Maintenance software lives an odd life. When it works, almost nobody notices. The work order arrives. The inspection happens. The pump keeps pumping, the classroom stays open, the factory line moves, and the building behaves as if good fortune were a utility. When the system fails, the invisible becomes expensive. Drea Toretti has spent more than 25 years marketing software that operates in this peculiar territory: essential, intricate and usually far from the glamour aisle.
Today she is chief marketing officer at TMA Systems, the Tulsa-based maker of maintenance and enterprise asset-management software. From her base in greater Atlanta, Toretti leads product marketing, lead generation and creative development. It is a broad remit, spanning the words used to explain a product, the programs that introduce it to buyers and the creative work that gives the whole enterprise a recognizable face.
Her official biography traces a route from Pittsburgh, where she is from, through New York, Los Angeles and San Jose, and finally to the Atlanta area. The cities suggest different chapters of American commerce and technology. Her company history does the same: Servigistics, Bomgar, PowerPlan, Command Alkon, CAI Software and now TMA Systems. Each sold a different kind of technical promise. All required a marketer comfortable with detail.
The glamour of avoiding trouble
Vertical software marketing is translation with consequences. A buyer does not wake up wanting an acronym. The buyer wants fewer interruptions, cleaner records, a credible forecast or a maintenance team that knows what to do next. The software may contain dashboards, integrations and databases, but the story begins with a shift, a building, a fleet or a piece of equipment that needs to keep earning its place.
Toretti's career has repeatedly put her close to those operational stakes. Servigistics made service-parts and service-management software. Bomgar, now BeyondTrust, was known for secure remote-support technology. PowerPlan served asset-intensive businesses with software for accounting, tax and capital planning. Command Alkon built tools for the heavy building-materials industry. CAI Software focused on manufacturing and distribution. TMA's systems help organizations manage facilities, maintenance and physical assets.
This is not a tour through fashionable consumer categories. It is a tour through the systems underneath them. Concrete has to arrive. Equipment has to be maintained. Capital assets have to be accounted for. Specialized manufacturers have to know what is happening on the floor. Toretti's work sits between those realities and the language a market can understand.
A marketer who keeps returning to the room
In 2022, while vice president of marketing at Command Alkon, Toretti spoke repeatedly about ELEVATE, the company's user conference. Her language reveals what she thought the gathering was for. “One of the main tenets of our ELEVATE Conference is education,” she said. The program offered product road maps, training, best practices and customer stories. In other words, the event was designed less as spectacle than as a place where practitioners could become better at their jobs.
She also framed recognition as part of the work. As nominations closed for that year's awards, Toretti called the event a chance “to pause and reflect on the good work” done in industry communities. The categories went deep into the operating floor: plant operator, driver, dispatcher, weighmaster, fleet manager, quality-control specialist. Marketing was being used to point a light at people whose competence is usually absorbed into the day's output.
“One of the main tenets of our ELEVATE Conference is education.”Drea Toretti, speaking in 2022 as Command Alkon's VP of marketing
That choice offers a portable idea. In a technical market, teaching is not an accessory to selling. It demonstrates that the company understands the work, gives customers a reason to gather and creates a vocabulary the whole category can share. Recognition does something similar. It makes the operator visible and lets the product remain in its proper supporting role.
There is wit in Toretti's public record, too. In a testimonial from her PowerPlan years, she praised a video-production crew by contrasting them with another crew working nearby: she could not remember the others' names, she joked, but she knew this team's names and where they lived. It is a funny endorsement because it is really about memorability, ease and human rapport. The craft did its job, but the relationship earned the line.
Strategy upstairs, tactics on the ground
TMA's biography describes Toretti through a pairing that can sound ordinary until one considers how rarely it survives contact with an executive calendar: strategic vision and tactical planning. Strategy chooses the hill. Tactics locate the boots, the weather and Tuesday morning. Her remit mirrors the pairing. Product marketing sets the argument. Lead generation tests whether anyone responds. Creative development determines how the argument looks and feels in public.
At CAI Software, where she served as CMO before joining TMA, her stated focus was on innovative, data-driven marketing that could build awareness, accelerate growth and produce measurable results. The industry changed from construction materials to specialized manufacturing software, but the grammar remained operational. A message had to move, and the movement had to show up somewhere more concrete than applause.
Name the job
Start with what the customer must keep running, not with the acronym being sold.
Make expertise useful
Training, road maps and best practices turn a conference into working infrastructure.
Measure the motion
Connect awareness and creative work to demand, growth and observable results.
Credit the operator
Recognition brings the people doing difficult, specific work into the foreground.
Put together, those moves form a useful operating system for B2B marketing. Begin with the job rather than the feature. Teach enough to make the buyer more capable. Measure whether the message travels. Then recognize the practitioners who give the category its credibility. None of these moves requires theatrical language. They require proximity: to the product, to the sales conversation and especially to the customer who will live with the decision after the campaign has ended.
Toretti's job history shows why that proximity compounds. An executive who has marketed service technology, asset finance, building materials, manufacturing systems and maintenance platforms has encountered the same basic tension from several angles. The product is technical because the work is technical. The story must respect that complexity while still answering an elementary question: what becomes easier, safer or more reliable for the person buying it? A marketer who can hold both sides avoids two common failures, drowning the reader in specifications or floating above the work in slogans. The middle ground is concrete, and concrete happens to be one of the industries Toretti has already marketed.
The revenue team gets rewritten
In June 2026, Toretti joined other software and go-to-market leaders at Silversmith Capital's Growth Summit in Boston. The reported discussion considered how artificial intelligence could change team structures, productivity expectations and operating leverage across sales and marketing. The likely shape was leaner and more efficient. Yet the account of the conversation kept returning to an older advantage: alignment.
Customer feedback loops, a disciplined understanding of the ideal customer, shared accountability and cooperation between leaders remained foundational. AI could quicken execution, but it could not replace customer understanding. That conclusion fits a career spent in vertical markets. Generic fluency is cheap. Knowing why a maintenance planner, finance leader, dispatcher or plant operator cares is the scarce part.
The practical opportunity is not to make more marketing material merely because a machine can. It is to reduce the distance between an operational problem and a useful answer. For a CMO responsible for product story, demand and creative execution, that distinction matters. Speed without judgment produces a larger attic. Speed attached to customer knowledge can produce a shorter path to value.
The strongest B2B story is often hiding inside the work customers cannot afford to stop.
The systems outside the system
Away from software, Toretti's official biography places her outdoors or in community work. Weekends may find her hiking, gardening or helping with local food distribution programs. These details should not be inflated into a grand theory, but they do add texture. A garden is a patient system. A trail rewards attention. Food distribution is logistics with an immediate human destination.
They also provide a pleasing counterweight to a work life full of enterprise categories. Product marketing can become abstract in a hurry: personas, funnels, attribution, pipeline. Soil does not accept a positioning statement. A box of groceries either reaches a household or it does not. Maintenance lives by the same stern clarity. The work order closes. The asset runs. The facility opens.
Toretti's path from a Penn State liberal-arts and marketing education to the C-suite of a software company is therefore less a story about making complicated things simple than about making them specific. Simple can erase the important parts. Specificity reveals why they matter.
At TMA Systems, the canvas is large: maintenance, facilities and asset-management products serving organizations where downtime carries a cost. Her task is to connect those products to people, and those people to outcomes, without letting the machinery swallow the story. It is work in praise of everything that keeps working.