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We engage primarily in direct sales efforts. We will contact individuals at companies on a targeted basis. We know a great deal about our industry and the way companies function and the way the market is segmented, and we primarily work in that industry. There’s a strictly sales-oriented communications targeting strategy, and then there’s a corporate communications targeting strategy. Opportunistic things do happen, of course: people contact us from out of the industry and ask us about our software. But generally what we do is direct sales. Our goal is basically to talk to every single company in the industry several times a year – not as a hard-core sales effort, but just, “We’re out here. What’s going on with you?” One of the reasons we do that is because we believe the market is so dynamic and fast-changing that they don’t know what’s going to be happening six months from now, so the best thing for us is to just keep talking to them – not in an aggressive “I want to sell to you or never talk to you again” kind of way.
For ourselves, we define complete customer acquisition when we have signed a long-term contract with a customer and they are up and running on the system and sufficiently satisfied that the implementation requirements have been met. It basically means we have a lock on their business. It’s not an easy thing for a company to switch off of our system, because it covers so many parts of the business. We don’t make it difficult; it’s just that we usually take over three or four of their systems and breaking from our system into several others is much harder than one would imagine. So, as far as our customers are concerned, they acquire a new customer when they staff a position at a client, either on a temporary or a permanent assignment. And it’s not that different from what we consider customer acquisition. They acquire the customer when they make that placement; we acquire the customer when we implement our system for their business. So there’s a bit of symmetry there as well. Ideally for them, they would have plenty of repeat business from the same customers, and we look at it the same way. We hope they grow and add users to the system, and then that’s like repeat business for us.
Our system makes the process of making a placement for the staffing company very easy: it’s very easy to track, it has very few steps, it’s very rigorous, and they can customize it to their own process. That is the exact same benefit that we provide in terms of covering loyalty to them. They essentially get very good oversight on their accounts where they’ve made placements, and they can keep tabs on their customers to a fine degree and service their customers with these ongoing relationships in a very fine way. They can offer additional services, and they can see into the account activity very easily; it’s all rolled up in one place. And we use the exact same tool ourselves to track our customers, because again, there’s a similarity between what our customers are providing their customers and what we are providing our customers. We use our own system to provide the best possible service to our customers and therefore drive loyalty.
So along the acquisition-loyalty-retention line, our system will give them the ability to view what customers have requested, what their behavior has been like in the past, what other things are going on in their company. Retention with staffing companies really revolves around keeping up with the times and being able to be quick on their feet and responsive to requests. They’re really providing a service, and our system has direct access to all the service issues that arise at the client. Outside sales will know what’s going on inside a customer while recruiting and management will know if new opportunities are rising or falling. This kind of oversight enables up-selling and cross-selling, for example, and drives retention. This supports loyalty, new acquisition and so on, so in some ways it’s a self-fulfilling circle. Again we use the same system as our customers and are very focused on being proactive and having detailed real time information about every account.
The ideal customer life cycle is when we find them, we sell to them, and we keep them forever. But realistically, the ideal customer life cycle is one where we find them or they find us, and there’s a relatively short period of time in which they already know they need a solution. They choose us as their solution of choice, they fully understand what we can provide, and they move into implementation. As time goes on, they add modules to the system, they ask for new features – which benefit other customers, which benefit our products, which benefit them – and they grow, and they’re profitable, and they stick with us for many years. We sell a managed service, so ideally there’s no end to it. It’s not like building a product on spec and selling it, and the customer goes away and maybe comes back later. So we would really like to retain all of our customers. And the ideal thing is that the employees of our customers move to other companies and spread the word of our system to those companies.
We have a two-tiered sales and account management or sales and implementation system. The sales effort morphs into an account management effort during the process, so the lead salesperson who closes the contract will provide oversight and be a point contact forever with that client, and our revenue and our sales are annuity-based, which provides an incentive for the salesperson to stay in contact with the client and keep them happy and growing. That’s the first internal driver. As far as the customer is concerned, because of that incentive on our side, the customer receives constant communication at various levels, both at the upper account management level and the lower tech support or help desk level. We’re very aware of what’s going on at that company. We have many details – automatic reports about what parts of the system they’re using, how often, what users are doing – and all of these things are available to anyone in the company in real time, and it’s a very sophisticated technical and overlapping operational process that keeps our eyes and ears on every customer.
We are constantly releasing new features into the system, and those don’t all become available to every customer. Some are optional and some are mandatory, but they’re usually all free as part of what our system allows. It’s like a utility in that if the water department improves the quality of the water, you automatically start to gain that benefit at home. And with things that would actually effect how the user interacts with the system, we will communicate that both at the account-management level and then also at the end-user level so that everyone knows what’s coming when and if it matters to them and why it matters, and so on. And then we also collect feedback all the time about new feature requests and ideas. We often will just build something right into the product; everybody benefits. So there’s a bit of an ecosystem of ideas, and I think that’s one of the keys to our “profitable” customer relationship. If we’re adding value to them and they automatically add value back to us, then this is one of those examples of the feedback loop: the more value we add to them, the more they add to us |
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