How to find foreign customers for corporate IT solutions? CEO of Terabill, Teet Lõhmus shares his experience.

Terabill offers a billing solution for telecoms with a software service model. Billing, the core IT system of every telecom company, gathers information about telephone calls from the telephone stations, calculates how much each customer must pay according to the customers contract, generates the invoices and sends them out. The billing system usually also checks if the customers pay their bills and gives input to credit control actions if they don’t.

Billing systems get more complex

So as you might guess, calculating the call-minutes, the fees and eventually getting the money is a really important process in a telecom company. As the pricing schemes have grown more and more complex then so have the billing systems. Calculating the fees incorrectly might be disasterous for a telecom company – it either ends up with a scandal or big loss of income.

Terabill offers a billing system as a service. The IT industry term Software as a Service or SaaS means that the system runs on Terabill’s servers and the telecoms use them over the internet. This gives the benefit of quick start – no separate installation work is needed by the customer. Having only one central installation also means that the system is upgraded only once for each new version thus giving the latest features to all the customers straight away.

Targets growing telecoms

Terabill targets its offering to new and growing telecoms and thanks to really attractive pricing has a number of customers using its systems.

From the start in 2004 Terabill built its systems and business with East-European markets in mind. The system has been built so that local laws, taxes, book-keeping practices etc can be configured as parameters and they are not “hardcoded”. Nevertheless, it is never easy to sell ones services to corporate customers and especially for foreign corporations. By now Terabill systems are used by telecoms in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Macedonia, so they have been successful.

Here is how to do corporate IT exports in one sentence: Find a good local friend! It is very difficult to handle export sales if you don’t know the language and you don’t have the contacts. Corporate buying decisions usually last long, there is lobbying involved and you must know the decision makers. The decision makers must also know and trust you.

The conclusion

But finding a local friend or a partner is also not easy. You must build trust because your local representative puts his reputation in stake when he suggests your products. Another problem is that the persons with contacts must be interested in suggesting your services. How to make that happen is a challenge.

So, finding partners and with them corporate customers for a good product is possible. It is hard work, takes a lot of travelling, time and money, but this is probably the only way to do it. If your local market is small, like all the East-European and Scandinavian markets tend to be, then you better count partner-hunting into your business-plans.