It’s a war out there in the email security world (or anti-spam world or, if you wish, anti all bad stuff that can get in via email, which is a lot of bad stuff world!. It’s still a growing market, as email remains the dominant form of business communication and therefore gets targeted for malicious attacks of all kind.
It can be hard to differentiate in a very competitive market, with a lot of players including the major brand names (you know, the ones who spend a ton on Marketing but don’t necessarily have the best solution, not even close). You usually have 3 options for differentiation: innovative or super-performing product, unbelievable efficiency in delivering your product to customers or extreme customer care, service, intimacy and love (I’m no genius, it’s the Harvard Business Review that tells me this). In anti-spam, there are many high performing solutions in the market, so battling for that last 0.01 % of FP (False Positive), or that last 0.05% of Spam Filtering performance (is there really that big a difference to customers between 99.82% and 99.87%, given statistical and measurement errors?) is almost an impossible game. Top-performing solutions, like modus by Vircom, and others, are simply quite good enough when it comes to protecting email and getting rid of the bad stuff that attempts to enter via email.
Ok, so performance is out as a major differentiator, as good solutions crowd the top right of any performance quadrants. Next, there would be operational efficiency, with which a supplier would become ultra-awesome at delivering their solution to customers, saving mostly time and money for themselves, and ultimately for their customers. Again, most solutions are quite easy to obtain, install and operate, and they also offer hosted services which are even easier to get customers going on.
So that leaves Love! Well, at Vircom, we continue to maintain and improve our product so that it’s top performing, and we also continuously improve its installation, setup, UX and have also added a hosted service based on it. But we have chosen Love (ok, customer intimacy, if you want to get technical…) as our major differentiator. We will out-serve, out-care, out-love, out-follow-up, out-listen and out-engage any of our competitors!
Just a couple of days ago there was another instance of this working for us, and for our customers. An overseas customer comes in through our Inbound Marketing efforts, interested in our solution, but also considering Barracuda, the low-cost high-volume alternative. We get this a lot, Barracuda has established a massive brand and are heavy into AdWords, so you pretty much see them everywhere you turn. And, they’re cheap. Oh man, your basic competitive nightmare, right? Well, actually no.
Our Sales and Customer Love (sorry, customer service) teams connected with the customer, listened and understood their needs, proposed a solution, got them on a trial, and closed the deal before the Barracuda rep even got back to them! Again, this happens a lot. We feel that, if the Sales rep doesn’t have the time to get back to you, imagine what the after Sales service will be like. And this has been proven; the after–sales service of the major brand names like Barracuda is quite mediocre (I’m being polite). The customer in question actually told us that this is the main reason why they chose us.
But wait! The competition was cheaper and had a big brand name, and appears just about everywhere on google when you search for email filtering and protection, how did you get them?
Well, like they say, love conquers all. 🙂
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