MODASolutions founder Marwan Forzley. (Darren Brown, OBJ)

Many Canadians looking to avoid crowded shopping malls and treacherous road conditions this Christmas will opt to purchase gifts online.

But, according to eMarketer.com, Canada, while one of the most Internet-savvy countries in the world, lags behind the U.S. and the U.K. when it comes to purchasing goods online. EMarketer.com cites surveys that suggest up to 81 per cent of Canadians are concerned about online security and privacy and for these reasons don't purchase goods over the Internet.

Marwan Forzley of MODASolutions saw an opportunity in these kinds of statistics and created a service to allow clients to pay for purchases with the same safety and ease as paying a utility bill. He has been busy adding big-name merchants to his eBillme service, which he says is safer and more convenient for customers than other payment options. But it wasn't easy to get eBillme off the ground. Developing the product, he says, was the easy part.

OBJ: Tell me about your product.

FORZLEY: The product is called eBillme and it allows the 84 million consumers that bank online to buy stuff on the Internet and pay through their online banking account.

OBJ: How is it different from other online payment options?

FORZLEY: The way it works is when you're shopping online, you purchase something, the merchant bills you, the order of what you want is then presented to you on the website, that's what we call the e-bill. A copy of that e-bill is then sent to you through e-mail. Basically you log into your bank account and you pay eBillme like you would pay a phone bill. You're not entering any financial information at the checkout, you are simply shopping on the net with your name, e-mail and being billed by the merchant. It is then authenticated by your financial institution.

This is the only payment option on the market where customers are not required to disclose financial information, whether it is an 18-digit bank account number, or 16-digit credit card number, or a social insurance number, birth date or license number. For eBillme, you just need to have online banking set up.

OBJ: How did you come up with this idea?

FORZLEY: My background is in business development. I worked for Nokia and I ran development for them in Ottawa. I was looking into what Nokia should do in terms of large-scale e-commerce infrastructure. I left there and we worked on (eBillme) in 2004 and we introduced it to the market in mid 2005.

We have been looking for ways to leverage the current online banking infrastructure and more importantly, the massive number of people who bank online. It is a mainstream service these days, so we were looking for ways to extend that to the shopping cart and we knew that if we did that, there was a large opportunity on the market.

The online world is merging with the offline world, and in the offline world, we have a multitude of payment options. When you go to a store you can use a credit card, a debit card, a cheque, a gift card. (Soon there will be) the same thing online.

OBJ: How is business going?

FORZLEY: We've been adding merchants who accept eBillme from all over the world. Some of the largest merchants who sell online accept eBillme. We have several merchants from the Internet Retailer Top 500 guide. For instance, TigerDirect.com is number 24 on the top 500 list, Crutchfield.com is number 89, pcRUSH.com is number 241, ToolKing.com is number 244. They are all clients.

We are gearing up nicely for Q4; that's our busiest time, obviously. We have a lot of new merchants who are deploying eBillme. There are some high-calibre merchants that I can't disclose because of the nature of our agreements. In terms of size, we have tripled our staff (in the past year).

But the story when it's told is a lot easier than actually doing it. It's a lot of hard work, it's not just one thing that has made us successful, from direct selling to leveraging channels to the high-end marketing that we do. All of this has to come together.

OBJ: How did you get to the point that you're selling to big-name Internet retailers?

FORZLEY: We've done angel rounds with the (Ottawa) Angel Alliance, we've also done venture capital rounds. Last July in 2006, I raised $12.5 million from Celtic House (Venture Partners), BDC (Venture Capital) and Propulsion (Ventures).

Getting the attention of big-name retailers is a combination of direct selling and partnerships in the market that have become leveraged to help our case. The bulk of it is just hard work; old-fashioned knocking on doors and handling objections that people have until they believe that eBillme is going to be a successful payment option on their site and reduce costs. It's working through all the details to launch eBillme.

OBJ: What would you say is the hardest part to launching a successful product?

FORZLEY: The easiest thing to do is to develop a product. The hardest thing to do is to make sure that it's sold and successfully implemented. That's the biggest issue for startups in general, making sure that their product makes it to market.

In this community, in Ottawa in general, one thing that is common for all of us is having to make sure that it's customers who are willing to stand up and say this is a great product. If you think it's a great product, but customers aren't willing to say that, you haven't accomplished much. You only get there when customers on their own say, "This is a great product."

Getting big name clients: The experts say

It has been our experience that you need to work with a network or a partner to get into these enterprises. That could be anyone that you know, any kind of partnership that you already have. Say for instance if you were at Salesforce.com, if you are already on the platform, then you can go speak to your account manager at Salesforce and say, "Listen, I'd like to get into this company, do you know anybody?"

It's been our experience in getting work ourselves that you go to folks that are likely in the same line of business, of course not competitors, but those who can provide some sort of contact within the organization. LinkedIn.com is a really good tool, even I have gone in there and used it just to see who the folks are. So you look for either personal contacts or those who are called secondary contacts at LinkedIn. When you're getting to third-level contacts you're a bit too removed and you don't have that level of personalization.

What you're looking for is a wedge opportunity. It is very difficult to go and sell your entire suite into a large enterprise. What you do is you find that wedge; that could be a financial tool in the ERP (enterprise resource planning), it could be some analysis tool in the ERP and then you find what solution you are trying to solve and move that into the enterprise and then try to proliferate the rest of the suite across the entire organization.

Joe Bevk, partner, ServiceVantage Corp.

First of all, Marwan has correctly done what executives should do and that's orient the company around sales. He recognizes that if you want to dominate a space, you have to have the company very focused on success on the sales side. To us at Peak Sales, without sales there's no product, there's no development, there's no marketing, there's no overhead, there's no profit. Sales are absolutely critical and I think Marwan understands that.

In the tech boom perhaps, companies could get away with having money in the bank from venture capitalists and they could put together a product that didn't necessarily satisfy customers or excite them. But the harsher reality today is that since the boom, we have had to really create products that matter to clients if we want them to part with their cash. We have to do it the hard way now. Part of creating a sustainable business now is by creating products that matter to clients.

The formula that makes sense, and Ron Zambonini of Cognos is famous for this, is that leadership makes customers and sales an absolute priority. They care about the customers and are intimate with what the customers want. They put the right team together on the sales side, the customer service side and the delivery side. They set up the team and make sure that they are continually motivated to succeed on a regular basis. The right leaders have to scrutinize their own company and their own product.

Eliot Burdett managing partner at Peak Sales Recruiting