When it comes to maintaining contact with
customers, M. Gregory Smith doesn’t rely on just
his sales staff at Accudata
Technologies Inc. Instead, the
president and CEO says half
of the company is responsible
for that contact, including
himself, so he calls 10 to 20 customers every month himself.
The company, which provides
access to data verification
associated with phone numbers and IP locations, posted
2006 revenue of $9 million
and anticipated 2007 revenue
of between $12 million and
$15 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Smith about how he keeps
that personal touch and maintains a competitive advantage
as his business grows.
Q. How do you maintain a
personal touch with customers
as your company grows?
You start focusing on development of other products and
trying to get them to market
and managing all the things
you have to manage as a CEO.
It’s a discipline thing. Most
people who have gotten to be
a CEO have exhibited some
pretty good discipline along
the way in their life, and they
can make time to do that.
It’s not as overpowering as
you think because it’s usually
just a few-minute phone call.
Schedule some time on your
calendar a few times a month
to make those calls. You don’t
usually assign yourself a large
task as a result of that call. I
usually have someone else to
pick up the responsibility of
doing that. It’s a time-management thing, and it can be done.
Q. How do you find new customers to complement your
current customers?
Know your market, know
your customer niche, and
know it well. Research it,
understand it, and analyze it.
Get marketing organizations
involved with it.
Talk to your customers and
understand your customers. It’s a relatively straightforward
process in closing a
new client, but have
you really gotten
underneath the covers and understand
why they buy from
you?
Sometimes you
have in your mind a
competitive advantage, but when you
really talk to your
customers and say,
‘Why did you buy
from Accudata?’ we
found that some of
the responses were
different than we
thought, and it was
good because it
helped us hone our
conversation.
Make sure you understand
your competitive advantages,
and make sure you understand your market. I’ve been
involved in a lot of companies
over the years — I’m not 25
— and I’ve seen a lot of companies with a false expectation or a lack of knowledge of
what their real product is,
what their real product
strengths are and what their
client sets are, and they try to
go after areas that are not tenable for them.
Understanding that is really
key. It’s not obvious, and it
takes work to dig down to understand what your competitive advantage is and
what your customer set of
potential is.
Q. How do you find your
competitive advantage?
One of the processes is to
use an outside organization to
help you. What we said was, ‘We think these are our five to
10 key competencies and key
strengths.’ We hired an outside organization to touch
base with 10 to 20 percent of our client base and then have
them ask in an open question,
‘Why did you buy from
Accudata? Why did you select
them as your provider of
these services?’
Then compare the responses, and it’s very interesting. It’s
well worth the drill because
it’s going to come back a little
bit different than you expect.
We were focusing on some different things.
It’s a classic pitfall. I’ve been
here almost six years, and I
really thought that one of the
primary decisions was price. I
armed the marketing guys
when they went and talked to
customers that, that was our
perspective.
What came back was not
price at all. It was flexibility.
We’re able to customize our
responses for an individual
customer’s set. It was speed, in
the ability to respond to their
particular needs but also
speed in processing of their
business and transaction …
and then the accuracy of the
information.
We went to the databases
that we used to provide our
services and price never came
out, so the first thing I did
was raise my prices, and it
didn’t blink with the customers. I only changed it a little bit, but then we changed
our whole marketing pitch
since it was so different than
we thought.
Inside the organization, you
have this groupthink going
on. You assume X, Y and Z,
and you say, ‘Basically, this is
what we do, these are our
products, and this must be
what they’re buying and why.’
Well, gee, ask them — it really
helps.
HOW TO REACH: Accudata Technologies Inc., (972) 390-2610 or www.accudatatech.com