There’s a big problem in marketing technology. Many vendors—offering solutions such as infrastructure, content management, ecommerce, and personalization—are collecting exorbitant fees for products that don’t deliver. Often, brands are paying tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for these products before they can even try them out.

You might recognize such a vendor from their very large sales team. You might notice that important technical and pricing information isn’t available on their website. The vendor might offer AI-enabled silver bullets that promise to automate away all the trouble of running a successful brand...with no documentation.

Thankfully, not every vendor is like that. We were wondering if there was an easy way to identify the vendors who put delivering real value above making big deals, and we came up with a surprisingly simple filter.

We call it the Mojave Test. If a vendor passes the Mojave Test, you know what you're going to get, and you know what you're going to pay for it. It doesn't mean they're good, but it means they are transparent...and that means you can compare them with other vendors apples to apples.

Here are the four characteristics required to pass the Mojave Test:

Public API documentation

What, precisely, are the capabilities of the platform? If you can’t find this information, you’re just reading marketing copy. If your engineers and product managers are stakeholders in the decision (and damn, they better be), you shouldn’t be messing with vendors who hide this information.

Transparent pricing

How much does it cost? If a vendor does not reveal this information, it means they are trying to get as much money as possible from each transaction. It also means that they may be pricing unfairly, and for reasons outside your control. Sure, we understand volume discounts for major clients; but entry-level customers should be on an even playing field.

Self-service

Can I sign up now? I have my corporate card ready. Can a developer start testing the API right after that? Not only is self-service highly convenient, it shows that the product is real and ready to go. If a piece of software is not self-service, you have to wonder whether the vendor is writing the last few lines of code after they receive your payment. Even worse, and all too common: the vendor may be gearing up to sell you professional services required to put the product in place. A scalable, modern application isn't something we should have to wait for, and it shouldn't require an army to start using it.

Serverless (from your perspective)

This applies to pricing and configuration: if you’re talking about servers, you’re dead.

Pricing should be flat rate or based on usage, whether that be number of monthly users, traffic, data throughput, CPU time, etc. If a vendor is charging you licensing fees based on how many machine instances or cores will be running their application, run in the other direction.

As a customer, you should not have to worry about scaling the software you’re paying for unless you are operating at historic scale. SaaS vendors, however they accomplish it, should ensure that you can just call their API’s to your heart’s content (though usage fees may apply). Infrastructure and platform vendors should be able to deploy your brand’s applications in a way that scales automatically—without anyone manually spinning up VM’s or containers or manually resizing server instances.

The right vendors are out there

Many software and platform vendors already pass the test. Modern SaaS and PaaS vendors typically do. At Mojave, we use Firebase, Contentful, Copper CRM, and MailChimp, to name a few.

But there are still some big-name vendors who don’t pass the Mojave Test. The reasons are varied. Some offer products that haven’t caught up to the serverless revolution. Others still earn big profits by selling the old fashioned way: high pressure with lots of smoke and mirrors.

We think the role of the modern marketing technology sales organization should be to educate and empower, not to make promises that aren’t concretely backed up by publicly available API documentation, and certainly not to decide on the fly how much to charge a new customer.

We’ve seen a few smart brands adopt these filters already, and we know the wind blows in favor of vendors who are transparent, self-service, and serverless.

Once more, The Mojave Test:

• Public API documentation
• Transparent pricing
• Self-service to buy and use
• Serverless