Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do that allowed you to penetrate the U.S. market in a significant way? You raised money for that purpose in 2006; what was the strategy? How did you build the business from 2006 on?

Stephan Dietrich: We still have not penetrated the U.S. market totally. We won deals against the 800-pound gorillas from the U.S. We executed better and had key differentiation factors. We had digital DNA.

Sramana Mitra: I have been in this business long enough that I can tell you if you sit across from a buyer and tell them you have digital DNA and SAP does not, that is not going to sway the pitch.

Stephan Dietrich: If that buyer has a use case where they have email campaigns running at the same time as mobile campaigns, and on the side they have catalogs they want mailed out preceded by an email teaser, and have all of those channels combined, they turn to us. Especially if they want the user who visits their website to see the same best offer during that promotion. No other vendors could send out 100,000 emails a month and 1,000 offers a second on the inbound web because they could not do it.

Sramana Mitra: Was scalability what differentiated you?

Stephan Dietrich: We had a true cross-channel platform that was available on demand. No other competitor had that. We cover a number of channels with features that others do not cover, namely, the combination of interaction, marketing resource management, planning, and deep segment analytics all available on one platform, on-demand at an affordable price point.

Sramana Mitra: What is the price point?

Stephan Dietrich: Most of our deals are in the $300,000 to $400,000 per year range. Other companies require several million for the same capability.

Sramana Mitra: Who was your first U.S. customer?

Stephan Dietrich: We leveraged our European accounts. We had sold to departments of Alcatel-Lucent in Europe. Alcatel had acquired Bell Labs, and they were looking for worldwide platforms. We had a great data point to illustrate since they already had our platform, and we convinced them to expand their use of the platform.

Sramana Mitra: That is a great strategy.

Stephan Dietrich: It is pretty classic. We did a number of those deals to jump-start U.S. operations. Purr was a worldwide client, as was Nestlé. We then started to have our first clients in the U.S. doing trade shows and so on. The story we saw when we entered the U.S. was one in which Forester and Gartner were listing our competitors. At the same time, they were indicating that the market was growing at 25% a year. That is significant and compelling for investors. That helped a lot, and we got a lot of analyst backing for marketing technology. We then started to sign a number of great customers in retail, financial services, entertainment, and telecom.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich
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