Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In 2007, what was the landscape in the e-commerce shopping cart or the e-commerce platform world? What was going on around you? What was the competitive landscape? Whom did you compete with directly and indirectly?

Rick Wilson: Yahoo stores was still a popular platform. I wouldn’t say that it had momentum, but it was certainly popular. The osCommerce software, which had been very popular, had faltered. I was never a big osCommerce guy, so I can’t remember if they released version three or four. They were in between major versions and it just died on the vine. They never got the major version out. I think Magento’s alpha was announced during that time. Shopify was just starting to arrive on the scene. I heard about them in 2008. Volution was probably the earliest success story as a pure play Software as a Service platform provider in our space. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You were working as Head of North America Sales and the game plan was to orient the product to be sold by the hosting providers.

Rick Wilson: That is correct. We were very successful with that. Between 1998 and 2004, which was when we stopped that process, we signed up 3,500 hosting providers. During that window, we sold about 300,000 active licenses. We were very dominant from a market share standpoint. There was one fundamental problem during that whole time. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 1)

Miva caters to 20,000 e-commerce merchants and Rick Wilson discusses the trends he sees in their customer base, as well as the industry in general.

Sramana Mitra: Welcome to the Thought Leaders in E-Commerce Series. Tell us a bit about yourself as well as Miva Merchant. Tell us what you do and how did you get to where you’ve gotten to.

Rick Wilson: Thank you for having me. I’m the President of Miva Merchant. From the way most companies are structured, I take what we would normally consider as the CEO role. We’re an SMB e-commerce platform. In the scheme of the market, our customers are larger than what you might see on a Shopify or a Bicommerce revolution. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: However, right now it’s very inadequate. We only actually do content marketing. Our strategy, in terms of marketing, does not consist of advertising. However, the infrastructure around that content marketing in terms of analytics and being able to tie those pieces together is absolutely and terribly difficult.

Larry Augustin: That’s an interesting comment on your part. This is a digression for our discussion today. I see content marketing as incredibly valuable. I agree with you that we’re just at the beginning of an industry of the right tools to really help and enable content marketing in a significant way. That said, I think content marketing is a piece of an overall strategy. We have to understand sometimes that a tool like content marketing, which is still early, is one of the set of tools in the toolbox. I have in fact >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 6)

Larry Augustin: What we find is that the open platform makes that very easy for anyone coming in. And that community buids very early integrations. Twitter is a great example. We had a Twitter integration available for our product long before most of us here even knew what Twitter was. It’s now part of the product, but it started out in that open developer ecosystem. That’s been a great success for us and that’s one of the reasons that we’re in business.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a good segue into my next question. You are in a very interesting vantage point to call out and introduce our audience to stuff that is happening now that are especially innovative. You talked about Twitter, D&B, Data.com type of integrations, which are kind of established partners at this point. What is the most interesting, exciting, and cool innovations that you’ve seen on that platform that’s from a startup?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There’s a ridiculous amount of spam that comes through as well and that’s why that tool needs to be able to distinguish between spam and real customer opportunities where a client wants to talk to you.

Larry Augustin: Yes, I agree, all of those are opportunities for innovation in the industry. I think, as an industry, we’re just at the beginning of those pieces. Here, our goal has been to build a platform which can pull those pieces together, integrate them well, and create a great dashboard – whether it’s mobile or desktop – for the individual to view all of those pieces and pull them together. Some of it is internal data. A lot of data are external. How do you correlate those difference sources? We have architected a platform that enables all of those pieces.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Switching gears a little bit, I’m going to give you a scenario which I am experiencing based on our own process of sales and marketing, which uses LinkedIn centrally. We use LinkedIn community’s ability to market and sell subtly. I’m a LinkedIn influencer. Content marketing happens to be one of our primary strategies of how we are building our brand. This is probably why you knew about us before today’s call. We have a very active blog. We have very active social media channels where every hour, we put a good piece of content out there in social media. That flows through using technologies like Hootsuite.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 3)

Larry Augustin: Today, we have a virtual office for that. That virtual office is social media that sits around the person. Today, you may not be selling by physically sitting in that person’s office, but you may be sitting in their virtual office – what they are saying on Facebook or their resume on LinkedIn. Do their kids play soccer or softball? What is it that they care about?

Sramana Mitra: There’s a lot more information accessible today given the virtual nature of information flow than you would gather by visiting someone for an hour.

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