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Turning Vendors Into Partners

NASA needed the video and internal campaign in 45 days, and Fischer immediately set his business development team to work on finding a firm that CSM could partner with. The very next day, a Friday, the team contacted three marketing firms and asked for proposals to be submitted by Monday morning. All three delivered. CSM picked Technovative Marketing, a seven-person shop in Peapack, N.J. By Monday afternoon, Harriet Donnelly, the firm’s president, and her project manager were in CSM’s offices, ready to get started.

Fischer had plenty of experience dealing with marketing firms, both large and small. With the large outfits, it was always the same—the senior executives closed the deals, then handed the actual work off to less experienced junior employees. Technovative was different. “When Harriet looked me in the eye and said she was personally going to stay involved with this,” Fischer says, “she was very believable.”

In fact, Donnelly became CSM’s chief marketing officer in all but title, commuting between New Jersey and Virginia. She personally worked on the video and attended all meetings with NASA, though she never talked about herself as being from an outside firm. “We represented the project as if we were part of CSM’s team, which is what we were,” she says. That means behaving as much like a salaried employee as a contractor. She’s also careful not to nickel-and-dime clients for extra charges. The higher costs may cut into her margins slightly, but long-term client relationships won’t flourish if you charge for every little thing, she says.

It didn’t hurt that she thought the NASA project was a particularly cool one. But even on less exciting projects, she says it helps that her firm isn’t so large that she can’t stay involved with all of them, and that she always has a senior staff person involved as well to make sure clients have at least two points of contact. It also helps that she’s both a bit obsessive about her work and has no problem working nights in her home office.

Technovative’s work was a huge hit. Because of it, CSM has already pulled in more work from NASA and is in the process of selling similar internal marketing campaigns to other clients. Donnelly has been enlisted to help. The whole process has reinforced what Fischer suspected—that by working with another entrepreneur, he wouldn’t just get a contractor. He’d get a virtual employee.

3. What happens in an emergency?

January is a bad time for an accountant to find a mistake. That’s when tax season begins, and all the forms businesses need to send out have to be processed. So it was a dark Friday last January when Charles M. Ross, a CPA in McKinney, Texas, realized he’d set up one of his client’s payroll systems with the wrong wage figures and then run it that way for six months. It was a problem Ross couldn’t fix on his own, and the W2s needed to go out the following Monday.

Ross uses PayCycle, a payroll services company in Palo Alto, Calif., to process payrolls for his own firm and about a dozen of his clients. He likes the service for its flexibility—most of his clients are able to give it their own twist so it better suits their companies’ needs. Still, he was nervous when he called PayCycle about his problem. There wasn’t much time left before the weekend, and he wasn’t sure anyone would be available to help him.

Ross doesn’t have a designated customer support representative. PayCycle expects any employee who answers the phone to be able to solve any customer problem—and all of its 70 employees, including its CEO, spend at least 10% of their time taking customer calls. Ross’s rep understood the problem and its urgency. She said the company would take care of it. PayCycle’s staff recalculated an entire year of Ross’s client’s payroll—a job that required almost a day of nonstop work. On Monday, there was a voice mail waiting for Ross when he arrived at work: “Problem solved.”

This kind of responsiveness comes because PayCycle was founded to focus on its customers’ needs, says Rene Lacerte, the firm’s co-founder and CFO. Lacerte believes that the basis of successful business is having customers feel like they’re being listened to. He also sensed that his customers could become both his best salespeople and his best source of new product ideas. That’s why every employee interacts with customers. The payoff? Nine in 10 customers refer new customers to PayCycle.

For Ross, the best part about his experience is that it didn’t cost him anything. Helping customers with their mistakes, even on weekends, is part of the job for PayCycle. Fixing the W2s himself, Ross says, “would have taken me an entire day.” And better yet, he didn’t have to make an embarrassing phone call to his customer.

4. How do I know you’ll be there when I need you?

When Michael Joseph has a technology problem, he calls his accountant. When he needs advice on benefits packages, he calls his accountant. HR issues? Ring the accountant.

“I bring up things that are giving me pain, and I see what he has to say about it,” says Joseph, CEO of ASI Inc., a medical instruments distributor in Cleveland. Joseph didn’t start out thinking that way. In the beginning, he simply needed someone to help him with his books. Business was growing fast and Joseph lacked the time to stay on top of his finances and the resources to hire someone to work in-house.