Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO, Phil Copeland (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you sell? Do you sell primarily in Australia or do you sell globally?

Phil Copeland: Australia is a great marketplace because they’re very early adopters of technology. Very early on, we recognized that to really succeed in this industry, you need to become an American-established business and you need to have a lot of the momentum behind your business here in North America. I’m actually based in Colorado. We have an office here. I spend about 80% of my time here helping grow and expand our North American business. We also have a small operation in the UK that has been very successful as well. Our core focus is really getting to critical size here in North America, because we realized that the exit events that may occur in the future will be from an American company.

Sramana Mitra: Who buys your product? If you look at your sales cycle, how do you enter an account? Where exactly in the organization do you enter?

Phil Copeland: Sure. By the way, that’s a $64 million dollar question.

Sramana Mitra: Exactly why I’m asking.

Phil Copeland: It’s been a real battle for us to figure that out. The curtain opened for us earlier this year. The challenge for us is we don’t really fit into an established product category. We’re not an ERP system or a CRM solution. You can’t say we’re anything in particular. The problem that we’re solving is massively important to all of these businesses. Not only have we been trying to sell our own product but we’ve really been trying to find and define this category that we work in as well. What’s happened over the last 12 months is that we’ve started doing a lot of work with Forrester. They have coined the term digital business. They described digital business as the need for all large enterprise organizations that sell more complex products or services to bring their systems online and engage with their customers through all sorts of channels. It’s this awareness around digital business that’s really starting to crystallize in everyone’s mind.

For example, in banks, there are people who have responsibility for what they call their digital channels. They look after the sale of the bank’s products through their digital channel. It’s a new and emerging area but it’s one that’s occurring extremely rapidly. It’s extremely important to these big organizations because it’s becoming the most important sales channel. You look at governments. Governments are being very much driven by reducing red tape, increasing efficiency, and reducing paper work. They want to provide better citizen self-service. I think we’ve got a lot better at articulating what we do and identifying the people in those large organizations we need to sell to. We use LinkedIn a whole lot. In that book Predictable Revenue, Allan Ross defined a role in an organization called a sales development rep who’s basically an outbound marketing person focused on identifying the right people in the organization to contact. We got really good at starting to do that now.

Sramana Mitra: I did many years of strategy consulting. When I’m listening to you, I can see that the biggest lever you have in accelerating your business is in getting your positioning much sharper and understanding the sales cycle and messaging matrix better. I think you have work to do there.

Phil Copeland: We’d agree with you completely. If you look at our website, our website probably lags three or four months behind where our current thinking is. We’ve just won Best of Show award at the recent Finovate Show in San Francisco, which has been a fantastic vehicle for us. In fact, if you look at our latest presentation at that show, which is very much targeted to the financial services industry, our positioning has come along in leaps and bounds. It’s certainly not perfect yet, but we’re getting closer. We’re working with a couple of well-established marketing organizations exactly on that topic. We’re also working with the analysts in helping them because they haven’t quite figured this category yet.

Sramana Mitra: Analysts don’t do positioning. Companies do positioning and then bring analysts up to speed.

Phil Copeland: The definition of a category is quite interesting because it’s quite instrumental in defining the category as well. There’s a whole lot of other work going on at the moment around customer engagement applications and marketing applications that are going to lead to this new category. We certainly want to be seen as a leader in that space. These are quite exciting times.

Sramana Mitra: Thank your for you time. Good luck and keep in touch!