Making Small Business a Bigger Business: Intuit’s Acquisition of Demandforce

Intuit announced last week that it was acquiring Demandforce, which provides an integrated suite of Web-based social media and marketing tools for small businesses, for $423.5 million in cash. Demandforce automates many of the internet and social media marketing tasks that small businesses increasingly need to do, giving Intuit a proven front office play: Demandforce already has about 15,000 customers, books about $50 million annually in revenue, and is growing at about 80% annually.

This is Intuit’s second biggest acquisition (Digital Insight, which Intuit acquired in 2006, was the largest). What makes Demandforce so attractive to Intuit? Let’s count the ways!

1. Broaden Intuit’s Front-Office Presence

Intuit has a very strong footprint in small business “back-office” applications, such as accounting, payroll and payments solutions. As important as these solutions are to running a businesses, they do little to address small companies’ top challenges–which according to SMB Group studies, are to  attract new customers and grow revenue.

Intuit has made some acquisitions over the past few years to provide customer-facing application to small businesses. The most notable is Homestead, which helps small businesses build web sites and create an online presence.

Demandforce builds on this acquisition, and can help Intuit capitalize on the broader shift to digital marketing that’s being fueled to a large degree by the adoption of social media and mobile solutions. Now, Intuit can provide it’s five million QuickBooks desktop users, and over 400,000 QuickBooks Online customers with Demandforce, which is designed to help services-based businesses grow revenue, retain clients and strengthen their online reputation. Demandforce has already done the integration with QuickBooks and now they can mine the Intuit installed base for service businesses that would benefit most from Demandforce.

And, at roughly $300 per company per month, Demandforce figures to be one of Intuit’s most profitable offerings over time.

2. Gain Industry Solutions and Go-to-Market Expertise

Demandforce’s customers span the true small business service universe–veterinary, pet services, dental care, automotive repair, medical spas, salons, chiropractors, and fitness centers, to name a few.  (The company recently added a solution tailored for accountants–which should turn into a doubly nice move as about 250,000 accountants use QuickBooks).

Demandforce gives these small businesses affordable, easy to use tools similar to those that large enterprises use–and tailored to their industry-specific needs. It’s model is to select an industry, study it, and identify the top industry solutions in that area, such as Henry Schein for dental. Then Demandforce engineering does the integration work, and looks for partners that sell into the relevant industry. The vendor markets through industry trade shows and conventions, and closes sales through telesales and partner feet on the street.

Many vendors say they’re going to target small business vertical markets. But I’m hard-pressed to think of another vendor that has done this type of holistic, industry-by-industry block and tackling. This has paid off for Demandforce, and should reap even bigger rewards with the added muscle and money of Intuit behind it.

3. Flying Higher Into the Cloud

Intuit has been steadily progressing from being a traditional desktop company to an online cloud services provider. This is also where small businesses are moving, as shown in Figure X. The Demandforce acquisition adds to Intuit’s cloud credentials in the very hot marketing automation area.

Figure 1: Small Business Purchase and Plans for Cloud-based Solutions

4. Serving Up SoLoMo to Main Street Businesses

Three big tech trends are reshaping businesses today: social, mobile and local. Demandforce hits all three of these bases for Intuit. On the social front, It brings together many of the social media tools into a unified service, making social media more manageable for small business to manage their interactions across social networks. In terms of mobile, Demandforce makes it easy for small businesses to engage with their customers using mobile devices. So for instance, your salon can send you a text message to remind you about your next appointment, Finally, there’s the local element. With Demandforce, small businesses can invite and collect user reviews and feedback, building up their local reputation. To date, Demandforce has helped its small business customers gather about 1.5 million reviews, which can also be syndicated out to Google, Yelp and other review sites.

Adding it Up

As I discussed in an earlier post, Intuit: From Products to Services, Applications to Platform, Intuit has already made great strides in transforming from a products to a services company. Demandforce gives Intuit the fuel it needs to more fully tap into small businesses’ hunger for solutions that can help them grow their businesses–and in doing so, accelerate its own transformation.

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