Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did you feel that your skill sets in big data would give you a competitive advantage?

Stephan Dietrich: We were fascinated by the skills we had developed around data and profiling. We knew we had the skill sets to manage large databases. Back then, large databases were 1 terabyte databases that acquired data by the gigabyte. We felt that our skills would be very useful in the area of marketing to help manage customer data.

That is when we saw the visionaries of our space doing very well. Back then that was companies like Prime Response. We were looking at them thinking the entire line of business was going to need some enterprise marketing technology and nothing was there to address it.

Sramana Mitra: Is that when you started Neolane?

Stephan Dietrich: We formally incorporated the company in 2001. All of the other co-founders left Peregrine Systems to focus on that project.

Sramana Mitra: I remember the marketing automation space in 2001. There were all sorts of companies being formed to address various nuances of the marketing automation process. When you say you saw the opportunity to create Neolane in the space of marketing automation, what gap did you find in that extremely crowded space?

Stephan Dietrich: The vision we had back then is something we have stayed true to through this day. Back then, it was the early days of email service providers. Amazon invented email marketing. I was convinced that the rules of engagements were going to change between the brand and the consumer. The consumer was going to be tired of getting talked to and was going to take over the dialogue. That is where we coined the term ‘conversational marketing.’ We tried to apply that to the tool so that it was able to do more than just email marketing or mobile marketing.

Our very first campaign was a mobile marketing and email marketing campaign. We sent mobile text messages in Europe, and we were doing webinars on mobile marketing. Back then we were talking about multichannel marketing. Today it is closer to cross-channel marketing. It is about combining all those engagements into one channel and making sure we are able to build and sustain a conversation across multiple touch points with a consumer whether they are inbound our outbound. That is what we really started to work on.

We saw that the Exchange application did not have that. The email service providers did not provide that. That is how we built the tools. The DNA of the tool goes back to that point. That is a very different DNA from that of our competitors, who have built tools as replacements for SQL queries. It is different because our tool was built in real time to be inbound- and outbound-sensitive in a cross-channel environment.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich
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