone actually shown interest. So, it's either they visit your site, they open your email, they follow your page, and we've got on the other side the sales qualified lead. So, that means someone is ready for a conversation. So they book a discovery call, they request a demo, they accept a proposal, they are basically ready to talk about commercials. Our job here in ITVA is to build the bridge between those two, the MQL and the SQL deliberately every single time. And that bridge is what we call the ITVA engine. When an IT firm comes to us for marketing, they're buying a system that turns I click on something into I'm ready to talk sales.

5:34That means a solid pipeline. Okay. So this is the IPV engine that bridges the gap between market qualified leads and sales qualified leads. And we will be talking more about this one as we progress Ian because this is exactly our sixstage road map. Look hell of important on this is MQL to SQL. It's easy to go to chat or claude or something to that effect and Google it and say look give me the MQL to SQL. The problem with that is all these components in the bridge the ITVA engine are activities that human beings have got to do at some stage or majority of it even now you can never automate it. So at some stage you have to invest in the engine or create your own engine if you want you don't have to use ITVA engine but the thing at the end of the day it's not automated it can never really be because there's so many different things you got to go back and metrics and you you got to have experience to run those engines if that call if that calls. Thanks an for that.

6:27Right. Okay. So here's strategic marketing road map and I think you Ian could talk a lot about this one because this is exactly what you take your clients through. That's right. You know the thing at end the day is this is the if you have one page to explain everything in your organization this is the page okay around marketing activities to make sure that everything works and there's a lot to it. There's a lot of little components that you've got to go through to make sure that you get the right outcome and it depends on how long what assets you already have and where you are within your own life cycle or maturity around marketing as well as to when we start off. But what we do is we team sits there and does a assessment and then from that assessment we'll build out the road map specific to you and what you want to achieve within your organization. Okay, that's really important. You can't just take a screenshot of this for example, put it into Claude and say, "Hey, just do the thing for ourselves." Because not even Claude knows really services are and we're not selling accounting services or bookkeeping services as Claude keeps on coming back to me about. But the thing at the end of the day is step back, understand where all these components are. I'm going to quickly talk a bit about these components cuz I think they are really important. Okay, the strategy. Now, our whole team in the ITDA is all certified with Claude and we use Claude. We had to choose one or the other and we decided at some stage that claude was better than with open AI GBT.

7:42So everyone then had to be certified to carry on working within our organization. So we do use AI quite extensively. That's why we get the prices and the velocity on delivery as you see later on the slides down to where they are at. It's quite amazing. In July 2026 this video has been recorded and you know 6 months ago this wasn't there. So AI powered marketing engine what we really want to set up with you. that we do the compounding pipeline and the this the compressed sales cycle and brand authorities where we want to move that strategy along. We have different solutions in play that we always take for our clients. The LinkedIn automation outre sequency I always say turn that on and leave it on forever. We've got a team lead called Carlo. He runs all our clients through this automation component and it's a LinkedIn automation component and it's really really powerful. You've got to carry on building your database when you're talking to people. you can actually have someone to talk to and show your content via LinkedIn or newsletters through that as well. So that's where the marketing automation comes into it more and more. The nurturing side, we use a solution called IMA. It's GHL. We've got some of the accelerators in there as well for our clients workflow. There's a whole lot of stuff around websites and etc etc.

8:51And obviously we've got AI solutions around some of the web design and also visuals and things like that around AI solutions do that. So that's the type of solution we're using at the moment. There is around the LinkedIn automation. We do scraping. We've got four or five tools we go to to scrape. So there's probably like 10 to 15 tools across that sort of solution road map that we use to get outcomes for our clients. There's not one tool out there unfortunately. I wish there was cuz we'll just pay a lot of money for that one tool, but we end up paying for about 15 tools. The timeline above that is really important. You know, it depends on where you are already with your offer, which is what I work with coaching. What is your offer? What's the pitch? And then once you got that in parallel is where are you with your marketing assets and your process and that's where the times lines from 1 week to 6 weeks to 3 months basically grow out. It depends on where you're at with those things as well. And also what you can afford. You know sometimes you know everyone wants to drive a Ferrari but you can only you know afford a Toyota Corolla. Well just drive the Toyota Corolla until you can afford a Ferrari. That's the way it works. So we'll work on the budget and we'll work on the way we can actually make it affordable to our clients to engage at.

9:57Now the other thing as well, you don't have to engage me to engage the ITVA. You can go directly to the ITBA as well. Sometimes people just don't want to get coached by me and I'm busy as well and I have a real firm view on certain strategies and that might be wrong for some people. So go to the ITBA directly, engage them directly and work with them directly. The next thing is around the foundations, the road map. So the road map we build out is there's a foundation component, awareness component, engaging, nurturing, a conversion and then a growth component. So those are the sort of components we look at when we build out our road map for our clients. And obviously then our accelerators, the things that make us unique, our special little jam that makes us really good is the accelerators that we've been building over for the last 6 years through my coaching. What's worked, what's not working, through the 150 clients that we've had through the learning growth program over the last 10 years, 11 years I think it is now. When we do the road map, we map them to the accelerators to get you that fast deployment and get the price down and get some eyeballs on your content and get that action happening and bringing people into your sales pipeline as much as possible. So, we have the grand guidelines. Some people haven't updated them in 5 years. Some people haven't even done them properly. We do the brand guidelines, ICP development, which is is what I call the perfect future customer.

11:10Then you have LinkedIn foundations, messaging, database building. Big believer in building a database. Start that sooner. You don't have to have all the IP and all the things sorted out. Just build a database with Carlo and his lead genen, a magician of a team. And then we look at the content strategy and the blogs, the campaigns for emails, the media posts and the visuals. And then you get things like webinars, events. There's a whole lot of overlays that we have there. We couldn't fit that all onto one slide, but that's sort of accelerators we bring to and that's what makes our clients win all the time and they come back to us all the time. So yeah, an hopefully that sort of gave people out there a bit of an overview on how we look at marketing for IT services and our software companies around strategic marketing road maps kind of important. You can do a lot of things with AI but you still need the human in the loop as I always say and you need people who know what is actually working in the marketplace at that given time. So yeah hopefully that helped going through that.

11:59Yep. Thanks for that Ian. And you slightly mentioned about the foundational work. So I just want to hammer on that more Ian by like showing them how we start every campaign when we work with clients. So every firm basically wants to jump straight to ads or content calendar. That's what we always hear from our the people that we talk to. But we always tell them that we hold off until the foundations are actually solid because you know a campaign built on shaky ground just burns budget faster. So here's what has to be locked in first. These are like the foundational work that we do with our clients before we do anything before any outreach or campaign activity begins. So first one is the ICP. Who exactly are we targeting? Not like a broad IT companies type of thing but the specific segment size and the buyer this firm actually wins with. So that's where we begin. We define the ICP first and then we move on to messaging. what does this firm say about itself and does it actually land with that ICP. So most technical founders can explain what they do but actually very few can explain why it matters to the person deciding whether to use them or to to use their services or to hire them. next we've got LinkedIn for IT services. LinkedIn is where the buyer actually shows up. So if the profile looks abandoned or generic that's the first impression gone. So we have to work on the LinkedIn and we also have the content library.

13:27It's a bank of material that supports every stage of the funnel. So not just a scramble to write something new every time a campaign needs an asset. So we really have to make sure that your content library is built first. And then like what you mentioned earlier, branding. So we want to make sure that it's consistent, it is credible, and it is current or updated cuz buyers judge trustworthiness in seconds. That's why we have to have a solid branding. And then we've got our IMA. It's our AI powered marketing engine that keeps all of the above running consistently instead of you know relying on someone like one person on each aspect of the work. IMA is where all the marketing campaigns are actually anchored on. So we've got website. It's the one asset that works 24/7 like what we always say. So if it doesn't convert the moment someone lands on it, every other effort is wasted traffic. These are basically the seven steps that we do. First we check on each one and get these right and everything after them works harder.

14:27We've got the pricing in here. it actually reflects the Everest pricing. That's right. So Everest is the loading growth program. It's one of the programs that we run. So the normal pricing is there on the left hand side. So you can jump out there. It's so so good value. We have got a lot of tools and processes and we've been doing this for so long. We know what we're doing. And so the everything in yellow is for my clients. We've got a special deal even though I own half the company with Angelique and we have to make sure that we're profitable as any business would and we have a special deal with the Everest clients because we coach them and we want them to to grow and be the next batch of companies that we help exit or grow to a point where they're doing fantastically well. So thanks very much for that an whole thing around that setting up that foundation work is so important is you can't skip it. You've got to go back and do all the steps. And the ICP, for example, the step one is, you know, gets a lot of people caught because they always think that is a buyer, but it's not really the buy or we have influences. We have to have the influences and the actual person that's going to make the decisions. And we have to have maybe five or six people at each client that you want to target. So, we got to be really specific and deep and and unfortunately, you know, people sometimes don't want to hear that. They they don't believe that's the case, but unfortunately, normally it is. And everywhere you go along here, an has checklists for everything to go through cuz we run this as a machine and that's the way we talk about it internally.

15:41It's the ITBA engine. Reason why it's called the ITBA engine because it's a machine that runs and it goes over and over again and that's why it's so successful cuz we're tweaking it. We're upgrading it all the time. So yeah, thanks for that an once we've done the foundational work, we now go straight into the actual IPva machine which I showed you earlier and we call that the six stage road map. So this is basically the bridge that we were talking about earlier, the bridge from MQL to SQL in six stages. Each stage represents deliberate progression. We've got first one the awareness, engagement, nurturing, conversion, onboarding and growth and expansion. And underneath each one of that, we've got different campaigns that supports that one. We've got for the awareness stage, it's basically making the right people know that you exist, putting your offer out there into the right people. We've got campaigns to support that like the LinkedIn outreach. We've also got LinkedIn monthly management, content management. We can create lead magnets for you and manage ads for you as well.

16:43We've got engagement. So from creating that interest, we turn observers into active responders. So we want them to engage with you or to connect with you. So that is ongoing that overlaps the awareness stage. We also have some different campaigns running underneath that one. And then we nurture these people. We keep them warm until they are ready to be converted. So some nurturing techniques that we do, we've got the monthly newsletter, email campaigns, webinar, many other things. We normally also do combination of different campaigns to nurture your database. And then once they are ready, we move intent to book meetings through the fourth stage, which is the conversion. So we've got an appointment setter to support that as well. We've got the fifth stage, which is the onboarding. We can help you deliver a seamless first experience for your clients. This is supported by the way by IMA. We can create an onboarding system for you inside of IMA where you can do some welcome sequences. You can set up your kickoff calls expectation setting inside there in IMA. Your booking calendar is there as well. So we can create a whole system of that for you. And lastly, we've got the growth and expansion. We turn your clients into loyal customers or into advocates. So we've got upsell campaigns, preferral programs, and case studies. we can do that for you as well.

18:05Look, it's complicated. You know, once again, it's the ITVA engine working in the background to get this all done. A lot of people when they start, they think, oh, you know, 80 20, you know, rule, they think we only, you know, 20% when they do marketing. I was like that. You know, I spent when I had my own IT services firm. I spent, you know, two 300 grand in the space of 3 years trying to get marketing right. Never got it right. I wish I had the service that that you guys offer us, my clients now, because it would have been so much better. We just go in, tick the box. Yes, this is what we need. This is how it's how long it's going to take. this is generally what the outcome's going to be and off you go. You know, it's really that good. Certain people tend to be skeptical and we can do it ourselves and yeah, let them go and spend their time and fail and try and build their own ITVA engine, but unless you're a big organization, you should just replicate, you know, what the success that everyone else has been through and jump on the bandwagon and do the sixstage road map and not try and do it yourself. And yeah, I think it's it's frustrating for me cuz when I coach clients and they want to try and do it themselves and I always say, go do it cuz they got to learn sometimes to fail. And then they come back and they say, "I wish I'd learned from what you told me. You should have pushed me harder." Well, I'm not here to sell it to you. You make your own choice and you go from there.

19:09So, yeah, it's an awesome awesome process. Thanks, Ash. Yeah, and I forgot to mention, Ian, that each stage is actually augmented by AI as well. Like what you've mentioned, the team is already claified. So, we've got the accelerators actually built inside of Claude. So we now do it, you know, quicker and faster and we are able to put the price point cheaper now.

19:29Thanks an for that session. It was awesome to help my clients at Loading Growth on the Everest program to understand a bit more about what you do behind the scenes. And for those that aren't part of the program, obviously you can join the program if you want or just go directly to Angelique. Her details are on the slide as you see Angelique at theba.com. Go to the website, whatever. Reach out to her. Just get a sense check what you're doing currently with your marketing process. Also just you know what your provider that you have currently just do a review ask an you know this is what we're doing current with the provider what would it look like if you folks did it. We only do things for our clients that are necessary and a lot of these big marketing agencies an they try and do everything and make it they try and push a lot around the strategy and make it all sound big and successful and grand and it take the clients through a nice journey and the clients love that process. Unfortunately you you don't need it. You just need to get get on and get some freaking MQLs, marketing qualified leads to start happening. You don't need to be told told about how your brand looks, how your slide looks, how your website's so fantastic. It's really execution time and my clients that are that know me the most know that I'm very serious about bringing money back to them as in their back pocket and I think the big agencies have got a lot to learn around that, but you know, their their style is very different unfortunately. And do you want to say anything on that or close off?

20:46I guess you know you guys can just reach out to me anytime that what Ian said my email is there I'm also in teams you can send me a message or you can even send me a WhatsApp message I'm on WhatsApp as well some of our clients just call me straight from WhatsApp so just feel free to reach out to me if you've got any questions or like you're curious to know more about the ITVA engine that we were talking about earlier just feel free to reach out anytime and thank you so much Ian for doing this with me as well

21:15No it's only a pleasure and keep on doing the great work and I'll see you the next two weeks. I'll be over to see you in person. Can't wait. Thanks. Bye Thanks for joining us on IT Mastermind Talks. Don't miss out on our next episode. Hit the follow button and stay updated. Want to be our next podcast guest? Contact us and share your expertise with our audience. Visit www.itmastermindalks.com for more information.