For Support.Com, Growth Demanded Less Brand, Not More

Back in 2007, when CEO Josh Pickus was spearheading a radical reorganization involving the sale of Support.com’s core enterprise software business, he made a key strategic decision that would reshape the middle-market firm’s future by making its brand less visible.

“This was really a paradigm shift that came from asking the question of whether support should be about eliminating calls and costs or be about enhancing the customer experience so that technology providers and resellers could deepen their relationships with us and grow their business,” explains Pickus, who says that the decision to go to market through a variety of marketing partners, including Staples and OfficeMax, was in part validated by the excessive customer acquisition costs of the direct-to-consumer model.

“We’re no longer a brand in and of ourselves. We don’t invest in building the brand. You won’t see us with a Super Bowl commercial,” explains Pickus, who says that the decision arrived roughly a year into a reorganization that precipitated the launch of a new cloud-computing platform and triggered the sale of the firm’s enterprise software helpdesk services — a suite of offerings responsible for close to $65 million in annual revenue.

“At that point, we were kind of in this brave new world where we didn’t have revenue anymore in the old way, and we were starting from about zero,” adds Pickus.

Six years later, having grown its new offerings to more than $72 million in annual revenue, Support.com’s decision to forfeit its direct-to-consumer model appears to have paid off by any measure. Along the way, its bench of marketing partners has also grown as the firm identified IT services pain points such as computer viruses, where virus software vendors could offer little help to consumers whose machines were already infected, and faulty Internet connections, where cable providers found themselves dealing with technology issues unrelated to their services.

“We found that all of these companies were interested in partnering — whether it was an antivirus software firm like Symantec or cable providers like Comcast or Time Warner, we built programs for them,” explains Pickus, who says that the firm’s ability to partner has recently reached a new threshold as it begins to offer its partners a software-only solution.

“Now we can go to a prospect and say, ‘Look, if you have your own labor, let us do just the technology piece, because you don’t want to invest in building something like this.’ And so what we’re doing is developing a new subsection of the CRM market that focuses on the technology customer experience,” explains Pickus, who says that the opportunity to license the Support.com platform to partners became visible because of several inbound queries from different partners, some of which had preexisting helpdesk personnel.

According to Pickus, Support.com has begun to improve its profit margins over consecutive quarters, as its ability to forecast talent requirements has also improved.

“We now know how to ramp up these contracts, but this has come with a lot of trial and error, and we have at times overhired as well as underhired people — but we learned each time and refined the algorithm to where I think we now have some very interesting intellectual property,” explains Pickus, who says that the decision to forfeit Support.com’s earlier helpdesk model had little to do with demand.

“The issue of making technology work has gotten no less important. In fact, it has only gotten more important, because there are more technologies and they need to work together more — so this core market is really quite healthy.”