NewVoiceMedia is a cloud-based customer engagement suite, including virtual contact centre functionality (‘contact centre as a service’ and distributed call handling), inside sales and integration with CRM systems, including Salesforce.

That said, the business was founded in 2000, long before SaaS was on any technologist’s agenda (and parallel with the founding of Salesforce). Jonathan Gale joined as CEO in 2011, and is one of a handful of executives credited by the founders as having had the greatest impact in scaling the business to $165m in revenues and exit in just seven years. Jonathan was also Global VP, Sales at MessageLabs, so NewVoiceMedia is his second category-leading SaaS exit from European beginnings.

It also means that he can compare and contrast the two experiences.

The key difference between the two in terms of US expansion is that MessageLabs set up shop in New York, whereas NewVoiceMedia’s US headquarters are on the West Coast. All of our other contributors have wrestled with the expense of a Silicon Valley operation; some have opted for the new technology hubs in e.g. Seattle or Austin. Jonathan says, “The logic for MessageLabs was that New York was less competitive, but still gave us access to significant numbers of enterprise decision-makers. Today, New York is just as competitive, and our ability to win customers on both coasts has also been similar. But more importantly, if you want to win then you need to ‘run with the big dogs’ and San Francisco is the place to be. Being there is healthy - it’s incredibly competitive, and if you can succeed there, then you can succeed anywhere. Silicon Valley has certainly cemented its dominance in technology beyond anyone’s imagination in the past decade.”

The other crucial lesson from MessageLabs which carried through to a radically different approach with NewVoiceMedia was the go-to-market partnership strategy. MessageLabs was heavily reliant on established Systems Integrators (SIs) to leverage credibility and market advantage in the large enterprise space. “It allowed us to chase market growth”, says Jonathan, “but it came with gross margin implications which in some cases cost us unnecessarily. Whilst NewVoiceMedia is also very focused on partnerships (and is predicated on the Salesforce platform), the business is almost entirely marketed directly to clients, and that has given us far more ability to create and deliver value and growth”. Equally, this is as much a function of the improved stack and integration opportunities of the modern SaaS world: as SaaS services have flourished by offering easy integration and connectivity, so the fortunes and influence of the traditional SIs have waned.

Stop seeing the US as a unique challenge

Businesses looking to expand to the US might be well advised to take a step back from what looks like a hard mountain to climb and re-evaluate the challenge.

“In terms of the size of the market and the number of customers, the US is clearly the most important territory, but I don’t think like that. We are a truly global player and entirely focused on our ability to service customers who we know want what we offer."

"The strategy we have developed has been driven out of five key insights; and we then use those insights to identify customers who we can serve uniquely well.”

Some of those insights are only applicable to the CRM and service industries, but the refinement of those insights into a reliable go-to-market strategy is a plan which any business can follow, and which will give leadership teams confidence that they can meet the needs of customers in any territory:

• Have confidence in a disruptive vision. “In 2005, NewVoiceMedia founder Ashley Unitt believed what no-one else did; that call centres would move to pure cloud. At the time, the received wisdom was that a contact centre could never achieve the scale or reliability to live 100% in the cloud. He was right.”
• Focus on doing one thing exceptionally well. “We knew that our customers all needed a CRM and already had an integration to SFDC (the Salesforce Developer Community – Salesforce’s wealth of integrated third party technologies). Many of our stakeholders wanted us to have an open strategy and to integrate to multiple CRM systems, but we had limited resources - I wanted to focus from a product, sales and customer perspective. So instead of supporting everyone else in our space, we bet the farm on SFDC. We decided to be as Salesforce-like as possible.”
• Tackle the challenges in your industry which most irritate customers. “The contact centre market at that time was opaque and unreliable. We had a good product, but like many, we had our own challenges with reliability.

"We made it a fundamental tenet of our business to be entirely transparent about our uptime and downtime, which forced us to deliver a better quality product and at the same time drove a dramatically visible wedge between us and the competition."

“We were pure-cloud (with all the flexibility that brings), we were the best contact centre on Salesforce, and now we were the most reliable provider, even publishing our uptime statistics – which is what drove our impressive increase in revenues. It was then insights 4 and 5 which allowed us to define our category and to become the dominant global player in our sector.”

• Integrate and optimise. One of the most powerful aspects of the SaaS ecosystem is the power to integrate with partners in the connected ecosystem or design in new services. In 2013, the outbound calling business was again plagued by low customer satisfaction – the market consisted mainly of low-quality “predictive dialler” businesses which were hated by consumers and hence could damage clients’ reputations. Again, Jonathan saw an opportunity for disruption. “We saw an emerging business in high quality outbound ‘sales acceleration’”, he says. “We figured that if you were on SFDC and you were plugging an inbound call centre into CRM, then it would make complete sense to integrate outbound sales telephony too. So we set out on a strategy to build a true inbound/outbound customer management platform covering all touchpoints and fully integrated into Salesforce.
• Globalise. NewVoiceMedia already operated the only true SaaS cloud contact centre application. The contact centre market was highly fragmented, driven in large part by the geographic focus of traditional telcos with their regionalised cloud contact centres businesses built on top. Yet the reason many customers bought Salesforce was to be global; and with a SaaS architecture, this was less challenging for NewVoiceMedia than for other providers. “Being truly global is a massive differentiator. We invested in Europe, AsiaPac and the US. The customers we choose – and who choose us – are obsessed with the quality of the customer experience regardless of which region, country or market they’re in. So when I think about internationalisation I don’t think market first, I think customers.”

Key takeaways:

• If you can succeed in the competitive cauldron of San Francisco, you can succeed anywhere.
• Direct sales of technology in the enterprise space, rather than through traditional systems integrators, dramatically improves margins.
• The US is challenging, but if you build to succeed globally, you will succeed in the US, too.
• Bet the farm. Do at least one thing exceptionally well.
• Concentrate on the challenges your customers face: what in your industry most irritates your customer base? That’s what you should disrupt.
• Integrate. The SaaS ecosystem is collaborative.