Who Is Your Mobility Customer?

Talking to Brad Kieley and Chris Kane feels more like talking to the owners of the corner store, rather than a million dollar company. In 2002, the two quit their jobs with a locally owned mobility hardware company to launch a mobility company of their own — Emkat. While it's not uncommon to hear stories of people walking off their jobs with dreams of developing their own business, it is also not uncommon to hear about the failure that often results. In fact, the de facto quote that seems to surface is that as many as 80% of new companies will fail in the first five years.

Kieley and Kane understood that by launching a new company they would be facing considerable challenges, but that wasn't about to dampen their entrepreneurial spirit. After all, they had spent more than two years mapping out the Emkat business model, learning all they could from other successful business and industry leaders along the way. What Emkat learned from these business leaders, including the former CEO of Tonka, was to concentrate not on the extraordinary, but on the fundamental. For Emkat, this translated into the discipline to maintain focus on specific solutions, markets, and even customer types. It's an approach that seems almost anticlimactic until you consider that the integrator has achieved 927% revenue growth over the course of the last five years.

Determine Your Mobility Solution And Target Market
One of the first things on Emkat's to-do list was to determine its specific focus within the market, including product offering and target customer. Selling mobility hardware for the previous employer had already illustrated that mobility solutions were getting a lot of attention. However, according to Kieley, Emkat's CEO, it was the mobility software that was driving the adoption of mobility solutions. As a result, Emkat established itself as a mobility integrator rather than simply becoming a reseller of mobility software — or hardware, for that matter. Emkat focused its efforts even further by concentrating on outside-the-four-walls solutions such as field service and DSD (direct store delivery) using bar code and rugged handheld technologies.

Once the scope of Emkat's mobility solutions had been determined, the integrator took a very deliberate approach to defining its target customer, as well. The integrator resisted the urge to go after the large enterprise sales, deciding instead to focus on the SMB market right from the start. "We're not targeting the Cokes and Pepsis of the mobility market," says Kane, Emkat's VP of sales and strategic partnerships. "Those markets have been long established, and we knew it was just a matter of time before it started to trickle down into smaller companies."

Specifically, Emkat finds its greatest opportunities come from SMB companies with between 10 and 100 mobile users. "We've found the smaller sales to be both faster and more profitable," says Kieley. "For one thing, you are usually dealing with higher-level people right from the start, often the company owner, which makes it much easier to convince them of the benefits to their business." According to Kieley, smaller sales usually close quickly, sometimes in a matter of just a few weeks. In contrast, pitching your solution to a Fortune 500 company is a much longer process. Initial contact generally occurs much lower on the decision-making hierarchy, kicking off a laborious upline struggle where the initial contact must convince a higher individual, and so on until the final decision maker is reached. In addition, enterprise-level companies also have the tendency — and the luxury — to haggle more regarding price, negatively impacting precious profit margin. "There is no doubt that landing two smaller companies is better than closing just one enterprise sale," says Kieley. "For those reasons, we tend to let the larger, enterprise projects go to someone else."

Disqualify Customers That Don't Match Your Profile
When it comes to focus, Emkat strongly cautions against trying to become all things to all customers just to make a sale. This goes against the mentality of many companies, which is to say 'yes' every time the phone rings and the person on the other end asks 'do you sell this?' "It is better to be defined in what you are doing," says Kane. "There is nothing wrong with telling customers you don't do something, and it's even better if you can refer them to somebody specific and send them along." Kane offers the reminder that passing these opportunities to other vendors promotes reciprocal referral business.

RFID (radio frequency identification) is a common example of this for Emkat. Many customers and prospects inquire about RFID-based solutions, assuming that since the technology is similar in purpose to many bar code applications, it would be a natural fit. "If we come across a customer that truly has a desire to research RFID, we have found it best to forward these opportunities on to the providers who are experts in the technology," says Kieley. "That way we are not pretending to be something we are not, and we are not wasting valuable resources in the process."

Emkat also finds value in having the fortitude to disqualify a customer — even an established one — in order to maintain focus on its core capabilities or business processes. One of Emkat's long-standing customers had decided to procure bids for a new project through an online reverse auction format. "Our account manager made the decision to 'fire the customer' since this does not fit into our model of doing business," says Kieley. In the long run, the project sourced through the auction process failed, and Emkat ended up completing this project for the customer, generating both revenue and increased customer loyalty.

Also on Emkat's list of customers to disqualify are those who are out to buy based on price alone. "Low margin accounts take the cake," says Kieley. "Everyone in our industry deals with the price shoppers, and if you succumb to the urge to deeply discount your product or service just to make the sale, both parties lose." Kieley explains that the customer may benefit from the initial price break, but the provider of the service ends up resenting the relationship, which leads to poor customer service. To prevent this, Emkat grades its prospects and customers based on buying habits in order to determine the level of resources to be spent on the opportunity. If every objection or conversation circles back to price, for example, that customer will get shuffled to the bottom of the priority list. This enables the integrator to focus its greatest efforts on those customers looking to get the best solution, not necessarily the cheapest price.

Let Your Web Presence Work For You
According to Emkat, defining your solution and your customer is a waste of time if you don't spread the word. For this reason, the integrator stresses the importance of ongoing marketing, especially in a tightening economy. One of the most beneficial tools for Emkat has proven to be the company's website. "A sharp website can make even the smallest operation look like a 200-person company," says Kieley. "Although I can't really monitor how many sales our website lures in just because of its appeal and navigation, there is no doubt in my mind that it has won deals for us." That's an important message, because first impressions matter and a customer's perception of your website impacts their perception of your company. A winning Web presence can certainly make it easier for them to choose.

 For another viewpoint on rugged handhelds, visit BSMinfo.com/jp/3350.

Emkat chooses to outsource development and optimization of its website, which is now in its fourth edition. One particularly successful program the integrator has enrolled in is a pay-per-click program, where a sponsored link will appear in an MSN, Yahoo!, or Google search when specific keywords are entered. Users that click on the sponsored link are taken to an exact replicate of Emkat's website, with a different toll-free number displayed. The toll-free number forwards to Emkat's real phone number, but the calls are tracked and recorded as are the clicks to the replicated website so that the integrator can measure effectiveness and lead generation.

Emkat is only in its sixth month of the campaign, but is already seeing measurable results. For example, Emkat spends between $4,000 and $7,000 each month on the pay-per-click campaign. In August, 183,000 people were exposed to the sponsored link, and 1,025 people clicked through the link. Of those, Emkat received 23 phone calls and 8 emails, leading to $60,000 in closed business so far. "We're not making hundreds of thousands of dollars on this, but the business we close from these leads is bringing in much more than we're spending on pay-per-click in terms of profit," says Kieley. According to Kieley, the income to expenditure ratio is nearly four to one on the pay-per-click campaign.

Although Emkat's business strategies may not seem innovative and exciting, they do remind us of the fact that success often stems from concentrating on the daily and the common. The approach has led to phenomenal growth for Emkat, with its increase of 927% over the last five years. That's quite a figure, but don't get caught thinking it was just a start-up fluke for this integrator. Ongoing increases continue to be noteworthy, continuing at a rate of more than 50% in most years.