Successful Pivots: Anthony Ferry, CEO of PriceSpider (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Help me understand one thing from a business-building point of view. You have about 500 companies that are using the Where To Buy solution. All these other products that you have come up with, to what extent are these products up-sells into those customers bases?

Anthony Ferry: Every single one of them. As we explore new opportunities or things we want to build, we realize how important it is for that thing to be something that you can market with your existing Sales and Marketing team and that you can sell to your existing customer base.

If I have an opportunity to develop a new product, but it’s something that is such a departure from what we are doing that my current sales force cannot grasp it or is not the most appropriate team to sell it, that’s going to hinder our success. Secondly, if that product is not something that I can actively market to my existing customer base, that also is going to hinder our success and ability to penetrate the market swiftly.

That is a litmus test that we take with most considerations for new development in our R&D division. If we are exploring a solution or idea, those are the first two questions we ask. Can we sell it with our current staff? Can we sell it to our current customers?

Sramana Mitra: Just to illustrate that, could you touch upon the different products that one of the customers would typically buy from you and the different use cases that each of those are dealing with?

Anthony Ferry: The two that I mentioned – Where To Buy and MAP Guard – are sold separately and independently. Any customers can buy one or the other. The real power is when those two things to work together. If a customer is a Where To Buy customer, we’re providing a widget on their website that helps their customers to find products at any number of sellers online.

If they’re also a customer of our MAP product, we can take the information and the understanding about their pricing policies for those products and influence where we direct their consumers. If there is a seller that is notoriously violating their pricing policies, that seller can be removed from Where To Buy as an option. It’s a very powerful story. That’s probably the easiest one to explain.

For the most part, whether we’re offering a report or anything from our brand integrity suite, that better-together story is one that we’re very proud of. We try to make sure that we have a value proposition for each of our new innovative products or solutions enhances the products that are already out there in the marketplace. We truly do have an increasing or an exponential value proposition when more than one of our products or solutions are being consumed by a customer.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like your product strategy has worked out extremely well.

Anthony Ferry: Yes, we’re really happy with it.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Successful Pivots: Anthony Ferry, CEO of PriceSpider
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