Three months after a new platform goes live, the campaign review has become my most predictable meeting. It is always the same story on screen. Campaigns are running, the numbers are climbing, and the team feels on top of things. Then we look at what is actually running. Segment, message, send, measure. Segment, message, send, measure. Batch-and-blast campaigns, every single one: marketing picks an audience and hits send. Exactly what the team already did with the old tool.
Everything the company actually bought the platform for sits unused. Journeys triggered by customer behaviour, not by the marketing calendar. A message at the first sign a customer is quietly leaving. An offer timed to arrive when a contract expires. Content tailored to each individual recipient. None of this is a campaign anyone “sends”. These are automations: built once, running on their own - even while you sleep. And that is exactly why they don’t exist. Every automation is a small project. And a project needs hands that aren’t there. You can hire those hands or bring them in from outside. Or you can buy the result itself.
Nobody is at fault in these meetings. The team runs at full capacity. It is simply resourced to run campaigns, not to build automations alongside them. Which is why I don’t buy the “poor adoption” story IT likes to offer. As with the phone in sales, this is not a technology problem.
Adoption is not a function of training. It is a function of the calendar.
An executive looking at those numbers tends to reach the responsible conclusion. First strengthen the team, then move ahead with the new platform. It sounds prudent. In reality it is the most expensive option: it stops the project.
Growing the team is the right long-term move. A person who owns the area grows with the platform and keeps the knowledge in-house. I say this even though part of FrodX’s business is supplementing client teams. But the calendar is relentless. According to SHRM, the median time to fill a non-executive position dropped to 39 days this year. That is the average office role. You will not find a niche martech specialist in this region in six weeks. When you do find one, they have a notice period. And once they arrive, the real learning begins. At FrodX, onboarding a SAP Engagement Cloud specialist takes six months - even when they join us with years of martech experience. You don’t learn these platforms on a course. From decision to self-sufficient specialist, you are quickly looking at nine or ten months.
Ten months of waiting is exactly what a brand-new platform cannot afford. According to Gartner’s 2025 Marketing Technology Survey, companies actively use only about half the tools in their martech stack. Just 15% of organisations extract both strategic goals and positive ROI from them. A licence left waiting for a new hire only makes that statistic worse. The platform is only half the investment - the other half is hands. And hands are the only half you can borrow.
So flip the sequence. Post the job ad today, but don’t stop the platform - bridge the gap while you hire. I know two bridges, and they are not for the same situations.
The first bridge is staff augmentation - or body leasing, as the model is known across Central Europe. An experienced specialist in your platform joins your team for a few months. They work to your plan and your priorities. You get hands and knowledge - no hiring risk, no ten-month gap. Your lead decides which automation gets built this month. The specialist has it live before a new hire would even get a login.
There is one condition we too rarely say out loud in sales conversations. Someone on your side has to know what they want. Staff augmentation only works when there is strong internal direction. Without it, the rented specialist just runs the same old playbook faster on the new platform. We are back at the start of this column - with a higher monthly invoice.
Growth as a Service means FrodX takes over running lifecycle marketing or your loyalty programme across your existing customer base: strategy, segmentation on your own data, building the automations, execution, and optimisation. Payment is tied to results. You are not hiring a person. You are buying a working process that answers for a number.
GaaS is rarely bought by marketing. It is bought by the board - and always with a challenge attached: if we pay you €100,000 over eighteen months, we expect €600,000 of value in return. The same logic as ROAS - except the cost isn’t ad spend and creative, it’s our heads and hands.
The bank that set us this challenge first walked us through its graveyard of experiments. Consented leads collected by its business partner. Buyers of a promotional offer the bank wanted to turn into long-term customers. Two segments written off after several failed campaigns. To us, that archive was the most valuable document in the project. It revealed two problems. The outreach came too late. And a single USP had to persuade everyone. We bet on the opposite - a USP tailored to each individual customer, delivered on time and on the right channel. In a segment nobody had considered worth the effort, the bank’s returns more than doubled.
We were not smarter than their team. Distance let us see what was hard to spot from inside. And we ran far more tests than an internal team could afford. To my mind, that is the whole point of the service. GaaS does not promise miracles where you are already strong. If you have been polishing your abandoned-cart flow for ten years, we will not double it. We look for blind spots.
First: we work exclusively on customers you already have - retention, repeat purchases, loyalty, referrals. We reach into lead-to-cash only when the enquiry inflow is strong and the consents are explicit and legally sound. The partner leads above are exactly that case. We do not chase new markets, and we do not carry your advertising risk. Acquisition stays your game. We make sure an acquired customer doesn’t remain a one-time buyer.
Second: GaaS makes sense for medium and large companies with repeat purchases and their own sales channels. Below a certain customer-base size, the economics of external management simply don’t work - for anyone.
And third, the point that disappoints most prospective clients. We run GaaS only on technologies where the experts are on our own payroll: SAP Engagement Cloud and HubSpot. We regretfully decline enquiries from companies that have invested in Salesforce. We cannot guarantee a result on a platform we don’t know inside out. Not while relying on contractors whose business model is selling hours against your specification. Look at that model closely. The client writes the specification. So the same team that never gets to its own automations is now supposed to manage an external vendor too. You pay for hours; the thinking stays with you.
To anyone still choosing a platform, I suggest one simple test. Ask: who in this region will take responsibility for the result on this technology - not for hours worked, for the result? If the answer is silence, you will be the one writing the specifications. Choosing a platform is not just choosing technology. It is choosing which forms of partnership will even be available to you later.
“Which service is better” is the wrong question. The right one: who owns your existing-customer business today - and how much time do they actually have for it?
A lead with a clear vision and a campaign calendar, but no hands to deliver: staff augmentation. You buy capacity and keep your hands on the wheel. Knowledge flows into your team with every sprint. No owner, or an owner buried under everything else: GaaS. You buy a process that answers for a number, not hours someone still has to direct.
And then there is the question executives like to skip: where do you want to be in two years? If the goal is your own team, both bridges are temporary. The specialist, or our team, mentors your new hire until they are ready to take full ownership. The programme is the same six-month one our own people go through. And whoever picks a candidate knowing they will work together for six months picks differently from an external recruiter.
None of the companies whose campaigns we reviewed made a mistake. They bought the right technology and had it live fast. The slow part is the hands that will build the automations. But the order matters. Don’t wait for a new hire to launch the platform. And don’t wait until the platform is in place to start hiring. The ad, the bridge, and the project run in parallel. That is not three decisions. It is one, stretched across a calendar.
You stand up a platform in a quarter. You plan a team a year ahead. And the most expensive part of the project is not the licence. It is the licence that waits.
P.S. The best Growth as a Service contract is one the client cancels after a few years. It means they have built a team that no longer needs us. Until then, let the licence work, not wait.