A Series of Forbes Insights Profiles of Thought Leaders Changing the Business Landscape: Bill Nussey, CEO Silverpop…
Bill Nussey started his first software company at age 15. Now, he’s CEO of Silverpop, an Atlanta-based digital marketing company that was just acquired by
Silverpop’s cloud-based platform gives marketers insights into their customers and provides them with an automated system for tailoring their messages to individuals. The company started in 1999 as an automated email marketing company, which Nussey freely admits was popular with businesses but not consumers.
“The acid test was when you went to a cocktail party and someone says ‘What do you do?,’” Nussey recalled recently. “You probably didn’t want to describe in great specificity the job. And that’s when we knew that there was really a gap between what business wanted and what their customers would ultimately demand.”
Email marketing has evolved since then, and so has Silverpop. Instead of mass mailings to millions of customers, the technology today allows marketers to customize their messages to individuals automatically based on their online profile and interests, evolving the company into a marketing automation software provider along the likes of Marketo, Eloqua or
“We were thinking at the time what does the actual end customer want?” Nussey recalled. “Not necessarily just what does our customer—the marketing department want—but what does their customer want?”
Multiply that by millions, and the task becomes that much harder.“How do you handle the hundreds of millions of behaviors and activities that are important?” Nussey said. “And the most challenging part is how do you do all this without having a human being in the middle to make sense of it?”
Nussey was already thinking of this issue when he joined Silverpop in 2000.“I came in shortly after its founding to help take it to the next level,” he says. “It was born with the idea that marketing interactions were going to become individualized.”
The challenge, he said, was taking all the “raw, hard technology” and delivering it to marketers “in a way that they can digest and make use of.”
“We were trying to figure out how to sell more effectively and deliver to our clients more quickly than the traditional model, which is where you ship them a CD or a disk and they install it and then you send them a new one every six or 12 months and hope they keep up.”
The answer came with the rapid growth of the Internet. It allowed marketers to interact with customers in an entirely new way. And Silverpop was one of the early experimenters in this field.
“This was way before there was AJAX and interactive web experiences,” Nussey said. “We built an application years ahead of most of the marketplace in terms of allowing marketers to log in over the Web and do very sophisticated marketing. Originally it was around email primarily, and by 2006, we cast a much broader vision than just email.”
Today, interactive and automated marketing have become widely accepted. “It’s amazing how important it’s become,” Nussey said. “And I would argue that it’s really an early indicator of what’s coming down the pike in the next couple of years. I think there’s a sense that marketing as we know it—really customer experience as we know it—is beginning to transform."
“And it’s interesting that the largest, most successful technology companies on the planet all think it’s central to their long term success,” he continued. “Those of us who have been doing it for a long time, we always had a feeling it’d be important.”
The deal with IBM just confirms that view. Silverpop felt like it had the right technology and products, but it didn't have the heft of a big company to get the kind of attention Nussey was looking for. “We felt like when people had the opportunity to hear our story, we did extremely well and had great long-term customer relationships with marketing departments,” he said. “But we just didn’t have the awareness.”
After talking with several companies about combining, Nussey said he and IBM knew almost immediately that they were meant for each other.“It was the first major meeting with IBM up in New York,” Nussey said. “We were in the meeting for about 15 minutes. We looked at each other…and we knew we had seen home.”
Nussey believes both companies share similar visions and goals. “IBM really was the first company to recognize and publicize the emerging role of CMO as chief technologist,” he said. “So they have been on a mission to understand and serve the CMO years before anyone else. Not that technology is the goal, but you can use technology to change things, and that’s always in been my beliefs. Marketing has been my passion for the last 20 years, and so technology can make a real impact on marketing.”
Nussey has always considered himself a software person. He got a degree in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University and started his “first global software company” while still in college. “That was called Nussey Systems, and we sold desktop software across the world,” he said. “I was in college traveling all over the planet doing deals.”
He sold that company, went to Harvard Business School and then joined the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Greylock in 1996. He helped fund an e-commerce consulting company in Atlanta called IXL and a few years later became president and eventually CEO. “It was a services company and we did strategy, technology and design all over the world,” he recalled. “It was a great time, but I dearly missed software, which has been my true passion. “
That’s when he joined Silverpop, which was also based in Atlanta. Though the company is now part of IBM, Nussey and his team will remain in the Georgia capital. “My heart and my family are down here in Atlanta, so we love it.” Nussey said. “And IBM has done an amazing job allowing people to live where they want and to work where they want. I think you can look inside of IBM and see a lot of glimpses of how the future of the business world’s going to be.”
Silverpop is now part of IBM’s marketing arm, which has been re-branded “ExperienceOne” group, which Nussey says best describes the focus on individual consumers. “So with the services we offer at IBM, we’re going to make that promise of individualized experiences far more realized,” Nussey concluded. “And the great thing is that everybody benefits. Businesses benefit, consumers, business buyers—everybody benefits. And that’s the art of the win-win.”
Bruce H. Rogers is the co-author of the recently published book Profitable Brilliance: How Professional Service Firms Become Thought Leaders
