Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Did you build a direct U.S. sales force?

Stephan Dietrich: Yes. We did that right away. That is why we raised the money. You cannot go into a country with one or two people. We needed to have 15 people to cover sales, marketing, consulting, training, and support. I moved over with my family. We knew from the get-go that one of the founders would have to come over to drive the business. That is what I have been doing since then. Boston has been home since 2007.

Sramana Mitra: How much revenue did you generate in 2011?

Stephan Dietrich: We did $45 million.

Sramana Mitra: When you look out at 2012 and 2013, what is your strategy? Where are you getting traction?

Stephan Dietrich: There was another wave of consolidation in the marketplace. Our space has huge opportunity right now. We have become the biggest leading independent leader in our space of cross-channel campaign management.

Channels must be managed together, and marketers are starting to realize that. Email can’t exist in a silo; it needs to be coordinated with direct mail and social. If you take the latest report from Forrester, you will see that we did not want to be in the ESP wave. The main pain point for marketers is that they struggle to integrate email with other channels. The email business is a $1.5 billion business. Technology alone represents $500 million to $600 million dollars within that business. I think we can capture a piece of that and make sure email is coordinated with other channels via a single channel. That is a huge part of the market opportunity we see ahead of us.

Sramana Mitra: You are going to run into all of the email marketing providers, which are significant companies. There are at least 15 companies in the email marketing space that you will run into.

Stephan Dietrich: We are not going to compete head to head with them. Among the clients we signed last year, 80% to 90% of them will phase out their email service provider and will use Neolane. They also do social with Neolane, which includes channels like Twitter and Facebook. They also do direct mail, and they have inbound interactions on their websites.

Sramana Mitra: It is great to see a company coming out of Europe and getting traction.

Stephan Dietrich: There is a lot of be said around that. I think that Europe has great talent for software. It is known for food and fashion rather than software.

Sramana Mitra: It has amazing talent, but for some reason it has not been able to develop great software companies.

Stephan Dietrich: Business Objects and SAP are probably the success stories. Europeans don’t dare to go after the European markets. They don’t get access to the same amounts of money. There is a lot to be said around that. I recommend every to European technology company to get involved in the U.S. market. We could have gone earlier than we did. Go early. We could have been much bigger if we had done that. The U.S. market is 10 times bigger than any other country in Europe. It is a wonderful market.

Sramana Mitra: I am very happy to hear your story. I am delighted to see your success. Congratulations!

This segment is part 7 in the series : Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich
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