"I don't call it CRM, " says Neil Metviner, president of Pitney Bowes Direct. "I just call it good old-fashioned management."

Whatever Neil calls it, it sure seems to be working for Pitney Bowes.

Starting out with a commanding 80 percent of market share in postage meters, Pitney Bowes would seem to have nowhere to go but down. But with a commitment to growing its market share among America's 20 million small businesses, backed by a disciplined approach to "customer care," Neil Metviner (recently named 2004 "B-to-B Marketer of the Year" by the Direct Marketing Association) and Pitney Bowes certainly appear intent on moving up.

Little question but that they are. Already responsible for some 840,000 Pitney Bowes Direct customers, Neil and his team are adding more than 15,000 each month. But the key, as Neil carefully notes, is making sure those new customers stay in the fold.

"It costs so much money to acquire a customer, that if marketing isn't looking at the lifetime value of the customer, we're going to be less successful," says Neil. He is quite serious about this. "When we bring on a new customer," he explains, "we start with a 90-day trial period, and we carefully manage each element of that introductory phase."

It's to the point where Neil has added a Welcome Experience Manager to his staff, whose responsibility it is to navigate the various issues inherent in that critical early phase of the relationship. It's the Welcome Experience Manager's job to bear down on a whole host of ostensibly small details that, all told, add up to the Pitney Bowes customer experience: Are the instructions clear? Is the welcome kit effective? Is the billing understandable? When customers call in with problems, are those calls handled correctly?

After that initial 90-day period, the focus shifts to monitoring the customer's lifecycle. "As they grow and as their mailing needs expand," says Neil, "we upgrade them into larger systems that are either faster or that offer different features, such as sealers. We can move them into folding and inserting machines if they have larger needs, for example."

The credit card industry re-writes the lessons on marketing all the time.

It's an approach that Neil developed at Pitney Bowes after an extended tour in the credit card category, initially as head of the credit card division at NatWest. "The credit card industry rewrites the lessons on marketing all the time," says Neil, " simply because of the huge volume they do. Good direct response marketers test constantly," he adds. Neil then built on his NatWest experience at CUC International, running direct mail, telemarketing and Internet campaigns targeting bank credit-card customers to join any number of "membership clubs."

"That's where I really learned how to do marketing," says Neil. "We were doing a few hundred million pieces of direct mail a year, and about three or four million hours of telemarketing, at our peak. It was real heavy-duty marketing." For Neil, it was a hugely formative period, defining his philosophy of direct-response marketing: "I believe that direct-response marketing finance is just as important as creativity," he says. "A lot of great ideas cost people millions of dollars because they didn't figure out the numbers correctly. We used to just tie everything back. We created, tested, and analyzed our results."

About four years ago, Neil was recruited into Pitney Bowes, initially as president of what was then called Pitney Bowes Office Direct. A year later, he added responsibility for Internet postage, and a year after that, he was put in charge of the company's "customer care" operations, as well. At that point, Neil's entire operation was re-badged as Pitney Bowes Direct -- so named, he says, because in every aspect of its business, Pitney Bowes is dealing "directly" with its customers.



To what extent do you apply your background in consumer marketing to business-to-business?

I take a lot of B-to-C learning and apply it to B-to-B. That's particularly appropriate in the small business market because many small businesses operate more like consumers than like big businesses. Small business owners have a very difficult time separating their business lives from their non-business lives. They live their businesses 24-hours a day, so we have to appeal to them as much as a consumer as a business.

Can you give an example or two of how you've done that?

Sure. Many of our direct response pieces, for example, are based on the learning that I've had with B-to-C. Making it easy to respond, for example -- having a phone room that's available, a 1-800 number that they can call into.

It's a B-to-C technique to keep the message very simple, and not barrage the prospect with information and choices. The idea is to provide an easy-to-understand proposition and then entice that customer to contact us so that we can complete the story -- as opposed to sending out a heavily detailed description of our products.

Working with third parties to do co-marketing is something else that I've learned from B-to-C, because "openability" is a big challenge. To that end, we're using postcards more -- pieces that don't need to be opened. We're also driving more sales to the Internet, giving people the choice of sending in a business reply card, calling us on the phone, or going to the Internet.

We've even eliminated the business reply cards from many of our solicitations because people feel more comfortable just bringing up the website. Our 90-day trial also is a typical B-to-C type of concept. Oreck vacuum cleaners, Bose radios, Pitney Bowes postage meters -- they're all pretty much marketed the same way, and yet the first two are almost exclusively sold to the consumer.

How exactly does the Internet fit into that vision?

I view the Internet as a channel, not a business. A number of years ago, a number of companies viewed the Internet as a business and separated it entirely from the rest of their core businesses. To my way of thinking, we have to view it as a channel -- just as we view the phone, direct mail and the sales force as channels to either sell, to service, to communicate, and so on.

We're also integrating the Internet into many of our key offerings. The slope of growth is going up every month, which means that people are becoming more and more comfortable ordering things on the Internet. It's a crossover thing; it goes from industry to industry. Once you feel comfortable buying tickets on the Internet, you'll feel more comfortable buying a piece of machinery on the Internet.

Or buying postage -- as in your joint venture with eBay.

Yes. We decided to re-invent Internet postage and our eBay model is a perfect example of one of the ways we're doing that. We've created a situation where eBay sellers can print postage at their computers and either put it on a label, stick it on a box or actually print it on a piece of paper. They never have to go to the Post Office. In fact, the Post Office has also announced that they are going to start picking up packages at small businesses and homes.

We see this as a tremendous opportunity to get into a fast-growing industry. eBay's transaction levels are just incredible; they go up every single day. It's worked out wonderfully and we're going to expand this model to other applications as well. We call it our Internet Base Delivery System (IBDS). It's a platform for future growth.

Meanwhile, back in the offline world, you've decided to get into the magazine publishing business. What's the thinking there?

About a year and a half ago, we decided we wanted to be viewed by our customers as more than just providing that postage meter to them. We've been hearing from our customers that small businesses face a lot of issues -- whether they're a doctor, dentist or a landscaper -- there are certain common issues among our small business customers.

So, we decided to come out with a magazine, called "Priority," that focuses on the needs of the small business and provides them information that they would find useful. We've covered issues such as how to deal with expanding your business; technology innovations for the small office; and how to be better time managers.

It's a free publication. We send it to about 750,000 customers as a way to talk to them and let them know we are interested in their success. Our entire focus of "Priority" magazine is to zoom in on the things that are important to small businesses to help them grow. And it's been great.

What's it like to be so far ahead of your competitors? How do you stay sharp?

Well, when you have as many customers as we have, you have to recognize that it's not that difficult for the competition to find our customers and try to switch them. Four out of five of the meters in America are Pitney Bowes' meters.

So, we have to make sure that we provide great customer service and not give our customers a reason to move. We want to eliminate the situation where a customer even attempts to defect. As the industry leader, we have to do that. We also have to be right on the edge of the technology curtain.

Pitney Bowes is not typically thought of as a technology company, though. Why is that?

Pitney Bowes actually is a very strong technology company. Our R&D investments in the last decade top $1 billion, and we are consistently ranked among the top 200 companies in terms of patents each year. We believe that our intellectual properties are one of our key assets and being able to create innovations is one of our core competencies.

We also believe there are tremendous opportunities for us to further expand into what we call the "mail stream." Our primary business is putting indicia -- printed stamps -- on an envelope. But we also sell mail creation equipment, which does things like addressing, folding, and so forth. We also have software that helps with address cleansing. We really want to be viewed more and more -- as our advertising tag line says – "engineering the flow of communication."

Pitney Bowes has taken what's considered an old-line business and constantly reinvented itself. We are really focused on that. There's a reason why we are the leader in the industry. Pitney Bowes also does a tremendous amount of work for the community. It's a company that's been able to balance its corporate citizenry, great products, and aggressive sales organization -- and the result is a hugely successful company.

Whom do you admire more -- Arthur Pitney or Walter Bowes?

Well, each had something going for himself! As I understand it, Arthur Pitney was the inventor who had this crazy idea that you could print stamps by machine. He basically wanted to simplify business mailings. So he invented the postage meter and patented it, but couldn't convince the Post Office to set up a joint venture.

As it turned out, Walter Bowes, who provided post offices with stamp canceling equipment, had a similar idea. So Pitney and Bowes got together and this time the Post Office bought into the idea because Bowes was a businessman and did a better job of presenting the idea to them.

So, I'm not sure I can pick a favorite, although I probably relate more to Bowes because he was the businessman. What counts is that the two of them together set a vision for a $4.6 billion company that endures -- and keeps on growing -- almost a hundred years later.