Simpler Communications in Your Space – Ajay Kapoor of TouchSource

Ajay Kapoor, CEO of TouchSource

Ajay Kapoor, the CEO of TouchSource, grew his company’s revenue from from $4.8 million in 2014 to $7.6 million in 2017, a 57% increase, and another 20-25% in 2018.  

TouchSource provides electronic directory, wayfinding, and public access information systems and kiosks.  

In this interview with Eversprint‘s Malcolm Lui, Ajay shares how he and his team accelerated their high value sales by:  

  • Expanding outside of commercial real estate to healthcare and retail.  
  • Successfully anticipating needs and future user experiences.  
  • Providing a service that ranks in the top 1% of customer satisfaction.  

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Malcolm Lui:
Welcome to the High Value Sales Show of Eversprint.com. I'm Malcolm Lui, the Managing Member of Eversprint, and today we're speaking with Ajay Kapoor, the CEO of TouchSource, a provider of electronic directory, wayfinding, and public access information systems and kiosks. Welcome to the show Ajay.

Ajay Kapoor:
Thanks a lot Malcolm. Glad to be here.

Malcolm Lui:
Ajay, you grew your company's revenue from $4.8 million in 2014 to $7.6 million in 2017, a 57% increase, and in 2018 you grew another 20-25%. Before we talk about how you grew your company so fast, can you briefly share what your company does beyond my quick intro, and how your company differs from the competition?

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah sure. So Ted source is the leading supplier of digital directories and information systems in North America. What we do differently than everyone else is we really focus on a very simplified user experience in which our customers customers those going to commercial real estate buildings or retail or hospital can get a very simple way to get oriented to a place find information they need get useful content and move on while the property manager or marketing manager that owns a solution can update the technology without needing advanced technical skills and can do things as easy as a click of a button. So that simplicity combined with our focus on a really great customer support experiences as has been the hallmark of our differentiation in the market.

Malcolm Lui:
How would you say you differ from the competitors out there in particular is it simply the UI that's different for the users as well as your customers or are there other differences.

Ajay Kapoor:
The UI is definitely a big part of it. I think simplicity really is is where we set ourselves apart from others. When you look at our solution you know there obviously is a software element but it's a physical component right. It's got a display in a secure enclosure and it's got to be integrated into the wall or or a freestanding unit. We make all of those aspects simple. We make it simple to operate simple to manage simple to use. And then when if anyone if ever people need help or support they're calling talking to real life people on the first ring who are really focused on getting them up and are empathetic what they're going through that you know our customers are not technologists. There are people who are really trying to serve their customers better and by us making it simple we feel like we are very different than our competition in the market.

Malcolm Lui:
Can you give me an idea of the size of your your customers are we talking about like a single kiosk inside a department store. Many people in the right direction or take more of a shopping mall type application

Ajay Kapoor:
Yes. So first of all we have we have about 9000 deployed units around North America and the customers could be all over the map. Some of the largest property management companies that own or operate commercial real estate buildings like CBRE J.L. l. and Colliers where we're proud to say our very large customers of ours and all of them are have hundreds of buildings that have our solutions. In addition we're in large health care facilities like Covenant health and Santa Clara health. And here in Colorado we're in Rose Medical Center and all around the country and then we're we're really excited to be doing national malls. We started with the Prudential Center in Boston. We've done that the shops at 900 North Michigan on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. And now we're working with Starwood retail partners and rolling out their thirty malls around the US. So you know our customer spectrum can go from a small commercial office building to a doctor's waiting room to a very large mall to a 30 building campus for a university. And we we cover the gamut across all of them

Malcolm Lui:
Now. What would you what would your kiosk provide in a doctor's waiting room.

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah we're actually doing a great project with a with the provider up in New York in which you know we've all discovered that the typical TV in the waiting room has now been inundated with with ads and during the daytime the largest buyer of ads or Big Pharma was trying to influence the patient decision. Two doctors are looking for ways to engage their patients with helpful content healthy tips even their own marketing and branding while not innovating and with with content and ads that disrupt the patient doctor experience. So we have a solution in which we sourced really great and interesting content on health tips. We've also formed a partnership with a company who has source local art from local artists in each geography and digitize them. So now I'm in a waiting room. A patient can see health tips they can see community calendars they can see upcoming events and see local art produced by local artists animated videos and just a an experience that aligns with a doctor's values not the advertiser's values. If you were to have say CNN on it and to room

Malcolm Lui:
Right now this is not something you did for just one doctor. This is something that you're doing for many doctors across the board.

Ajay Kapoor:
Oh absolutely absolutely. We you know just this month we are shipping almost two hundred of those to various practices. So it's a it's a very high growth business for us as one doctor sees it in a medical office building every other doctor wants it.

Malcolm Lui:
Right.

Ajay Kapoor:
And so it's it's a rapidly growing part of our our segment. And yeah the example I highlighted in New York is actually a facility that houses buildings that has hundreds of doctors and we're working with the facility to have a consistent experience across all of our waiting rooms.

Malcolm Lui:
Right now your doctor kiosk is totally different from the ones that you would see in a shopping mall. How do you guys come up with this idea of going to doctors and providing a kiosk or a a portal. I'm not sure how you would describe it. That's better than what they have currently. How did that idea develop

Ajay Kapoor:
You know a lot of what we do is think about the user stories and the user experience. So whether it be in retail or an office building or doctors we start to think about the people and we we take on the personas of who's joining or who's going to be visiting that center in the health care example. It's fascinating because you have seniors with health conditions coming in. You have people of all age groups you have family members who are half of the people who don't who visit a medical facility especially a hospital are not there for care therefore support of others. And so you have to take the persona of what people are looking for when people enter a health care facility. Many times it's not an unpleasant situation. So we try to put in and anticipate both their concerns and their simple and their expectations. Now hospitals because of the rise of health care in North America hospitals have been growing almost like Lego blocks attached onto a child's structure just growing wherever they can. As a result they are very disorienting. So as we think about the persona of somebody who's coming to a hospital they are you know in need they are potentially looking to support their friends or family and they're very disoriented. So taking on that persona we need to provide comfort we need to provide simplicity we need to provide content and then we also identify there's other resources. One of our customers said it would be amazing if you could just provide a place with a link. So our families know where to take their laundry. Provide a link to know what other closest restaurants for them to do things to provide a link to get to the local grocery store and other things because people who are coming to hospital weren't planning to get there and still need to get life going on and so part of our kiosks are not just to support how they traverse the hospital but to support their lives while they're there.

Malcolm Lui:
Right now. Did you come up with the idea and then you approached the hospitals and the doctors offices or did they say you know this TV sucks you need to find something better and then they approach you

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah that's a great comment. So it's really in partnership what inevitably happens is we solve a simple problem first for a customer like these health care facilities and and for this that we're the the patient display or the waiting display came from as we were working with the overall building a medical office building to provide them in some ways just a simple directory lobby based directory functionality in two languages because they had a wide diversity of people in there coming to their practices. But as we started to talk to them and as they started to highlight issues that we identified that we could help their practices as well in our standard lobby directories we often provide news and content and weather updates. And so as we were talking about other content and the customer realized we could provide health tips and health information jointly we started to come up with a solution to solve for the patient room experience and bring in all these other elements. And frankly that's when it gets really exciting. CO creating solutions with customers makes it far more interesting and far more exciting than you know a guy in a lab trying to think up something.

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah yeah definitely. Now how long this process take from the time you started doing work with your lobby kiosk for the hospitals until you started going into the doctor's waiting rooms

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah it's hard to say that there's a start and a finish to him because we take a pretty agile and iterative approach. But from for this one use case you know we went from idea to concept within a matter of weeks and a prototype to be able to work with the customer on. We built our software platform very agile and we created quite a bit of API integrations so that we can bring in content sources from all different places and then we have an in-house team of really really great digital designers. So they were able to work and create the digital design that brought in all these content sources. We were able to bring in and use leverage our content partners and then we're able to work with the medical office itself to get all of their local branding and content in there as well. And that process frankly just took maybe two to three weeks before we had something up and ready for testing to work with them and then then we started working with scale from there. And now we're doing it across the country

Malcolm Lui:
Very cool. Now I take it your devices are probably all wireless right so for you to set up a waiting waiting display in a doctor's office is pretty quick and easy.

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah. It's really just power. And then you know connecting it to Wi-Fi and we're up and running

Malcolm Lui:
Right. So yeah I could imagine you can get a prototype up and running pretty quick. It could simply be just be a tablet right to start as a very early stage waiting display in this have that in the waiting room sitting in the corner right off the bat.

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah for prototypes. It's about getting a small form factor. We're fortunate to have very large partnerships with some of the largest commercial display providers in the world. People like Samsung and things like that so we're able to tap into a variety of different form factors to test and prototype very quickly and can work with them because what's interesting is you bring up a tablet orientation but then as the the medical practice gets excited this quickly turned into something that they want to do it. Sixty five inches or seventy five inches in a big display because when you could do things like anywhere from a digital fish tank to a digital art display in concert with useful useful content they want it big bold bright and that that was a pleasant surprise on the scale and the size desired in these types of solutions

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah. You never really know what people wanted to actually do it. Right.

Ajay Kapoor:
Yep absolutely.

Malcolm Lui:
So very cool. Now you grew a business quite rapidly over the past four years. Right. Four point eight million to seven point six million from 2014 to 2017. A 60 percent almost a 60 percent bump. And then in 2018 you bump it up another 20 to 25 percent. What would you say were the rebates growth drivers over the past four years.

Ajay Kapoor:
So for us we've we've touched on a little bit but you know our our expansion into other key markets outside of commercial real estate specifically health care and retail have really been accelerators for us. We feel like we can provide more value to those visitors and patients and things like that and there's a lot of larger more sophisticated projects that really need the simplicity that we bring. So one is you know expanding into differentiated markets too is trying to anticipate where the needs and the experiences are going. So a few years ago we started bringing in a variety of different content sources into digital information and really created a lot more flexibility in the designs and things like that and created a future experience now and anticipate in the future. We've we've equipped our our solutions with IO T or Internet of Things sensors so that they can help a property manager or others sense temperature ambient sound lighting there's cameras to look for for you know potentially security issues their sound sensors. So we're putting these into being more intelligent so anticipating the needs that way. And then third honestly it's word of mouth has really helped us. Our customers have really helped spread the gospel to other customers as they add there as they move into other industries or different different companies or as they work in different markets.

Malcolm Lui:
All right. Sounds like you have a fan there who is expressing

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah.

Malcolm Lui:
Support in the background as well.

Ajay Kapoor:
Sorry about that.

Malcolm Lui:
Ok. So let me recap the three drivers share with me of your growth number one expansion outside of commercial real estate to health care and retail. Number two is anticipating future needs and future experiences. And number three the word of mouth that your customers are just spreading the gospel of of your devices and how they've been really helpful. It's not about wrap it up

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah that's a great summary.

Malcolm Lui:
Okay great. Now how did you get the idea of going into health care in retail. Did they come to you and then you started to work with them and you saw as lucrative he did more. Or did you proactively target health care retail before you even had any business with them.

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah. In some ways it came to us. And then once we identify it we pursued it further. So we have clients like CBRE who's the largest property management company in North America. Or maybe the world and they may manage traditional commercial real estate buildings which we do quite a bit of but right next to it could be a medical office building with the same property manager. So we started doing medical office buildings that requires a little bit of change into how you show listings you're showing providers rather than companies and things like that. And then as the healthcare market has changed those property management companies are now managing more direct health care services like hospitals and things like that. So they asked us to keep on providing solutions into those types of facilities. Once we did a few we took a step back and we're able to recognize that there was a real opportunity to create that simplicity in the health care environment and then we took a really focused approach on it. We've added people in the team that have 20 plus years of of healthcare experience. We've added customer success managers and designers focused in on the health care experience and really you know look at this as something that has its own unique problems and solutions and and really kind of created that focused effort on it to grow further

Malcolm Lui:
Right. And similarly on the retail side as well. A similar process.

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah. We are our first very large retail deployment was the Prudential Center in Boston and were the first ones to do right. One of the most prestigious retail spaces in the country. We learned a lot in that process and through that we were able to identify different ways to to make it better. As we started a project with the national mall operator we recognized one big area that they spent a lot of time is a mock marketing manager has to go to a website and update listings deals offers et cetera then they would have to go to the content management system or their digital directory and do the same. And so we reached out to a company who is the largest provider of marketing websites and marketing content for the retail centers and malls a company by the name of place by digital was also based in Colorado and forged a partnership to eliminate that complexity on behalf of our customers. So now our customers rather than going to two different places to upload content they focus on one marketing message. They're able to integrate in national brands through place y as we integrate all of that stuff into the kiosks and our customers can have a fresh constantly updated digital directory experience with automatically updated maps and deals and offers and events and all sorts of stuff without them having to do anything. And so once we really focused in on an eliminating that complexity it allowed us to to really accelerate that that retail business as well.

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah a lot of the key to moving forward with anything right is is keeping it simple right. Because I think you get complex people just defer the decision.

Ajay Kapoor:
Absolutely. I'm still in and we we pride ourselves that the training required to use our technology can be done in under half an hour. And with that you know it creates guardrails for us because if we're gonna create something that would require a lot of user training we probably haven't thought it through enough. We haven't made it simple enough. And so

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah

Ajay Kapoor:
Keeping that guidance has helped us really keep it simple

Malcolm Lui:
So I often find out when things are kept simple. One way that that it's done is by reducing the functionality. Have you found a way to keep it simple but yet they will have wide functionality

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah absolutely. You know for like the example I gave in the retail space by leveraging integrations and finding where they're doing duplicate work you can create tremendous power in the solution while reducing the amount of steps. The other thing we do that's very different in the industries is our our designs aren't really user customizable fully so there's things that a user can do in terms of updating content and putting information into different areas but we actually have our designers design the actual template that our users companies go do. It's a little counterintuitive because we're now in this realm. This sort of Web 2.0 and 3.0 realm of everyone wants to be their own designer but what we actually found is leveraging our expert designers in consultation with the customer to create something that's scalable for the customer that they can then use and go forward makes it vastly simple and dramatically reduces the time to activation for the customer increases their experience and requires a lot less sophistication on the customer. Because we partner with them to create that that scalable design for them

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah oftentimes when I see applications right after I go through it I'm using it. I'm thinking that the person who designed this probably isn't a user of the application because

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah.

Malcolm Lui:
It's so body you know. But the way

Ajay Kapoor:
Your

Malcolm Lui:
You do it it makes more sense

Ajay Kapoor:
Yep you're absolutely right. There's people who spend their lives focused on design and and let's leverage their skills.

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah. Awesome. Now number two anticipating needs and future experiences. Your second driver. Tell me about your crystal ball. How do you do that.

Ajay Kapoor:
So in some cases it's not magic. It's about building partnerships with experts in different aspects of the industry and of different industries. So for example I mentioned earlier that our focus on Internet of Things and IO T. We're a strategic partner with aero electronics one of the largest electronics supply companies in the world by working with them closely. They have researchers and labs teams that are focusing in on things five years out and but with us working with them in tandem we're able to leverage the resources of a 30 billion dollar twenty five thousand person company while US being a small agile innovative business. And so we did that with Intel. We've done that with Aero. We've done that with Microsoft. We've done that with a with a bunch of the largest customers our largest partners. And then we've brought in really innovative software development teams who have non-traditional paths to software a lot of self starter people of people who transition in different industries and then we've set up an internship program with the University of Colorado at Boulder to bring in a lot of their High grad students as interns and bring in some of that expertise. So I think the key in having a crystal ball is to realize we don't have a crystal ball and to ask a lot of questions create great partnerships leverage expertise and others and then keep on asking your customers about the rest of their experience aside from what they deal with with your product and keep on it kind of expanding the sets of solutions that we can we can work with them. We like to when we speak to customers keep on asking the question what else what else what else. In terms of what other business issues your problems here things like that and eventually that what else gets us to an interesting problem that we can solve on their behalf.

Malcolm Lui:
Right now the situations you present that you get ideas from if you're already partners. How far up the curve do you go. Are you bleeding edge in terms of the technology and ideas that you might apply and bring the market. Or do you kind of wait a bit to let someone else be the first mover and experienced the pain of getting it wrong before you follow in their footsteps.

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah that's a great question. I don't I don't feel it's our role and I don't think our customers look for us to be bleeding edge. But what we do is is really understand enough about the market to find out when it's it's scalable on that innovation curve. And I'll give you an example of that having cameras in in digital kiosks is becoming increasingly important because you can trigger when somebody approaches the kiosk before they touch it as well as start capturing demographic information and well where people dwell and things like that. So a team can help service their clients better. We were meeting with a client this time last year and they're very interested the demographics and so the solution we're rolling out with them includes the cameras but we had a candid conversation with them saying the technology right now at that point had really only two to three entrenched providers that were really doing a price premium on that tech because they were operating at the leading or the bleeding edge. We felt in that both hardware and software changes and things like Facebook opening source open sourcing some of the technology and Microsoft doing it and things like that that within just 12 months the economics on that same technology were going to change dramatically that we could bring in commodity hardware put together a solution and offer it at a fraction of the price that they would buy it in 2018. That prediction was actually accurate. And now today we're leveraging technology from Intel and in our toolkit that allows us to do that demographic information at a fraction of what the insurance provider that would have been last year and doing it in a scalable way that's not as leading edge but still innovative

Malcolm Lui:
Right now when you say demo capturing demographic information are you saying that the cameras are on all the time and they're analyzing the people who are walking by. Figuring out their gender their ethnicity their age or making a guess at as it does on those dimensions is that what you mean by capturing demographic information.

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah. It's largely age gender gender and position. Where are they standing. But you also know the inevitable next question is how do you deal with privacy and those pieces. So the interesting thing about the approach we're taking is we never actually save the image. The image comes in and we immediately grab the demographic markers storm and files as data files of the age the the gender how where they stood in the position and delete the images. So you have you know thousands of anonymous set of data that you're able to make conclusions of without obviously going into privacy concerns of storing images of people

Malcolm Lui:
Right now why not track ethnicity as well. I thought that would be helpful. I mean I know it's hard to figure out but you could probably make a general guess

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah I think it likely will get there and there's probably a lot of tech that does that for us in the mainstream model. It's probably a little too bleeding edge to grab that but I think over time that's going to become more of the norm. But there's you know there's opportunities to grab lots of different data points and come to conclusions on it. So we will we're really excited to see where that technology can go.

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah it's really interesting. But anyway it's a little bit unsettling as well because I never really thought about that. Now that you brought it to my attention. Interesting. And am I comfortable with having a kiosk in it. Yeah it doesn't necessarily have to be your kiosk right. Anyone could set up a camera and capture this information anywhere. Right. But you kind of brought it to light a dimension I hadn't considered before.

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah. And that's what I think it's our our duty to really work and make sure we're honoring privacy. We're collecting data and responsible manners. We're ensuring data safe. And we're taking action that's useful for the end user and not disruptive to their overall experience.

Malcolm Lui:
Right.

Ajay Kapoor:
And so it is it is I mean it's a fascinating space but it does come with a great amount of responsibility for us as a as a provider

Malcolm Lui:
Right now what you're their driver the word of mouth marketing that your customers are doing for you. Are you proactive in any way in generating those referrals

Ajay Kapoor:
In some ways. So we do a we do a customer satisfaction survey after every time they they engage with our service and support team. Those results have been very positive. We know we're at a average net promoter score of about an eighty five in those and for those not familiar with net promoter scores you know eighty five is in the top 1 percent kind of in the territory that you'd find companies like at the Four Seasons Hotels and Apple Computer and things like that. And so as we started seeing all this positive feedback and then customers writing us notes saying this is great you know I'm going to let my my friends know we we created a little kind of fun contest in there where people could put in referrals once a month will draw you know a few those referrals on a hat they'll get what we call touch source swag like a hoodie and a hat and stuff and creating you know kind of a community of advocates who who really enjoy telling their peers about the types source solution that's really helping them

Malcolm Lui:
Right.

Ajay Kapoor:
But then also they're helping us identify places for that to expand. So it hasn't required a lot of cultivation because you know we do have a very strong service experience but you know nudging it along a little bit creating some fun around it some competition around it has really helped grow that as well.

Malcolm Lui:
Right. Got it. So for 2019 what say we were to do yet another interview one year from now to get an update on how things are going. What would you have to see have happened to for you to be happy with your company's progress along the lines of say the obstacles that were over that were overcome by your team. The opportunities that you captured as well as the strengths of your company that you were able to further leverage

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah. So I think I think first and foremost you know I look at success as the people first. You know with us we're almost valuable asset is our our people. If we speak this year this time next year and it's a team that continues to be engaged and excited and living our values and things like that that's probably going to get me out of bed fastest in the morning. But if we turn to the kind of the more practical matters of the business. You know I am very excited about further expanding the health care business this year. I feel like we are solving problems for customers in patient experience and waiting room experience. We're actually working with customers on helping communicate the reduction of spread of infection by helping them do sensor based videos educating parents on how to wash their hands correctly in neonatal units and things like that. So those types of solutions in health care are really exciting. And I would be shocked if this time next year we weren't you know didn't have another half a dozen new really interesting stories to talk about in health care.

Ajay Kapoor:
And then the last pieces and you know we're seeing a real transition in the way people use real estate and space. We work transform the nature of an office now you know in in urban conversions of old warehouses and stuff or changing the retail experiences people are creating shared and community market spaces. The line between where you work where you shop and where you live continues to get blurry. And so the last piece that I think is going to be tremendously exciting in 2019 is us helping the industry whether it be architects or property teams retail managers move in and activate these mixed use spaces and help people use space more in a more agile fashion do things that bring in the value of live where you work and work where you play and things like that and you can do that digitally right the digital creates that agile experience that traditional signage doesn't. So I think that is going to be our next frontier. And I'm I'm really excited about where where health care is going and then obviously I'm most excited about where people continue to go

Malcolm Lui:
All right. OK so the interesting opportunities over next year would be expanding the health care business. And then when you mentioned just now about how the change in how people are using real estate right. The lines are blurring between work and life and living

Ajay Kapoor:
Absolutely.

Malcolm Lui:
Right. Okay now what about the the objectives not objectives the obstacles the challenges the dangers if any that you need to skirt and avoid and or overcome in 2019

Ajay Kapoor:
You know I think like everyone in this in this fast growing market that we're in. You know people risk is probably our greatest risk. I truly believe you know as we've talked about our differentiators and simplicity and service and things like that it all goes back to our people. And so I spend part of my role as a CEO is really making sure we retain and grow and recruit the top talent that keeps us innovating and with that crystal ball. And so I'll tell you that and I would I'm probably in the same seat as almost every other CEO. You spoke to us I think we're all we all see that people are our greatest upside and our greatest risk. And so for us creating excitement and a culture and rewards to continue to engage them in a positive ways is really important. The other obstacle I would highlight is you know we we see our buyer the traditional property manager the demographics changing quite a bit. If you look at the demographics published by Boma the building operators association there is a very large percentage that are near retirement and then a new very large percentage that are in you know 1 to 3 years of the workplace. And so that major shift in our in our buyer will require us to engage with our customers differently to really anticipate how this next generation of customers want to buy how they want to engage what are they looking at how do they think about technology it's something that that we need to keep up on our toes. Otherwise it could turn into an obstacle. And if we when we approach it right it could turn into a strength for us.

Malcolm Lui:
Right. How about now in terms of acquiring new customers what challenges do you see on that front

Ajay Kapoor:
Yes. So I think in our marketplace there's there's always a danger of people looking at things and saying oh I could just do this myself right and get smart TV. Load up an app put up some content and I'll work. And so that creates. And as we go into new markets a concern of people moving to the bottom and the lowest kind of moving into a commodity. Now we strongly feel like our differentiation and in consistency and quality and support and experience and simplicity completely overwhelmed that. But that that does create a potential obstacle in recruiting new customers if they feel like you know they can go to a low end solution or a self created solution or commodity solution for those. So for us it's important to continue to differentiate and create that value. We're seeing a record amount of leads coming in through our digital front doors. And so for us it's really important to get to and speak to those customers and make sure we get to that value. I don't think we have an obstacle in reaching a market. I think where where that something it could be an obstacle in the future is making sure that market really understands the value proposition

Malcolm Lui:
Now what's the plan for making sure they understand your value proposition

Ajay Kapoor:
So we've really embraced a value selling approach in which you know we really believe our role is to solve customers issues and problems. And if we can really understand their business issues their problems how they perceive value and how they perceive solutions we can help identify a way for us to be a partner in solving those problems and solutions. And so what our teams are really focused on doing is not racing to a demo and showing them you know features and widgets but really pausing and spending a lot of time asking questions and understanding the environment understanding the people that visit and understanding all those pieces. We really believe if we can create a comprehensive understanding of the of the customer and their environment we can create an effective solution and clearly differentiate with them

Malcolm Lui:
Make sense right. Because a white wide devil is something if that's not what they're looking for.

Ajay Kapoor:
Exactly.

Malcolm Lui:
Now a question for you here on the imaging you're you're getting a lot of leads through your digital front door in the big scheme of things. What's the quality of the leader you know. Are they people that you turn out you want to work with are you finding a number your leads aren't really a good fit

Ajay Kapoor:
I think they've been they've been pretty high quality. We have we have a pretty good digital team that thought you know and sensor tools that filter out spam and stuff like that. We get a lot of referrals through the Web site. So one colleague may have mentioned to another and so we'll get a pretty pretty captive leads coming in that way we have chat integrated on the website as well and so they are. I mean I think everyone can always have the you know some percentage of leads that are just no value. And people are using a Hotmail account and stuff like that. But you know I think I think we are at. I would estimate 70 80 percent of the leads would result in some degree of of deep conversation

Malcolm Lui:
That's pretty good. A really pretty high ratio. Well when you say 70 80 percent of the leads. How many are you getting say on a monthly basis.

Ajay Kapoor:
Oh you know. So I'll be honest with you when I've been tracking is a percentage year over year growth on the leads. But as I'm thinking about it I'm not sure I even know what the the number of leads is there. So I always challenge my teams on growth rate. And so for example are January and February leads coming into the website where 35 percent greater than January February in 2018. But I struggle to tell you the absolute number.

Malcolm Lui:
You're right. Okay. All right good. Now I took a look at your paper click footprint in your SCA footprint. I see that you have some paper like experience exposure you're spending some money but not a huge amount on on it from the tools I have it's only looking like maybe four hundred two thousand a month and these tools can be totally off in your budget. And then CEO side you know you're getting some traffic there. According My tool is a value of USCF traffic is up 200 bucks a month. What's your take on paper click and ACL when it comes to your business.

Ajay Kapoor:
So I think ACA is really important. The you know for us there are sets of keywords that people do search so. And with Google's changes to really make it less clear what's a paper click versus what is a organic search. I think we have to be playing in both markets and so we try to do a balanced approach. You know all the data I've seen is if you can get you know organic search and end up and then one or two that's worth far more than any dollars you'd spend on getting one or two pay per click. And so we try to balance those pieces together. There are places we especially in expanding and markets and other things like that where clearly spend in paper quick to create a footprint where it probably wasn't there previously wasn't there. But you know I think a lot of our role is to create useful engaging content in the Web site continue to optimize it with MCO and and get people there organically.

Malcolm Lui:
Right. Okay. Got it. Three last questions for you. The first one say a touch source where to have a billboard on a freeway that's moving. What would be your billboard message. And keep in mind you only have six seconds or someone to see your billboard and read it before they drive by.

Ajay Kapoor:
Good question. I think it would be partner with us to simply communicate in your space

Malcolm Lui:
All right simply communicate your space. Probably maybe

Ajay Kapoor:
In your

Malcolm Lui:
But

Ajay Kapoor:
Space.

Malcolm Lui:
It

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah.

Malcolm Lui:
Might be enough by itself.

Ajay Kapoor:
Or simply me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're pretty good.

Malcolm Lui:
Simply communicating your space. All right. Awesome. And the last two questions. Who are your ideal clients and what's the best way for them to reach your team.

Ajay Kapoor:
And so I'd probably be remiss and say in not saying all clients are great clients but. You know I think I think our most successful clients are those that allow us to to to have that that exchange back and forth where we can solve their problems health care clients have been fantastic in doing that because they can quantify their experience better than others because health care is just much more monitored and structured than others so I think well we're excited to work with with all clients and then those that really want to share and dive into problems that they have end up being the most successful with us and the best way to reach and engage us. Obviously you can start at the website or call the team from there. We've really invested quite a bit that you get a consistent kind of account and selling experience no matter who you start with a tech source

Malcolm Lui:
We to share your website meaning

Ajay Kapoor:
Oh yeah. So it's w w w dot tech source dot com

Malcolm Lui:
All right awesome. And do you have a minimum business side that you'll work with.

Ajay Kapoor:
No. No. We work with companies of all sizes. We actually in our some of our resellers and reselling partners are very small mom and pop businesses that work with a local building near them and help us position the product correctly. So we work from the smallest to you know we have customers in the Fortune 50

Malcolm Lui:
So if you had a small office building with 50 offices you would work with a company

Ajay Kapoor:
Oh

Malcolm Lui:
Like

Ajay Kapoor:
Absolutely

Malcolm Lui:
That.

Ajay Kapoor:
We. We do. Probably hundreds of those projects a year

Malcolm Lui:
Ok very cool. And I take it it's a you're the way you do your business. It's kind of like a hardware fee setup fee and then you have a monthly subscription maintenance fees that the structure

Ajay Kapoor:
Yeah. Yeah exactly. There's there's the VAT the capital that's being put in which includes the display and the enclosure and the media player and things like that. And the initial software and setup and then you have a recurring set of pieces for our cloud service and any content you add on

Malcolm Lui:
Right. Yeah it's a nice model A.J. it's been awesome having you on my show today. I've really enjoyed hearing how you grew your company surpassed

Ajay Kapoor:
It's a lot. It's been a lot of fun.

Malcolm Lui:
We've been speaking with Ajay Kapoor, the CEO of TouchSource, about his company's rapid growth. For interviews with other fast growing, high value sales companies, or to learn how we can accelerate your firm's high value sales through automation, visit Eversprint.com.

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