We Want Your Business to Succeed
We believe that every mayor problem in the world will be solved by entrepreneurs.
We will do everything in our power to help you succeed in doing so.
“embrace the formula of hard work, persistence, and passion to unlock the equation of your potential.”
Douwe Wester
Founder of Upbeat
Companies we’ve helped
Strategy, Coaching, Full Funnel Work
Let’s Work Together to Create Your Perfect Marketing Strategy
Increase Visibility
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Monthly Reporting
Get Quality Leads
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Grow Your Customer Base
Make better choices, build strong foundations, and create thriving businesses that positively impact the world.
We value the domino effect of choices, the importance of a rock-solid foundation, honesty with a dash of humor, empathetic support, and the pursuit of a positive global impact. As a brand, we are committed to being the brutally honest yet supportive friend that entrepreneurs need on their journey to success and creating a lasting legacy.
We empower the creative gut and critical mind with our Philosophy:
Empowering Employees:
We believe in giving our team members the autonomy to explore their creativity and develop innovative marketing strategies. This freedom fosters a sense of ownership, driving cutting-edge ideas that set our clients apart from the competition.
Encouraging Collaboration:
We value teamwork and promote an environment where collaboration is key. Through regular brainstorming sessions and open communication channels, our team members can exchange ideas and provide constructive feedback, ensuring the most effective marketing solutions for our B2B clients.
Embracing Failure:
Upbeat understands that failure is a part of the journey to success. We encourage our employees to learn from their mistakes and iterate on their strategies, fostering a growth mindset that leads to continuous improvement.
Client-Centricity:
Our approach to marketing is rooted in crafting compelling narratives that resonate with our clients’ target audiences. By focusing on storytelling, we create engaging content that drives results and strengthens our clients’ brand presence in the B2B landscape.
Continuous Learning:
We are dedicated to the ongoing professional development of our team members. We offer in-house training, workshops, and industry events to keep our staff informed and inspired, cultivating a culture of lifelong learning.
Candor and Feedback:
We promote open and honest communication, allowing stakeholders to share their ideas and provide constructive feedback. This culture of candor enables us to refine our marketing strategies and deliver the best possible outcomes for our clients.
Full Funnel Expert
Ready to unleash your growth potential?
Ready to unleash your growth potential?
Frequently Asked Questions
Fractional CMO
Most of the work will be done remotely. We have found that building a virtual team works very well for SaaS Marketing Teams. Using modern technologies like Zoom Video Meetings and planning tools like Trello help a team be very focused on the work. In team meetings, everyone will use video to ensure maximum, focused participation. More on the best practices we use are described in Jason Fried’s book, REMOTE, where he describes how his team built some of the most successful SaaS companies using 100% remote teams.
Yes, your CMO is a “real CMO” who is on your leadership team, and officially able to represent your company. By all means, let’s get the word out!
This article describes the work of a Fractional CMO. It’s an overview that will be different per engagement but gives a good initial indication.
Your CMO is always available, just like a full-time team member of your executive team. We provide a shared model, not part-time. We have a team of professionals that will be dedicated to your project. This allows your CMO to focus their attention on leading your marketing function.
Engagement
In a typical engagement, Upbeat will work alongside your sales team, but we will by no means manage them. However, we do have a sales leadership service that we offer for an additional charge. In a typical engagement, we will work closely with BDR/SDRs and will produce playbooks, funnel structure, and handoff procedures. This will align marketing and sales, increase accountability, and will increase sales follow-up speed.
The typical engagement is a full engagement, which covers marketing leadership, inbound marketing, and outbound marketing. However, although we recommend a full engagement to obtain the best possible ROI and experience, you do not have to sign on for a full engagement. Upbeat is open to customizing an engagement to your company’s needs if we feel we can still make a significant impact and produce positive results.
You can still work with Upbeat if you are not a venture backed company. The reason we prefer venture backed companies is solely based on their ability and willingness to facilitate marketing growth. Marketing can be costly, so as long as you are willing to make marketing a strategic priority and financially able to hire our services, we are happy to have you.
We use Pipedrive or Hubspot for the end-to-end automation of Marketing, Sales and Customer Success. We also support the need for outbound campaigns with, Meet Alfred, and many other tools.
Yes. The power of our team is the broad set of experiences, and deep competency in specific industries, marketing specialties, and business models. Our CMOs lean on each other and team up to provide significantly more value to your business then they could do on their own.
A full engagement includes three parts: marketing leadership, inbound marketing, and account-based marketing . Marketing leadership will be led by an Associate or Executive CMO, depending on your request and requirements, to lead overall strategy and manage your team of specialists. Both inbound and account-based marketing will include a wide variety of agency services such as copywriters, graphic designers, video content creators, automation specialists, website developers, etc. These resources can be scaled up and down at no additional cost, to best suit your organization’s marketing needs.
An announcement of the new CMO to the team and the organization usually goes hand in hand with personal meetings with all team members and key stakeholders. The CMO will also meet with all members of the Executive Team. If possible, we try to schedule an initial visit on-site to meet the team in person. This can be done regularly if appropriate, for example as part of quarterly leadership team meetings.
When a new CMO joins the team, it is customary to make an announcement to the organization and arrange personal meetings with team members and key stakeholders. The CMO will also meet with all members of the Executive Team. Whenever possible, we try to arrange an initial on-site visit to meet the team in person. If appropriate, these visits can be scheduled regularly, such as during quarterly leadership team meetings.
Yes. Your CMO acts as a normal staff member on your team and manages the marketing function completely, including making personnel decisions.
There is no standard length for an engagement. To have a maximum impact a 6-12 month engagement is a good minimum. It’s possible to hire our CMOs for many years and keep adjusting the engagement to the needs of your company as they evolve.
Can we still work with Upbeat? Absolutely. Upbeat’s marketing leadership has no problem working alongside and/or managing outside agencies and helping connect all the dots to ensure smooth and impactful marketing processes are in place. We even pride ourselves on helping clients’ agencies improve their campaigns and results, with our own expertise and best practices.
A full engagement includes three parts: marketing leadership, inbound marketing, and account-based marketing . Marketing leadership will be led by an Associate or Executive CMO, depending on your request and requirements, to lead overall strategy and manage your team of specialists. Both inbound and account-based marketing will include a wide variety of agency services such as copywriters, graphic designers, video content creators, automation specialists, website developers, etc. These resources can be scaled up and down at no additional cost, to best suit your organization’s marketing needs.
Pricing
Yes, Kalungi is able to work with multiple solutions. To accommodate this, we will adjust our pricing and scale our agency’s bandwidth to ensure we are covering all your needs.
We do not have a set CAC cost, as it varies heavily depending on your company and industry. However, part of our services include auditing marketing spend, funnel conversions, and channel ROI, so that we can gain an accurate picture of your CAC and develop a strategy to improve it.
No it does not. Our fees will cover our services, and foundational one-time costs but will not cover promotional costs like advertising campaigns, events, or your marketing tech stack. However, we will create a marketing budget that will include these additional costs in order to ensure your company stays within budget. Additionally, Upbeat is very ROI driven and will audit these additional line items to ensure they are actually beneficial to your marketing strategy.
When you purchase Upbeat’s services, you have a comprehensive marketing team at your service that will own everything from the high-level strategy to execution across your marketing entire marketing function. However, there are a few areas that are not included in our pricing:
- Media “real estate” – This encompasses all media from PPC ads, to TV ad buys, to collateral, to trade show booths. While Upbeat will be happy to own the planning, messaging, design, and execution behind each piece of media, we won’t purchase the actual media for you.
- Marketing tech stack – Upbet requires that you pay for your Marketing tech stack. This means that you will pay each of your tech stack vendors directly, although Upbeat will run, monitor, and maintain each for you.
- Additional personnel – Upbeat will not pay for additional personnel, whether they are full-time employees, contractors, additional consultants, or agencies. That being said, you shouldn’t feel a need to hire additional talent, as Upbeat should give you more than enough resources across the entire marketing discipline.
- Product launch PR – While Upbeat does cover general PR, we do recommend that you reach out to an additional agency for a “big splash” item like a product launch. For these scenarios, we have developed a package with BLAST Media for a 3-month PR sprint that will fully support a big item like a launch. If you are interested in their services, please reach out to our sales team.
Fees and costs are projected based upon pre-payment. However, part of Kalungi’s unique value prop is our ability to scale pricing and be flexible with payment terms in order to meet our client’s needs and budget. This may be an area that we can work with you, depending on the specific contours of the engagement.
All of Upbeat’s engagement tiers include the standard set of services that are listed at upbeatinnovation.com/services. Our engagement model enables us to provide the full stack of marketing agency services and the pricing level just determines “how much” you get. Just as a full-time employee would have a limited number of hours in the day to accomplish tasks, we manage bandwidth to fit the investment level.
In order to contain costs, we assign an Associate CMO to engage with every client. These are professionals with significant marketing leadership experience as well as a strong track record of tactical marketing success. Douwe Wester, Upbeat’s CMO, would be involved in your account and likely will participate as part of your leadership team — but much of the day-to-day engagement and tactical execution will be driven by an Associate CMO.
The average tenure of CMOs with B2B SaaS companies under $50M ARR is between 8–18 months. The reality is that it’s very hard to count on people or companies for a long-term commitment in today’s employer/employee relationship. Equity-based compensation with longer vesting schedules can help with this, but for that to be meaningful it can get expensive. Our CMO can grow with your team and stay with you as long as there is a need, and it’s a good fit. Our experience has shown us that the type of marketing leadership requires for growing companies changes dramatically over time, so it’s hard to assess whether the CMO hired today will still be the right CMO 2–3 years from now.
Yes, we pride ourselves to take accountability for results if you outsource your complete marketing function to Kalungi. You can read more about how we do it here.
Yes, we are open to discussing any form of pay-for-performance. As long as we can connect our work to the outcomes we feel comfortable to “bleed and feast” with you.
Upbeat works with a retainer model, that can include a pay-for-performance component. When you outsource your Marketing function to Upbeat, you will typically pay less than hiring a marketing team of full-time employees. Our pricing is based on that. This list of Marketing needs for a typical B2B SaaS Venture provides another benchmark to create your budget.
Upbeat provides you instant talent, with the right, specialized expertise and experience, on-demand. We can hit the ground running and you don’t risk making the wrong hires. All this at a cost that is much lower than hiring, onboarding and managing an in-house team.
Practical stuff
As long as your company falls close to our ICP, with some exceptions, we feel confident in our marketing playbook and experience to take you on as a client!
Our CMO acts as an ordinary employee of your company. This includes using an email address with your company identity and being presented as your CMO on your website.
Let’s Make Things Happen
Douwe Wester
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