Fulfill an Unmet Need – QAS

timjsmith

Tim J. Smith, PhD
Founder and CEO, Wiglaf Pricing

Published May 26, 2004

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

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About The Author

timjsmith
Tim J. Smith, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Wiglaf Pricing, an Adjunct Professor of Marketing and Economics at DePaul University, and the author of Pricing Done Right (Wiley 2016) and Pricing Strategy (Cengage 2012). At Wiglaf Pricing, Tim leads client engagements. Smith’s popular business book, Pricing Done Right: The Pricing Framework Proven Successful by the World’s Most Profitable Companies, was noted by Dennis Stone, CEO of Overhead Door Corp, as "Essential reading… While many books cover the concepts of pricing, Pricing Done Right goes the additional step of applying the concepts in the real world." Tim’s textbook, Pricing Strategy: Setting Price Levels, Managing Price Discounts, & Establishing Price Structures, has been described by independent reviewers as “the most comprehensive pricing strategy book” on the market. As well as serving as the Academic Advisor to the Professional Pricing Society’s Certified Pricing Professional program, Tim is a member of the American Marketing Association and American Physical Society. He holds a BS in Physics and Chemistry from Southern Methodist University, a BA in Mathematics from Southern Methodist University, a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Chicago, and an MBA with high honors in Strategy and Marketing from the University of Chicago GSB.