Sales force gets mobile
‘We would like to be Canada’s next Research In Motion’
Smartphones and tablets of various makes and models have fundamentally changed the way firms in customer relationship management (CRM) do business, making them less about services and more about software. Recognizing this reality, Oakville, Ont.-based Skura Corp. dropped the services side of its business three years ago to focus exclusively on supporting emerging technologies. Having surpassed 30,000 users of its device-agnostic platform last week, company founder Chris Skura spoke with Financial Post technology reporter Jameson Berkow about his plan to capture even more of the still nascent multibillion-dollar mobile-application market. The following is an edited transcription of their conversation.
Q You say your focus now is on “sales enablement” and “closed loop marketing.” What are they exactly?
A Sales enablement is about giving sales reps the tools they need to be effective in the field with their electronic device of choice. A lot of their problems are technology-related and we support them. Today we see a huge trend in companies wanting their reps to choose their own devices. So you might have a mixed salesforce like [Johnson & Johnson] does of 5,500 people. A lot of them might be Apple fans and you may also have a segment that loves their Blackberrys and doesn’t want to give them up.
What we see a lot of companies doing is adopting this BYOD strategies that allows reps to bring their own devices to the company. The challenge is you need to build applications and supporting tools that run on all platforms and that is really the angle we have taken as a company. We have seen a market need in the past couple of years to take device-agnostic technologies to the field for that reason. It is a market that is just coming of age now, driven specifically by the mobile trend that is happening out there.
Q Is that why you decided to drop your services business even as
your competitors tried to stay the course?
A We wanted to work toward a new model. We really wanted to solve this problem because we knew it wasn’t going to get solved otherwise. And we knew we couldn’t do it by doing two things at once, it was kind of the chase two birds-andcatch none problem. What we’re doing now, we are mobile, multidevice and open Web standard so we are well ahead of the curve in terms of technology and we don’t even really compete against the same companies anymore. Whereas our old competitors, those companies each became even more lifestyle players and really hunkered down within their revenue streams and protected those and really don’t do anything different today.
Q Now that the change has been made, where do you plan to go from here?
A We have very high aspirations so we’d like to be Canada’s next Research In Motion Ltd. and a big driver of jobs to market. If you look at the mobile application space, we see that growing to $400-billion in the next five years. That was what made us not want to stay in services because we knew there was a cap and we would never get the private jet on that trajectory.
Q What will it take for you to reach that point then, to get that private jet?
A We do have a big hurdle to overcome and that is, we are very strong in the life sciences space and we absolutely need to find a way to get out of this and hit the bigger market because we know it applies generically across sales. I believe the big risk we take is if we fail to do that.
Q Is there something in particular you believe will help set you apart going forward?
A We invented a new metric we call “seen” views, which is just a digital piece of information that occupies the screen. Moving forward, our success will be tied directly to the number of seen views our customers have. So 30,000 users who have bought the product doesn’t mean anything if we only get two seen views a day. We want to have 40 million a day. But we haven’t quite figured out how we are going to sell that right now. That is ultimately how we can get it out to other verticals though is to give them a risk-free model to buy it where we can say “if you don’t use it you don’t pay but if you do use it you do pay.”
Q And as far as you know, none of your competitors are working on something similar?
A They would never do it, and honestly it was a big decision for us. To do that would be a huge disruptor for this industry and for everybody that sells in this space. It would essentially give people the ability to buy this technology without any investment because until they start using it they pay nothing. None of our competitors would be willing to do that.
Financial Post jberkow@nationalpost.com