Rolling Up Bill Management: Flint Lane, CEO of BillTrust (Part 4)

Sramana: What kind of companies tend to be good partners?

Flint Lane: We tried going through accountants in the beginning, and what we discovered was that accountant drove payroll business because they did not want to do it themselves. The best partners for us are the accounting software companies. These are the companies between QuickBooks and SAP or Oracle. There are hundreds of those accounting software packages by vertical. Each one has hundreds of clients that generate thousands of bills. Our pitch to those guys was that they were not making money by generating bills. We give them a revenue share for the clients we signed up.

Sramana: What is the deal size at which you switch to direct sales?

Flint Lane: Our partners never actually sign the business for us. We have a relatively complicated selling process. Our partners give us an introduction, and we do the actual selling. We struggle with the fact that it is an educational sale. People have been outsourcing print and mail forever. The concept that a print-and-mail company could help with an electronic or online strategy is new. We had to spend a fair amount of money branding ourselves as a new category.

Sramana: When you started in 2002, what was the competitive landscape and how has it evolved?

Flint Lane: The competitive landscape has not evolved that much. The only real change is who we go after. In the early days we went after very small clients where, 90% of the time, the clients were looking at their first outsourcing decision. They were deciding to keep it in-house or outsource with BillTrust.

Today we target larger clients. About 75% of the time they have already outsourced. Now we are convincing them not that they need to outsource; rather, that we have a better service than a traditional print and mail company. Some of those companies have partnered with other companies to offer online billing, but it is not tightly integrated and it does not work well. That is not our big challenge. Our big challenge is to get in front of enough people so that we can actually tell them our story.

Sramana: How often do you face other competitors when you are going after deals?

Flint Lane: At least half of the time one of the competitors we face is the incumbent. Typically they are doing just print and mail. We go up against them all the time and beat them regularly. They just don’t offer the full solution we offer.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Rolling Up Bill Management: Flint Lane, CEO of BillTrust
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