Keeping a very tight focus on one niche market in specific countries has allowed a New Zealand company to beat much larger competitors.
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Entrepreneur: Paul Weatherly, Chairman and CEO
Company: Software of Excellence International Ltd (SOEI)
Business type: Development, production and marketing of dental practice management software
Founded: 1992
Turnover: NZ$2M - NZ$10M
Head office: New Zealand: Albandy; Australia: Sydney; United Kingdom: London; Singapore
Contact details: +64 9 302 0171
The Software Of Excellence International Story
Software of Excellence International (SOEI) shows how a New Zealand company can achieve a significant global presence in a chosen niche market. The company supplies proprietary Windows-based software that allows dental practices and institutions - such as public dental services and dental schools - to electronically manage most of their operations including patient records, billing, clinical analyses, and marketing a full range of dental treatments.
In 1992, SOEI won a ‘Best Commercial Windows Application’ award for its software from Microsoft and Computer World magazine. In 1995, SOEI made the strategic decision to focus on two key markets - NZ and the UK. Australia was a secondary focus.
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Key learning points:
- Niche vision - Aim to be the market leader in your selected niche market and focus entirely on this selected niche market.
- Product excellence - Your products must be seen as the market leaders. Their quality and functionality should outperform competitors’ products.
- Success strategy - Market leadership leads to strong growth.
- Direct marketing costs - The high cost of direct marketing by sales representatives - supported by trade shows and trade advertising - can be offset against growing a larger client base.
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This decision was based on SOEI’s desire to enter larger markets and to lead the second wave of dental industry computerisation, adding a clinical dimension to the software and a focus on patient communication by the dental practice, to develop what the company calls its “Patient Centric” software.
SOEI’s Chief Executive, Paul Weatherly, says: “We have tended to focus on CRM-type facilities - customer relationship management, [providing] a systematic way of ensuring that people say the right things at the right time - so we believe we have got better tools when it comes to helping dentist and [their] staff communicate with the patient.
Following a series of corporate acquisitions between 1995 and 1998 in NZ and Australia, the company is now the leading provider of dental software in Australasia.
But SOEI’s growth in the UK since 1996 has been outstanding. SOEI outsells its thirteen UK competitors by a clear margin, with 600 dental practices now using its products. SOEI has the fastest sales growth in the UK dental software market, based on company market analysis of the English Dental Practice Board trade figures for 1998-2000.
The company’s success in the UK has been based on strong marketing of the “Patient Centric” software concept, with many customers upgrading from competing products with fewer functions.
In 2000, SOEI tapped a newly emerging UK market - the branded dental care provider, Boots (The Chemist). SOEI won the contract to supply its software to a new chain of 250 dental practices owned by the retail pharmacy giant Boots (The Chemist).
Weatherly says SOEI’s success as a competitor is partly due to its size and international perspective. He says: “We are not just a New Zealand, Australian or UK company. Our key people make sure that we talk to - and are getting good ideas from - people all over the world. Partly it was the strategic focus on customer relationships. The Boots clinics’ specific goal is to sell more cosmetic dentistry. They were specifically looking for tools and I think they could see that our understanding of how to sell dentistry was more sophisticated than [SOEI's] competitor.”
Weatherly believes that SOEI’s sole focus on dentistry gives the company enormous power in its chosen market. He says: “We have repeatedly beaten companies who are doing medical as well as dental software. When we are taking their dental business, they give up. It’s not strategic for them and of course we tell our customers that our competitors who are not strategically focused on dentistry are not a good choice for the long term. We don’t have any choice - we either make this work or we give up.”