- editorial
Selling the vision – part II
This message doesn’t always resonate well with all prospective employees. For example, as a developer, you’re likely to be more interested in a well organized and stable environment and the right technologies so you can focus on creating great software. Backbase does offer all this, but we don’t yet communicate this prominently.
When meeting with new recruits, they often are pleasantly surprised with all the cool stuff we do. And the scale in which we operate. For example, we have over 80 million users on our platform. Yes, there’s a lot we can do to strengthen our employer brand, but our focus remains on the contributing to sales more than to getting new people in, and perhaps that focus needs to encompass both goals in the coming months.
Ambitious, ahead of the curve. Being bold. What we promise, we’ll deliver. Having a passion for what we do. These attributes are very much Backbase. But they were not ‘designed’ – they have attached themselves to the brand — really as the result of how we work and how people experience us.
Backbase shows a very solid and aggressive growth. What are the main challenges in supporting this growth from a marketing / communication perspective?
The other challenge is to stick to the plan and don’t stop when it’s starting to be successful. You would be surprised how ‘common’ this problem is. Consider, for example, a plan where you want to approach 50 banks in a specific geography and you aim to have an appointment with each and every one. You organize a number of events and other activities to make it happen. So far so good. However, when sales cannot follow up after the first three meetings, the whole plan stops working altogether. I think there is still a lot to gain for us by diligently executing what we set out to do.
Backbase is well covered by the major analysts and well positioned too.
Analysts – just like banks – are looking for new players that do something cool. They have a vision for a certain market, and they need technology companies that deliver on that vision. Technology companies with customer cases to back that vision up. Next to that, it’s about building a personal relationship, from both sides.
From the beginning, our goal was to be a global company. Our first banking customer was in South Africa, so this wasn’t even a local bank. I’d say that if you’re a B2B company, especially on the technology side, and your product is or potentially will be good enough to serve a global market, you must communicate in English from the beginning. Sure, there is a case for localisation, but this just opens up a web of content and translation issues when you penetrate new markets. Think Europe – exactly how many languages are you planning on catering to. And let’s not forget the cost of this. So we decided early on that it only makes sense to use English as our language, and that’s what we did.