Rob Cheng – A View From the Top
Another quarter is in the books, and it was a great one. Sales were up 21% from the prior year. Last year was difficult because vast sums of presidential election money were thrown at TV advertising, which hurt our ability to purchase TV spots at affordable prices. But now that the election is over, our voice is being heard again. More importantly, sales leads and web traffic for PC Matic Pro have spiked over the last three months. There is no doubt that we are headed for a record year. The only question is how much will we beat the prior record.
But, and it’s a big but, Q1 channel sales have been disappointing. All of our growth is being generated through TV advertising including sales to businesses and government agencies. We have invested heavily in our reseller network and it is not returning any dividends. We were clearly doing something wrong.
We reorganized both sales and marketing. It is sad to say, but one of the reasons for our poor sales results was a lack of follow up with our current and potential resellers. That is now fixed. We dialed our pricing from conservative to aggressive. Typical reseller margins begin at 20% and PC Matic Pro now starts at 40%. We introduced an unheard of incentive to flip endpoints from competitors product. We are prepared to pay $10 / end-point flipped.
Initial feedback was good but we needed to amplify our message. We introduced a sales incentive with Synnex sales representatives to pitch our “Made in America” and “Best Detection Rates” messages along with new pricing. The initial results are promising. We have doubled the number of resellers in the last 30 days. It is not revenue but it is a start.
Speaking of detection rates. We received another perfect score on the Virus Bulletin RAP test. That’s two in a row. The Virus Bulletin RAP test is the industry’s most difficult test and no antivirus ever has achieved a perfect score. Much less twice in a row. What we have accomplished is truly remarkable, and I know that the market will ultimately listen. We also got another perfect score on the latest AV Comparatives test of 28 different AV products. Perfect detection rates are what we are all about. Think a moment. Do you want your AV to detect all of the viruses thrown at your computer or 90% of them? PC Matic is the only one that gets them all of them, all of the time. That’s how to read our test results.
Lastly, I want to announce PC Pitstop’s first retiree, Doug Bender. Doug was one of our first employees after a long and successful career in the US Postal Service. I met Doug way back in 2001 as one of the moderators of the PC Pitstop forums. Doug was passionate about customer service and technology. What a great combination. When our customers still today rave about our great customer service, we all need to remember Doug as the guy who started it all. Best of luck, Doug.
To view the full first quarter newsletter of 2017, click here.