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Who's who: Chris Klein
After nearly 30 years in the ATM industry, including more than 20 as a salesman for NCR, Chris Klein has one of the best known faces in the business. The low-key Klein, executive vice president of marketing for Mosaic Software, also has one of its quietest voices.
October 26, 2004
After nearly 30 years in the ATM industry, including more than 20 as a salesman for NCR, Chris Klein has one of the best known faces in the business.
The low-key Klein, executive vice president of marketing for Mosaic Software, also has one of its quietest voices.
"That's the genius of Chris' personality. He understands that people want to deal with people they trust," said Rob Evans, director of industry marketing for NCR's Financial Solutions Division, who has known Klein since the late 1980s.
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Chris Klein |
"I don't even think he owns a plaid jacket," agreed Diebold'sRobert Nemens. "The best salespeople are the best listeners, and that's where Chris excels. He uses his skills to discover the big issues that need to be addressed with clients, then does what it takes to work out those issues."
Nemens said Klein helped lay the groundwork for a "strong business relationship" between Diebold and Mosaic, one in which Diebold offers Mosaic's transaction processing software to its customers as part of its turnkey ATM programs.
Kid stuff
Klein remembers accompanying his father, a former NCR regional sales and branch manager, to the office on weekends and "punching the keys on all of the cash registers and accounting machines."
In 1969, while a student at Georgetown University, Klein worked on the grounds maintenance crew at NCR headquarters in Dayton, Ohio, a job that included such duties as cleaning the traps of chemical testing stations. "I always tell people I started below the bottom at NCR," he joked.
While attending Georgetown and after graduating in 1972, Klein had a job with the Executive Office of the President's Price Commission in the Office of Public Affairs and spent several months traveling across the country addressing high school classes about inflation and fiscal policy. He initially enjoyed the job but experienced "a turning point" when students began heckling him about then-President Nixon's Vietnam policies.
When he got a call from NCR, offering him a position selling banking equipment in Fort Lauderdale, a city he'd grown to love during spring breaks spent there, "I packed everything I owned in my car, and left for Florida with $200 in cash," he said.
Projects of note
Chris Klein |
In the early '80s, he helped install the first ATMs in Publix Supermarkets, a project he said took two-and-a-half years "because of all the things we had to figure out and learn." At the time, the only shared networks in the country were in Iowa (ITS) and the Northeast (MAC).
Lobby machines were not yet common, so Klein had to find a source at Mosler Safe Company to modify the NCR 1770s used for the project. He found another source to write custom terminal control software. "There was no NDC or 912 then," he explained.
In 1983, NCR made Klein its Southeast regional manager, building and training a sales force to market the company's first PC-based ATMs through its first vertical business designed to go head-to-head with rivals Diebold and Docutel.
He installed the first ATMs on cruise ships for Florida's BankAtlantic, a deployment that garnered press attention and wowed industry- and non-industry types alike. It was "one of the first and only times my son has ever been with impressed with an ATM," said NCR's Evans.
Klein remembers "traveling all over the place" to assist with installations. "We'd have to tell our wives, 'Really honey, I'm doing another site survey' when we'd get on these ships in some great port," he said.
Also for BankAtlantic, Klein managed a rollout of 157 ATMs at Wal-Mart stores, one of the largest retail ATM deployments at the time.
Those complex projects taught him to "always think ahead," Klein said, a practice "most sales guys don't do, but should."
Tough love
Klein left NCR in 1996, briefly working for consulting firm Speer & Associates before accepting a post at First Citizens Bank in North Carolina. Klein categorized himself as the "client from hell" for the Diebold rep who sold him ATMs. "I was really tough with him on pricing, service levels, everything," he said. Yet the same man later helped establish the reseller agreement between Diebold and Mosaic.
Klein can still be a tough customer. "His motto is 'no excuses.' People who assume he's Mr. Nice Guy and will let them off the hook are making a mistake," said Mike Bengtson, Mosaic Software's vice president of product strategy. "I've heard him on the phone with vendors having problems getting us what we need for a trade show. He'll say, 'Sorry for your troubles, but what are you going to do to make it right?'"
"I've heard him say the same thing" to his children when they want to skip sports practice or other activities, Bengtson said. "I always take mental notes when he talks about his kids because he's obviously doing something right," said Bengtson, the father of two young daughters.
All of Klein's three children are honor students, and son Christopher Jr. is being recruited by several of the country's top college football squads.
Time for a change
In 1997, Klein returned to Florida to work for former client BankAtlantic. During his two-year tenure, he grew the bank's network from 385 to 800 ATMs, rolling out more Wal-Mart sites and establishing an alliance with Access Cash, becoming one of the first banks to work with an ISO.
Klein said his off-premises transaction volumes declined as more financial institutions and ISOs deployed retail ATMs, and it became increasingly difficult to wring a profit from those machines. He welcomed the opportunity for a change when he moved to Mosaic Software in 1999. He had been a potential client before joining the software developer.
"It was a real change running a marketing division instead of a sales territory," said Klein, who has helped Mosaic win such marquee clients as 7-Eleven. He also had to adapt to a company culture more relaxed than at any of his previous jobs. "It took me a week to take my tie off, and then another couple of weeks to get rid of the sport coat."
At Mosaic user conferences in locales like South Africa, Klein indulges his longstanding love of touring motorcycles. "You're riding on a bike 8,000 miles from home and you look at the stars and say, 'how did I get here?'" he said.
He and Diebold's Nemens have been the "middle-aged guys at the back of the pack" on several such excursions, Klein said. "We tell the guys going 150 miles with their hair on fire that we'll get there a little later but we'll have just as much fun," Nemens said.
Nemens and Klein also share a love of classic cars. In Klein's case, the fondness dates back to an uncle in Ohio who let him tinker on cars nearly a dozen
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Chris Klein's love of touring motorcycles follows him all over the world. On a recent trip to South Africa for a conference, Klein indulged himself and took a bike out for a spin. |
During Klein's tenure, Deerfield Beach, Fla.-based Mosaic Software has grown from just a handful of employees to more than 200 people working out of four offices around the world.
Klein believes the best is yet to come. Mosaic is beginning to see "an explosion of business opportunities," he said. "People used to say, 'No one will ever go to a server-based platform for mission-critical applications.' They're not saying that anymore; lots of companies are looking for that kind of a solution."
Included In This Story
Diebold Nixdorf
As a global technology leader and innovative services provider, Diebold Nixdorf delivers the solutions that enable financial institutions to improve efficiencies, protect assets and better serve consumers.
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