Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is your pricing model? Is there enough deal size to do field sales?

Ali Behnam: We have deals ranging anywhere from $15,000 all the way up. Average deal size is five figures.

Sramana Mitra: So talk to me about your business model and pricing model a bit.

Ali Behnam: Right now, we’re still selling to a lot of Fortune 2000 companies. These are companies that do a decent amount of business online. Our pricing is based on site traffic. The more traffic the website has, the more they’re paying for a service like this. With us going after the top echelon of customers, you can imagine the deal sizes are typically five digits. >>>

Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What was the sweet spot that emerged out of all these? Where were you finding traction?

Ali Behnam: This is where I’m starting to see the web analytics space all over again. I was in WebSideStory in 2000. That was the early days of web analytics space. The early adopters of web analytics were typically e-commerce sites. They were followed by a lot of media or publisher sites and then some B2B or Fortune 500 websites. We see that same exact pattern with the tag management space. The early adopters were, for the most part, e-commerce sites because they have the most to gain or lose from this technology. They were followed by publishers and media sites and some of the other demand generation websites.

>>>

Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If this is not too much proprietary information, what were the keywords that you were able to get a lead on? You said that buyers were the same with the web analytics buyers. Were you then advertising on the web analytics keywords?

Ali Behnam: No, we weren’t. By 2012, which is when we started doing marketing, people were starting to look for tag management solutions.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Todd Hitchcock, COO of Pearson Embanet (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch gears a little bit. If you were to advise entrepreneurs who are interested in working in the domain of online education, where would you point them? Where do you see open opportunities to build businesses in?

Todd Hitchcock: There are a lot of inflection points. We know that there are a lot of pieces of the partnership that we have competency in, but there are certain pieces that we may never build a competency in if we don’t acquire a company. Therefore, we like to partner with that provider to bring them into the ecosystem. We’re very strong in our belief that we need to provide solutions but that doesn’t mean that we need to provide every single component. >>>

Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get the product to market?

Ali Behnam: Probably about a year. We had an early version of the product that we released in January 2011 but didn’t do everything we wanted it to do. Another six months later in July of 2011, we finally launched Tealium IQ which is the basis of the product that we’re still selling today. If you take the development from beginning all the way to the launch of Tealium IQ, we’re talking about a little less than a year.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Todd Hitchcock, COO of Pearson Embanet (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That’s only true if you’re looking at those local types of businesses. We work globally and we work on only digital entrepreneurships – IT, IT-enabled services types of businesses. That’s non-local and a lot of it is very scalable. We’re seeing a lot of interest from entrepreneurs all around the world – not just from the United States.

Todd Hitchcock: I absolutely agree. Traditionally, we work with colleges and universities to put those programs in place driven by their region. I think you’re hitting on a macro trend. There is tremendous opportunity for international entrepreneurship programs. To that end, it hasn’t been one that has been brought to us by a specific partner yet. I think you’re really catching on something that has tremendous possibility.

>>>

Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You wanted to make the switch to a product company with a hypothesis that this is what you think is needed in the market. You wanted to switch off your consulting business and turn it into a product company in 2011?

Ali Behnam: A big part of the product that we had built was taking all the different use cases that we were solving for our customers. Different customers have different use cases. Through our engagement with various customers, we had seen a lot of different use cases that we needed to satisfy for our product to function properly. We wanted to make sure that the first iteration of the product could actually satisfy a lot of those use cases because those were the common problems that we were seeing among many customers – not just the ones that we were consulting. Thanks to our consulting background, we were able to see so many problems that prospects face and we ended up building up a product that could satisfy those use cases. >>>

Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 2)

Ali Behnam: Early on as we got engaged in our analytics practice, we realized that there is a big need for help with tagging. A lot of customers were unsatisfied with their analytics implementation. The number one cause of that dissatisfaction was the fact that their implementation was not done in a proper way and that has to do with tagging. Tagging is basically putting a piece of code on a website that allows you to capture the right data and send that data to the analytics solution. A lot of customers had challenges associated with that. We realized that there is a big need for streamlining the tagging work that customers need to do.

>>>