Adivent Opens Euro Doors for American Vendors

Bruny took over as CEO of Aztek Engineering in 2006 and promptly changed its name and its mission, taking it from a custom engineering house that builds products for others to a product company itself. Part of that process was building a sales and marketing team. But as it looks to go international, Aztek Networks first will use Adivent to assess the viability of the European market with his company’s products.

Aztek currently sells to Tier 2 and Tier 3 service providers. It began shipping product last summer. As is the modus operandi with Adivent, the companies agreed upon a set of milestones they would reach together before moving on to the next phase of their relationship. Adivent first will help Aztek assess its potential in the market.

“Before we go out aggressively to that market we want to get high-level feedback from the carriers there to see if they have the same sorts of business needs we see in the domestic market,” Bruny said. “We need to determine if we should go there at all. We think we should, but we want to validate that.”

Provided all goes well, Aztek will move to the next phase, which is understanding specifics about protocols and determining the potential need for customizing its products. This is part of the pre-sales process. Upon reaching that milestone, Aztek and Adivent would begin the actual sales process.

This concept of milestones is an important one for Adivent and one of the things that convinced Aztek to go the sales outsourcing route. “We establish milestones around what it is we want to do and we pay them when those milestones are reached, so it’s not your typical retainer situation,” Bruny said. “They have to achieve the same goals that you want or they don’t get paid.”

Burzi said that’s why his company is selective about its clients and the milestones he believes they can reach together. “When we approach a company, we decide together to engage in this activity. We do an initial assessment, identify the products they want to sell and a list of companies they want to sell to and define the sales opportunity,” he said. “If we believe we can reach the next step, we take the risk and accept the sales expense from there to the next step.”

Jeff Cotrupe, CEO of MarketPower LLC, said recently that “billions of Euros are going to change hands in EMEA in the next few years for B/OSS solutions. Smart ISVs, especially those now trying to sell into substantially consolidated markets such as the U.S., would do well to deal themselves into the game.”

Cotrupe said Adivent offers ready access to the top executive, technical and financial decision makers at companies to which every ISV with a brain would love to sell. “This is a great option for small ISVs, not just as an alternative to opening and operating your own overseas sales office, but also as compared to the painful and often fruitless process of trying to push your way into a [system integrator’s] standard framework/solution set.”

Burzi said that in addition to the long-standing challenges for foreign vendors breaking into the European market, conditions are getting even more complex with M&A activity and other consolidation leading to cross-border ownership of companies. “With all the cross-border relationships, if you want to sell something serious to Telecom Italia you have to shuffle between Rome and Madrid,” he said.

Burzi added that fragmentation also affects the distribution channels across Europe. “That’s a huge challenge for North American companies no matter what product they have,” he said. “But having said that, Europe is a great place to be right now. In a shrinking domestic market, the potential for generating a revenue stream in Europe quickly and efficiently would be attractive to many American companies.”

In a cashflow analysis of revving up a sales subsidiary in Europe, Adivent found it typically took 11 months and approximately 150,000 Euros just to get operational so you could start the sales process. Adivent guarantees to have sales representatives knocking on doors in four weeks.

“That’s a big difference in time, risk and money,” Burzi said.