I’ve had the chance over the last couple months to moderate two different sessions of Four51 Sales Training here at our headquarters in Minnesota. Attending these sessions were participants from all over the country coming from Distributors of varying sizes, strategies and outlooks.

I thought I would pass along some anecdotal feedback of mine from these sessions that might create conversation in your shops even if you couldn’t attend yourself. Two areas struck me the most: Branding and Marketing…that is, the way Distributors look at branding and marketing their own firms and how they position the Four51 solution within that. In this post, I will focus on the branding issue, and in the next post I will concentrate on what I heard about marketing.

Branding

All participants to-date work for firms who continue to brand the Four51 technology as their own…in other words, they are packaging the solution as a seemingly proprietary system that only that Distributor can offer to the customer. They wrap their own company name around the solution and offer it as their own. As many of you know (and if you don’t, I’ll fill you in here), Four51 does not require that your branding include any mention of Four51. We only show off our logo in the bottom of each screen with the “Powered by Four51″ image. A proprietary system would indicate that the user, in this case the Distributor, actually owns the technology and for many reasons these Distributors continue to promote the fact that the solution is theirs alone. Again, this is perfectly legal and allowed, I just think that these firms who continue to brand a technology that serves over 1 million registered end-users (and is growing at the rate of 1,600 new end-users each DAY!) as their own is missing the boat when it comes to showing their customers just how powerful and widespread this system is.

To put this into perspective, imagine 10-15 years ago when your firm adopted email as a new application (presumably the majority of you first decided to use Microsoft Outlook like so many millions of others). Imagine that, upon implementing email, you went to your customers and told them that this new application and capability of yours was based on your own technology…that it was your solution. In this scenario, you felt it was critically important to make your customers think that this technology gave you a strategic advantage in the marketplace and therefore, you needed to capitilize on it (all the while hoping your competitors would not adopt the same technology).

Let’s imagine you did all this. Ultimately though, as adoption of email grew, you could no longer sustain this promise in the market and you had to change your branding to reflect the fact that instead of “owning” the technology, you were simply using The Standard (in this case, Outlook). Your usage of Outlook became your competitive advantage, not owning it. You were the best at using it, not at creating and distributing it.

Well, I believe the same dynamic is at work today, and that many of you would benefit greatly by promoting the fact that you use the #1 system in the market, the only system with over 1 million registered users, the only system that is PCI Compliant to Visa’s standards and the only system that is Web-based only and can scale to the needs of your customers. Your branding as a Distributor with a proprietary system will not stand up to the branding of a Distributor who is a Certified Four51 expert and has the capability to solve the business and technology requirements of the largest customers in the world.

This is, of course, only my opinion, but it stands on the shoulders of how businesses have looked at and adopted mass-use business technology for the last 30 years. Four51 is in the business of helping you connect more effectively to your customers, and to connect to more and more and more of them. These ideas are designed to provoke some new ideas in your shops, and to help you get ahead of the curve in order to position your businesses more effectively than your competitors (even your competitors who use Four51 as well!).

In my next post, I will focus on marketing. If you have any thoughts or feedback, please let me know!

Thanks.

Mark Johnson, CEO

Popularity: 11%

We found a great article, “Measure the Right Things,” on the 1:1 Blog about a Forester Research finding that banks continue to focus on getting customers rather than retaining customers. While bank decision makers indicated in the report that customer retention is “very important” or even “critical,” their actions appear contradictory. The report author found that banks had very few strategies in place to measure customers’ actions and thus had very little chance of truly understanding their customers at all.

The reason why we wanted to highlight this article is that we are making the challenge of understanding and serving our existing customers our number one priority. Ahead of growth, ahead of profits, ahead of everything. As Four51 has grown dynamically over the past several years, the challenge of providing an amazing customer experience becomes more difficult. Over the past several months we have undertaken the task of completely reviewing our Customer Service approach. This review has provided us with many important findings that we are beginning to work on. Chief on this list are issues with initial service response, eventual turnaround time to close a service request, and communication coordination lapses that can cause delays in the delivery of our service. These issues have been identified, solutions designed, and now comes the hard part of implementing the “fixes” that are intended to improve the services we deliver to all of you. Once this cycle is completed, we will work even harder at gathering feedback in order to stay on top of the challenges ahead.

Four51 constantly strives to offer and deliver a world-class customer experience. We are aware that with the solid growth we continue to experience that we will have to work harder at accomplishing this. I am also aware that we have some distinct issues (noted above) that we really need to sink our teeth into now. By dedicating resources to these issues, and staying committed to finding and solving new service challenges in the future, we believe that we can begin to show our customers that Retention of existing customers is absolutely important to us and a critical component of our strategy.

We have lots of work to do, and I’ll be back posting from time to time in this forum looking for feedback on how we are doing. In the meantime, do any of you have reaction to these findings?

Mark Johnson
Four51 CEO

Popularity: 6%