Competing with Giants: Colin Earl, CEO of Agiloft (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me similarly about how you position against ServiceNow and Apttus in contract management.

Colin Earl: It’s essentially the same positioning. The Agiloft platform allows us to do two things. It allows us to configure the product to meet the needs of an individual customer in a period of weeks and it allows us to guarantee success – to provide an unconditional satisfaction guarantee that covers both the software as well as the consulting services.

If the customer isn’t happy for any reason within the first three months, they can just call and say, “I’m cancelling the order. Everything works perfectly, but the CIO has decided that post-it notes is the way of the future. That’s where we’re going.” The reason we can do that is, first off, the product itself and implementation staff is really good. Also, because we are pretty immune to one of the greatest of project failure which is when the customer says, “You’ve delivered what I said what I wanted, but it turns out that it’s not what I need.”

This, again, is the norm. It’s common for users to say that they want one thing, and when it’s delivered, it turns out they don’t consider it useable. The interface is wrong. The functionality is wrong. The processes that they told IT they were using weren’t actually the same as the ones they really do use in real life. You have to change it. If the product is manually coded, changing it can mean going right back to square one. If not square one, at least months of development time in order to put forward another iteration. With Agiloft, we can make those changes rapidly. We change it in real time in response to user input.

Sramana Mitra: Your big positioning is being able to rapidly change on projects that are already done on the basis of one spec with the anticipation that people’s needs change as they start using something.

Colin Earl: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now? How big is the company? It sounds like you’ve built this organically.

Colin Earl: We built it wholly organically. The company has no debt to investors or banks. We’re profitable. We’re growing at about 40% per year. While we don’t disclose financial information, we have over 51 and less than 201 employees. One thing I’d like to say is we give customers an unconditional success guarantee because we can and we know our competitors can’t. There’s another deeper reason for it. I want to make sure that the interests of our sales people are always aligned with the interests of our customers.

By providing an unconditional satisfaction guarantee, I ensure that it’s never in the sales person’s interest to make a claim that we can’t meet. It they did so, the customer would be a month or two months into the project and say, “You said it would do this. It clearly won’t.” We would have lost not just the sale but also the consulting services that we put into the implementation for that customer.

In the short term, the inability to exaggerate certainly hurt sales. Over the long term, it’s proven to be a huge blessing because the customers that we did sign have had a very positive experience and spoken about on social media and B2B review sites where Agiloft is the highest-ranked product. That, in turn, is generating a lot more revenue and a lot more sales for us going forward.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Competing with Giants: Colin Earl, CEO of Agiloft
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