Fulfill an Unmet Need – QAS

What will drive success at your company? I asked seven executives charged with generating revenue in business markets this question on May 17th at the Retail Systems Conference held in Chicago. The range of their answers crossed many aspects of business marketing. Their business cases confirm and expand many of the suggestions made within The Wiglaf Journal. In an effort to share peer beliefs on what drives success, we will provide their brief business cases in the coming weeks.

Fulfill an Unmet Need – QAS

Founded in 1990, this UK based company has achieved remarkable success by fulfilling an unmet need in direct response business to consumer industries. Revenues in 2003 were at $71 million, up 12% from year prior, and their client list includes numerous big names such as Lands End, Lord & Taylor, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Bank of America.

QAS provides solutions to the business challenge of maintaining accurate contact addresses. According to research, 23.6% of US mail suffers from address inaccuracies, driving an increase in the cost of contacting prospective customers and a decrease in potential revenues. To overcome this business challenge, the QAS system validates address data.

In the past, the US address validation market has been dominated by companies such as Group 1 and FirstLogic. The QAS solution differentiates itself by forcing address data validity at the point of entry while competitor software focuses on cleaning address data in batch processes.

Although serving an unmet need and improving a common business process is driving growth at QAS, sales and marketing processes are required to match the need to fulfillment. One tool that Bob Hebeisen, Marketing Manager for QAS, used to facilitate the buying process at the Retail Systems Conference was a Lead Capture Form. It asked three simple questions of prospect companies: How many people enter address data? How many customer records are in the organizations database? And in which QAS solution are they interested. Armed with this data on their prospects, QAS salespeople can follow-up on clearly qualified leads.
www.qas.com