Deschamps: My background is in general management, focused very heavily on marketing and sales. I started out as a sales professional with Olivetti in New York City and grew through the sales ranks into sales management. I found myself in my early twenties as a VP of sales of a software company when I took over and was part of a start-up that became a $300 million company in three years. I went from there and started my own company, a value-added reseller for IBM and Prime Computer. I sold that company in the early eighties, which is what brought me to California. I came out here and was involved as the head of sales and marketing for a start-up company in the voice-mail business in the mid-eighties that became part of a really successful company called Octel. Then I left there and was CEO of a company in Texas that was in the voice response business. I joined the parent company as the head of sales and marketing in 1990 and that company was purchased twice over the next eight years, first by Octel, then by Lucent, and then spun off into Avaya. In 2001 when it was spun off as Avaya, I was running the Unified Business Communications business unit for them and left there to go have some fun. I've been with two start-ups since; one in the same business line as Echopass and one in the mobile communications, which I was part of just prior to joining Echopass in April 2003. So that kind of gives you 30 years in 90 seconds.

OV: It seems like you have a diverse background of experience in public, private, software, equipment, and systems companies; especially on the sales & marketing side.

Deschamps: Yes, I have. I was in the situation when I was 29 where I was CEO of my own company and certainly had the sales background; but gained a lot of general management and marketing experience. Sometimes you get into those roles by circumstance; but it doesn't mean you're a great marketer. You know, you usually learn more by your mistakes than your successes and I had both great successes there and, Lord knows, I made bunches of mistakes. I would say that I spent my life solving customer's pains and providing solutions to customers that brings specific benefits to their company. Whether it was in the hardware world or the software world or communications, I've always been on the applications solutions side: whether that was an on-premise solution or a solution that the customer can get through a service. I've spent my career doing that, running all aspects of the business including engineering, product management, and sales & marketing. I'm a pretty young old guy.

OV: What was your path toward Echopass and what prompted you to join the company?

Deschamps: As I mentioned, when I left Avaya I went to a company that was funded by Mayfield in the same space as Echopass. I believed very strongly in the hosted model. I believed that the CRM Contact Center space was probably a ripe area for a disruptive technology to enter the market place. For a company to really deliver there, it had to have a hosted model targeted at mid-market companies and /or small or large companies with a highly reliable scalable product. I did a lot of due diligence on this in early 2001. I felt it was more a question of when is this going to happen rather than "if." I think the whole model has gotten lots of press and promotions lately. Customers want to use technology, not necessarily own it, and the hosted model is the way to go. If you're going to offer a hosted model you better do it around a killer app. What interested me about Echopass was that Echopass had been a competitor when I was with the other start up and it seemed to have built its applications around a highly reliable platform. My interest was first, in the whole contact center - or customer interaction space - but I also felt that what Echopass had was a combination of some great technology and great investors who did not appear to have gotten tired of the space or of the company.

Several aspects were attractive to me, including, the combination of having a deep understanding of the marketplace and of what it takes to be successful in a hosted service, having a good set of investors who believe in the company and have a pretty good handle what the company's challenges are, and having an opportunity to dive in and fix some areas, like sales and marketing that had been lacking in the company. I look at Echopass as a great technology company and as a great operations company. This market space is growing significantly year-over-year. Some of the individual segments of it are growing as much as 50% a year in e-services and multi-media contact (in layman's terms that's the ability to provide voice, email, chat and browsing to a medium-size business or a distributed large company or a department in a large company as a hosted service). Now, the key ingredient is marketing, sales and runway. That's why I came. You take some things on blind faith no matter how much due diligence you do whether it's me as an executive or you as a VC. The good news is the technology is highly reliable, the operations staff is world class, and the issues in the company are clearly marketing, sales traction and execution. A lot of that is built around focus as it relates to the vision for the company.

OV: What are some of the short-term goals for Echopass?

Deschamps: Our near-term goal is to package the solution and partner with companies through which we can gain new customers. For small businesses, acquisition of new customers is the key to success. Over the long term, we are focusing on the concept of contact interaction, whether it's with customers, employees, suppliers or vendors. Our initial business is built on customer interactions and as that scales to include interactions with employees, vendors and suppliers, it all becomes infrastructure on tap.

We are taking advantage of a bunch of trends in the market. People want to communicate in a means that's convenient for them, be it email, voice or chat. Today, companies do not have the ability to provide or manage that. They use available tools, such as Outlook, but they don't have any way to monitor or manage the interactions.. One of Echopass' key assets is our commitment to customers; in fact, 70% of our customers say that they continue to do business with Echopass based on our interaction with their company. We are going to make it simpler to have an end customer do business with our customers. The contact center is part of that solution, and it is helped by the emergence of e-services - web chat and email. How often today do you get on a website and find that if you have a question the only way you can interact with the company is to place a call to them? We're still really early on in the e-services arena and we've had great success at some large companies with our total package, including chat and email, as either a new solution or as a replacement for older technology.

OV: What were some of the challenges you identified before joining Echopass, and have they changed for today? What should our readers be looking for when checking in with Echopass and Vinnie Deschamps?

Deschamps: In my mind the challenge is one of focus, and of knowing which business you are not in. Another challenge is trying to get the company and its investors to relay a consistent message to the market. Since Echopass has had two CEOs before me, it is a challenge to take the employees and create a cohesive team. The third challenge is runway. Those are the areas that I have been spending most of my time.

The first thing you will see from Echopass is an affordable solution that does not require customers to expend capital, is scalable, and can deliver value in weeks rather than months, quarters or years. Feel free to stop by our website and "kick the tires."

The second thing you will notice is our focus. When I walked in the door, the company was either in discussions with or in some sort of relationship with about ten partners. We had to quickly make a decision as to which of these partners was most likely to help us establish credibility and gain new customers at once so that we did not have to restart. We have now placed bets on three companies, which seem to be going well so far. One of these is Salesforce.com, a hot company in the valley that also has a hosted solution. We are an alliance partner with them. We round out their product suite and they use us to sell their products to larger midsize companies and to compete with Siebel. Genesys Labs, which is owned by Alcatel, is another partner that we have had some traction with. We are helping them penetrate the mid-market because we have the ability to provide their technology (it's one of the things our product is built on) on tap. To date, they have not been successful in the mid-market and we are executing some very good go-to-market strategies with them in that space. It's certainly not a cake walk, but we believe that customers in the mid-market are not sophisticated in the whole communications and data integration world, and we can offer that on tap.

The most important thing for us to do here is to get the message out, keep it simple and be consistent about how we execute. Salesforce.com has 7,000 customers, 100,000 users and we want a piece of that customer base and to help them win new business. We're now connected with them at all levels within their organization. The same thing is true with Genesys Labs. We are just starting a relationship with a large national service provider called XO Communications which is trying to sell more bandwidth, and we are working with them to penetrate their installed base.

Right now we are heavily focused on making these three partnerships work. We've restructured the sales organization on these three opportunities, put the blinders on and are executing against this strategy. I wish I had a magic wand to tell you which is going to be the most successful, but we'll have to see which one gains traction quicker. Our strategy moving forward is to partner with companies that have a reason to partner with us, create a win-win for both them and us, and, most importantly, create a win for the customer.

OV: What are some of the trends going forward that will mean success for Echopass and be of interest to our audience?

Deschamps: There are both business trends and technology trends that are interesting to us. In terms of business trends, infrastructure outsourcing is a growing practice. We deliver our communications through VOIP; we deliver e-services and customers manage them through web applications. From a technology standpoint, the continual growth in contact centers, whether they're here or abroad, and the huge shift of people to the Philippines, India, and Pakistan are both technological and mega-business trends.

The other major business trend that works in our favor is that capital expenditure processes have changed. We provide companies the ability to gain this kind of customer interaction quickly, and without spending huge amounts of capital.. The challenge there is that there are many competing business initiatives so the key is to find the pain point. You have to find the pain, understand why they're doing it in the first place, what alternatives they have, what benefits they will get from this and what they have to do to take advantage of that. At the end of the day the buyer is less interested in technological changes than they are in who's going to solve their pain. To close deals in this market you have to either sell pain killers or sell vitamins. But if it's not in those two categories you're not likely to be successful. We focus on the pain that companies have in their customer interactions and how that pain affects their ability to retain customers, generate revenue and reduce costs. Echopass provides painkillers for all three.

OV: In the current economy how do you execute on selling to your customers? How do you get dollars out of budgets? How do you get the new sale?

Deschamps: That's a great question. Over the last year I have spent a good deal of time developing and fine- tuning a sales process that we have implemented at Echopass that not only affects how we sell, but also affects how we develop and market products. To sell today you have to assume the role of the buyer, and you have to answer the questions I previously mentioned: why is somebody doing this in the first place? What alternatives do they have? What benefits will they get? You have to help the buyer package that up. I've mentioned already that we're finding new buyers through partners; but once you find the buyer the process of purchasing in an organization is very different.

It used to be that a director in a larger company had signing authority for $100,000 but that's all gone. Now everything has to be approved at a higher level than it used to. To be successful we focus on finding customers through partners, which helps our credibility, and through adhering to a regimented sales process that says, "If the customer doesn't have any pain, don't spend anymore time with them because we're in the business of solving problems, not in the business of telling people about our features, functions, benefits or technological evolutionary changes."

We've got to first sell to the business owner and then be prepared to sell their technology people. At the end of the day, when that deal comes up to the CIO it competes with other deals. Budgets and expenses need to be approved at a higher level than before. Previously salespeople could expect the customer to do the analysis. Now, if you want to win as a vendor, you'd better be answering four key questions for your customer so that they can then take that information up to their management and clearly articulate, "Why are we doing this in the first place?" "What alternatives do we have?" "If we do this what are the benefits to the company and how will we measure those?" and "What do we need to do to take advantage of the opportunity?" You have to be able to answer all four questions when you find a customer.

OV: What is the biggest challenge that you, as a CEO, face today?

Deschamps: I think the biggest challenge for a small company is convincing everyone that you're doing the right thing. You've got to convince yourself that you've got the right strategy. You've got to convince your team and get their input so they're on board. You've got to convince your customers what is important for them to do now and you've got to convince your investors every day that they're betting on the right horse and the right rider; and that's hard.

Prior to that he was the General Manager/Vice President for Avaya's worldwide Unified Communications line of business. In that role, he led Avaya’s relationships with industry leaders Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Compaq, and IBM. He developed the business strategy, go to market plans, and sales efforts for Avaya's market leading Unified Messaging products. Vinnie can be contacted via e-mail at vincent_deschamps@echopass.com.

About Echopass: Echopass Corporation is the leading provider of hosted contact interaction solutions for mid-tier enterprises, departments and branches of large enterprises and outsourcers worldwide. With a wide range of flexible inbound and outbound customer contact solutions, Echopass delivers rich functionality that is easy to deploy and use. Echopass takes the pain and complexity out of implementing telephone and web-based customer contact solutions by integrating best of breed technologies and offering a full suite of service packages on demand. With Echopass, customers enjoy the benefits of high impact, cross channel customer sales and service applications in less time and at a lower cost than traditional, premise-based multi-vendor systems. Founded in 1998, Echopass is privately held, backed by top tier venture capital firms and headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.

For more information, visit Echopass at www.echopass.com or call 1-801-258-7000.