Positively encouraging your current clients to mingle with your prospective clients would sound risky to even the most successful of businesses—but not if you base your operations on an honest and straightforward approach, as Becky Done finds out from Derek Buchanan, CEO of Episys.
When was the last time you visited your local tourist office for leaflets on the best restaurants in your area? Never? Most of us, whether we realise it or not, rely on word-of-mouth and personal recommendations when deciding who gets to benefit from our hard-earned cash. And the same is true in business—or at least, according to Derek Buchanan, CEO of Episys, it should be.
Episys is a UK-based global information technology company providing products, services and support for signage, labelling and mobile systems across a range of industries.Clients—to name a few—include Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury's, Waitrose, Procter & Gamble, Reckitt & Benckiser and the NHS. Last time we spoke with Buchanan, he was actively seeking to enter new markets; but he has always recognised and shied away from the hefty initial outlay that’s often associated with doing so.
“Companies going overseas often have this great idea that they want to conquer a certain market,” he says. “They raise some money and go to that market, hire sales and marketing people, get a nice office and attend lots of trade shows. But quite often they come back with their tail between their legs, no customers and no revenue, having spent all the investment. My approach is that I don’t make that investment but I enter the country or the market through a referenceable, satisfied and iconic customer.”
The power of this approach means that Episys doesn’t need to spend vast sums of money on advertising. "I know advertising has a benefit in certain industries—I certainly know the power of it in the retail market and many others,” he acknowledges. “But if somebody you trust refers you to a restaurant—somebody who has the same values and interests as you—you feel much more compelled to go there than if you had flicked through a brochure and trusted your instinct, don’t you?
“So if I go to a home improvement retailer and tell them that we were able to introduce operational efficiencies at Home Depot [the US home improvement giant], then that’s much more powerful than me just telling them I’ve got this cool product.”
Buchanan likens his tried-and-tested method to that crucial element in the planning of a new shopping mall—to attract new tenants by securing a prestigious and iconic anchor tenant. “Our first customer in the US was the Sears Corporation—an iconic US retail brand that everyone is familiar with. By having Sears as a client, I was then able to secure other clients.”
Since we last spoke, Buchanan has applied this approach to Episys’s entry into the Middle East—a market which can be complex, with its fair share of bureaucratic hurdles to negotiate. “We appointed a partner there to represent us; and that partner then had access to a reputable customer—because here in the UK we had the retailer Lakeland,” Buchanan explains. Lakeland had just moved out to the Middle East and wanted to make sure its branding was consistent with its UK stores, which opened doors for Episys and its partner. “Our partner then had a reference in the Middle East—and they’ve now subsequently won a number of contracts with us in the region.”
If there is a certain client or industry that Episys wishes in particular to target, then it may offer the prospective client a special price in return for a certain amount of pre-agreed PR once they are satisfied with the solution. “It might be the use of their name, a press release, a case study video or a presentation at an event—because at our events, it is our customers who present, not us,” says Buchanan. “Sometimes you have to invest in those early customers—but it’s actually a form of marketing. Once they are satisfied, they’re happy to do press and case studies and network at your events,” he explains.
Episys events are certainly unique, with current customers presenting real-life case studies, and hard selling conspicuous by its absence. “I don’t allow people to sell at events,” asserts Buchanan. “What we do is allow prospective clients to freely network with existing customers. I’m much more comfortable doing business that way—through references, PR, through events where people don’t feel threatened and that sort of thing. Of course we’re trying to ultimately welcome them as a customer; but we’re just not trying to do it that day,” he says of the events.
There are other routes to attracting new business, of course, and cold hard numbers are always going to play their part. But here too, Episys is able to leverage valuable experience gained from work with its existing client base. “If I see a retailer that’s clearly got some challenges because I can see it as I walk around the store—there might be spelling mistakes on signs, for example—we’ll offer to do a retail efficiency survey where we’ll look at visual merchandising, store operations and IT,” explains Buchanan. “And because we’ve implemented the systems in so many places now with all different types of retailer, we can then present where we think there will be tangible benefits. That’s often an approach that we take, because the retailer is getting informed approaches to where the challenges are and what the benefits are.”
With clients at the heart of its ethos, Episys has a refreshingly straightforward approach to customer care. “If you do what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it, and you tell the truth and people can trust you, it doesn’t matter where you are in the world, people are going to want to do business with you.”
Looking forward, Buchanan is positive about new business. “There’s other territories we might want to expand into over the next 12 to 18 months or two years,” he says, without mention of ‘recession’ or ‘turbulence’ or ‘troubled times’. Which just goes to show, if you have a prestigious client list thanks to a straightforward, honest approach to doing business, you’re ideally positioned to continue doing what you do best—which in the case of Episys, is providing outstanding customer care, and then watching the word spread. www.episys.com
