Surviving The Dotcom Crash And Building A Sustainable Business: LivePerson CEO Rob LoCascio (Part 5)

Sramana: What has your pricing model evolved to today?

Rob LoCascio: We have three product lines. We have a small business, mid-market, and an enterprise product that are sold by the seat on a monthly basis. Small businesses pay anywhere from $99 to $1,500 a month. Mid-market businesses pay anywhere from $149 to $6,000 a month. Enterprise customers pay anywhere from $1,000 to $2,500 a seat.

Sramana: What does the competitive landscape look like?

Rob LoCascio: There is a company called ATG which was just bought by Oracle. Oracle also just bought a chat company that was worth about $7 million dollars per year. There are also a bunch of small players. There is a company called eGain. We dominate the business in all sectors and have done that for a while.

Sramana: How do you compare with RightNow?

Rob LoCascio: We see them a cooperative. They have a chat and knowledge base, but they focus on selling their knowledge base products for call deflection. We take over the chat piece. In many cases we integrate.

Sramana: What is your sales model? How do you sell to each of your three categories of customers?

Rob LoCascio: For enterprise customers, we do direct sales. For the mid-market, we do direct sales and telesales. For small business, we do telesales and Web sales.

Sramana: How does your revenue split among those three categories?

Rob LoCascio: About 25% of the business is in the small business area. About 10% of the business is in the mid-market. That is a new product we started a year ago. The rest is with large enterprise. The business is growing at a rate of 25% a year.

Sramana: The world has changed since the Xerox case study that you mentioned earlier, when they did not want their customers talking to each other. Today many companies do want their customers talking to each other. How do you see that evolution?

Rob LoCascio: We call that the connecting conversation. Companies recognize that consumers connect with each other in many places. There is a shift going on right now. In the past, companies believed that if customers wanted to talk to them customers would call them. Now the Internet is in a social phase. The connection and the conversations that are happening are important to businesses.

First, customers can help each other. Second, companies recognize that they need to be in the conversation and make it a three-way conversation. They are much more focused on accomplishing that and being proactive about that rather than being reactive. We are shifting our business. We have a platform on which we can [determine] intelligence and behavioral characteristics of your customers who may be on Twitter, mobile devices, or on the Internet through social websites.

Through LivePerson, you can chat with your customer, send them a coupon, Tweet back to them dynamically, and offer them something. Our process for connected conversation allows companies to become part of the conversation. Now we are allowing third parties to develop applications on top of our platform so that they can leverage our data intelligence.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Surviving The Dotcom Crash And Building A Sustainable Business: LivePerson CEO Rob LoCascio
1 2 3 4 5 6 7