Great companies succeed by running their business in ways
that leverage the most out of their product strengths. Southwest Airlines is just one of many low
cost airlines. What the airline does
better than any others, though, is execute a complete business strategy to
match its low cost airfare – from its fleet selection through labor contracts
to its marketing and distribution strategy (you cannot purchase Southwest
tickets from any third party source). As
a result, it has been the most profitable airline for over a decade.
Dell is another company that is able to outpace the
competition with a business strategy that leverages its product offering. Many of its competitors sell low-cost
computers. But thanks to a supply chain
strategy that tightly synchronizes supply and demand, only Dell can offer low-cost
made-to-order computers delivered in a timely fashion and, at the same time,
keep its inventories to minimum.
XOsoft sells
sophisticated enterprise software that helps organizations ensure continuous
availability of their business-critical applications at all times. Customers include many Fortune 500
companies, such as General Motors, Intel, and Raytheon, as well as the Federal
Reserve Board, the Department of Defense, and other government agencies. The typical sale is sizeable, with some deals
reaching six figures.
Similarly to great companies such as Dell and Southwest
Airlines, XOsoft is shaping how it conducts its business around its product
strengths. To do so, XOsoft is leveraging
the Internet as the primary platform for the entire organization – sales,
marketing, support, and finance. Using
the Internet, XOsoft is able to provide its customers with better service with
fewer resources. And it is able to
close more business faster, propelling the company into accelerated growth
while keeping expenses in check.
How Does XOsoft Do It?
It all starts with the product. XOsoft products are installed at the very heart of the
enterprise’s IT infrastructure. Getting
the IT department of a large organization to trust a new product into this
strictly protected environment is not an easy task.
Most of XOsoft’s competitors follow the conventional way
of selling enterprise software. The
sale cycle is several months long, requiring multiple visits of sales and
technical resources to the customer site to demonstrate the software and
discuss implementation options.
XOsoft products, on the other hand, are available for
download on the company’s website, and can be easily installed by the
customer’s IT staff. The ability to
conduct self-evaluation of the product is a key to XOsoft’s unique sales approach.
Product Success Key #1: Make It Easy
XOsoft’s products are application-aware, providing unique
configurations for specific applications such as Microsoft Exchange and Oracle
Database server. Therefore, the
installation process is highly automated and straightforward.
Product Success Key #2: Make It Safe
XOsoft’s patented “soft installation” technology enables
installation of the products without any interruption to the live
application. It gives the IT staff the
comfort level to experiment with the product in a manner that is non-intrusive
to their working environment.
Product Success Key #3: Make It Perform
Once installed, XOsoft’s products deliver the
functionality “as promised”. The
product has won pretty much every possible award, beating competing products in
almost every evaluation category. In a
recent example, XOsoft WANSync HA for Microsoft Exchange won a product
comparison conducted by
NetworkFusionWorld. XOsoft’s product was the quickest to make
the data available after failure
, and was the only product that did not
lose any message in the failover and recovery process.
If You Build It, Will They Come? Not Without Your Help!
Still, XOsoft is relatively new to the market, and having
a great product is no help if buyers don’t know about it. The challenge for Gil Rapaport, XOsoft’s VP
of marketing, was reaching qualified buyers, and doing it with a rather limited
marketing budget.
To do so, XOsoft has cast its net where IT buyers go to
find new products – on Google. Unlike
many Google advertisers, XOsoft did not settle on sending these Google
searchers to the company homepage. To
make the most out of his marketing dollars, Gil invested a great amount of
effort devising campaigns targeting
over 3,000 very specific search
terms, and directed click-throughs from these terms to specific matching pages
on the XOsoft website. Each of these
pages directs the visitor to a download link for an evaluation copy of the
appropriate product, based on the search term used.
Gil’s successful Google campaigns generated a steady stream
of product evaluations. Although the
evaluations were highly successful, it wasn’t enough. Most of the technical users conducting the evaluations have no purchase
authority at the price range of XOsoft products. It is up to XOsoft’s sales force to engage with the appropriate
decision makers at these organizations and translate the technical success into
a buying decision.
Since hundreds of evaluations were taking place every
month, XOsoft needed a system to help the salespeople track these leads and move
them through the buying process.
Looking for a system that would support an Internet-centric approach,
XOsoft selected the salesforce.com hosted CRM.
Whenever a visitor to the XOsoft website downloads an evaluation copy of
the product, the information is automatically captured into salesforce.com and
assigned to a salesperson, so salespeople can follow up on these downloads in a
timely fashion.
Using Google to capture traffic, its website to convert
this traffic to product downloads, and salesforce.com to hand this information
over to sales, XOsoft now had a fully-automated, web-based lead-generation mechanism
in place.
The results were impressive. Sales have been growing at a record pace. In July of 2004, the company closed a
new round of financing,
raising $9 million.
Next Issue: see how XOsoft was able to further
accelerate its growth by introducing a new sales process and the next level of
process automation.
