CONTENTS:

THE IT BEASTIARY - THE PUSHME-PULLYOU -FEATURE ARTICLE
How pulling services is replacing pushing products.

YOUR EMAIL FEEDBACK on "What is your view on the role of marketing? Is the primary function of the Marketing Department to support Sales?

A PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE OF E-COMMERCE
Forrester Research reported that "Business to Business sites are badly designed, shoddily built and difficult to use." Hear Cambashi's
experience with Dell, is this really good practice?

THE 'DAILY TELEGRAPH' ELECTRONIC BUSINESS MANUAL - BOOK REVIEW
The stated aim of this book is to help business managers decide to what extent they should be using the Internet, and how they
should go about doing so.

WILL THE ASP BUSINESS MODEL DOMINATE THIS DECADE? - e-CHAT
Recently there has been a significant growth in the number of companies that are moving to an ASP (Application Service Provider) model of doing business, yet what does this approach offer?

THE 11TH ANNUAL CAMBASHI SEMINAR
Put April 5th 2000 in your diary to hear more of these issues, explored at an Internet focused seminar in Cambridge.

FROM THE EDITOR......

SELLING IT TO INDUSTRY.

In each issue, we will bring a mix of new approaches, best practices and resources for competing within this increasingly competitive 'wired world'.

In this issue, the feature article discusses how the business models for products and services do not sit easily together and what can be done to improve this situation. We also share your feedback on the role of marketing and continue with our pick of good or not so good practice, reviews and news.

"You must start from a position of where people are now in order to move them somewhere else."

Tempus (magazine from Time Manager International)

Quote for today:

"The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little "extra."

FEATURE ARTICLE - The IT BEASTIARY - The PUSHME-PULLYOU

How pulling services is replacing pushing products

Those of us who were children of the sixties will remember Doctor Doolittle's pushme-pullyou: a kind of two-headed llama. This beast has a parallel in IT sales. The push end is the sales representative, using their commercial skills to identify budget and persuade the prospect to part with it; the pull end is the expert from marketing, using their industry experience and product knowledge to understand the prospect's need and match their company's offer to it. The recent move of most companies to sell solutions comprising a mix of products and services has created a new products and services pushme-pullyou. The business models for products and services do not
sit easily together.

* In the product business model marketing department staff push. They define the product; develop messages; create awareness; generate demand with a launch; provide the field sales force with collateral that describes features, functions and benefits. The sales representatives disseminate the messages and collateral, understand the product and sell the benefits to prospects.
* In the service business model, the customer, via the field sales force, pulls marketing. The customer explains the business situation. The field sales force tries to understand this and translates it into applications and product/service lines that are available to offer, then
finally, help the prospect justify the investment. The role of marketing is to respond to the diverse issues raised in these sales calls.

Most IT companies have made a major effort over the last decade to get marketing to work more thoroughly to serve the sales channel.
Managers have persuaded the sales and marketing pushme-pullyou to move in one direction. However, they now need to train the products and services pushme-pullyou. There are difficulties caused by personalities but the biggest barrier to be overcome are the systems for transmitting and recording information in the sales and marketing process.

The two basics of the Internet are more effective transmission of information and the ability for users to serve themselves by accessing a third party's database via a browser. Both these basics can help organise the pushme- pullyous.

Solution selling is about finding a prospect with a disease, diagnosing it as a headache and selling them an aspirin rather than Viagra. If all you have is aspirins then you need prospects with headaches. In larger companies, there will always be someone with a headache but the problem becomes finding this person. You can't knock on every door in a large company. In smaller companies the problem is timing, you can find the right person but have to call the day they are noticing the headache.

Both these problems can be mitigated with Internet technology. A well designed website, that prospects visit to obtain valuable content
and feel part of a community, can gradually collect information about them each time they visit. Effectively this can be a form of self-service qualification. If the information is combined with the storage and workflow of a Sales Force Automation system then the sales force can be directed to call on the most likely prospects at a particular time.

The field sales force can't be experts in everything. In a sales situation, they are often stalled until they can get support. Today's solution is to fly an industry expert or a very senior sales representative (who can progress the sale without the industry expert) from point of sale to point of sale. Planes are full of tired, expensive, marketing warm bodies. Geography and timing mean that when they do arrive at the point of sale, the prospect's headache has gone or the competition has persuaded them to try acupuncture. In the best case, the sales cycle is delayed.

The industry experts can't be everywhere nor is it realistic to get them to write down "everything they know". Even if they did it is not
realistic to expect the sales representative to learn everything or arrive at the prospect carrying a Victorian novel. However, companies can use Internet technology to combine three elements and provide a solution. External business intelligence from the web can be provided to the sales representative to feed to the prospect. The sales representative can keep the prospect engaged and build trust in his company as a source of information and not simply product pushers. Marketing can build a collateral scheme based on customer stories specifically designed for the Internet. The industry experts can moderate a newsgroup discussing needs and solutions.

The objective that can be reached with Internet technology is to use two scarce resources more effectively:

* The sales representative who can open and close.
* The industry expert who can relate his experience and knowledge to match the prospect's needs and his employer's offer.

All the technology is available to do this today and several companies have implemented elements of these ideas. However, I don't know of, and would love to hear from, anyone who is doing this in a joined-up way and has their pushme-pullyou under full control.

Mike Evans

Mike.evans@cambashi.com

YOUR EMAIL FEEDBACK ON "WHAT IS YOUR VIEW ON THE ROLE OF MARKETING"?

In the last issue of e-Xpertise in Industry, we asked the question "What is your view on the role of marketing? Is the primary function of the Marketing Department to support Sales?"

Your email responses were equally balanced, 50% said 'yes' and 50% said 'no'. The 'yes' replies felt no justification was needed, whilst the 'no' replies were supported by an explanation supporting their case. To give you a taste of the replies :

'The role of the Marketing function is to identify a market positioning and in turn an opportunity, quantify it, value it and if appropriate match it with a product of the right specification at the right price, facilitate the development or procurement of that product and manage its roll-out to the marketplace that was identified'.

Roger Crumpton, Director, iTx Marketing Services Limited.

'It is the role of marketing to identify opportunities in the market place and then produce the correct strategy to capitalise on that opportunity. The strategy must encompass all elements of a company's activity that are required for the strategy to succeed. Even given the greatest strategy, the greatest product and the greatest advertising campaign a company will not be successful if its sales channel, direct or indirect, is not capable of delivering on the strategy. Therefore, it must be a function of marketing to identify such potential problems and plan accordingly. Therefore sales must be a function of marketing and not the other way round.'

Steve Hyde, European Marketing Manager, Wonderware Corporation.

'The primary function is to ensure the business is aware of and aligned to meeting the needs of the customer in its entirety. Part of this is supporting the Sales process, but it also has a role in supporting many other areas of the business e.g. service... Having said that many senior managers in business continue to view the marketing function as being purely about promotional activities that assist in the sales process....'

Steve Massie, Marketing Manager, Desktop Engineering Ltd

There was also strong criticism that the question asked was overly simplistic. I agree it was, yet by doing so it enables us to more fully
understand, as Mike amusingly described it, the 'pushme-pullyou' and get it going in the same direction.

May I take the opportunity to thank all those who replied for their valuable contributions.

Ian Dabney

Ian.Dabney@brainsells.com

A PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE OF E-COMMERCE

Building a good e-commerce site is not easy. The January 14th Forrester Research survey of 30 sites reported that "Business to Business sites are badly designed, shoddily built and difficult to use."

Even companies held up as examples of good practice can get it fairly seriously wrong. Dell's European site, for example, has an on-line order tracking system. So after configuring and ordering a system via Dell's Web Site, you can monitor its progress through production and delivery.

That's the theory. Unfortunately, if Cambashi's experience is typical, it doesn't work like that. In the first place, ordering over the Web is
a problem. In our case the Web-specified options for our server were just sufficiently ambiguous and obscure to trigger a telephone call. And it's just as well they were, because we were about to make an expensive mistake. Then the order was assigned to the wrong department, so it was a week before our order got to the starting block. Part of the problem was the on-line tracking system. It never did give us a statement of progress, so it was a while before we realised we hadn't got to first base. Subsequently we got timed-out,
"errors in global.asa", "invalid customer No/ Order No. ... please check .." and "Out of order for serving". But mostly we just got nothing. The automatic telephone answering system was no better; it was telling us that there was no progress only a day or so before the product appeared.

Even now, several weeks after we took delivery of two servers and three workstations, there are glitches. Not with the hardware itself, nor with Dell's fundamental commitment to its customers - but with the technology. Six days after we received a friendly sign-off email from Dell, we received a second and identical copy. It left Eire and rattled around the States for six days before being dispatched from groovy.northamerica.corp.microsoft.com.

Quite appropriate really.

Ralph Seeley

ralph.seeley@cambashi.com

BOOK REVIEW - THE 'DAILY TELEGRAPH' ELECTRONIC BUSINESS MANUAL, DAVID BOWEN
Paperback - 351 pages (13 October, 1999) Net Profit Publications Ltd;
ISBN: 52971437; available from Amazon.co.uk

The stated aim of this book is to help business managers decide to what extent they should be using the Internet, and how they should go about doing so. Unlike many Internet books, this is written for business people, focusing on the cost and risks versus the savings and opportunities. It is as valuable if you have an Internet presence and are looking to expand it, as it is to new entrants.

The book is well written and can be read from cover to cover, yet its manual structure means you can also dip into it to get a briefing of a particular area in a matter of minutes. Being published in October 1999, the book's content is up to date. The scope of the book is extensive, covering the obvious issues of sales and marketing, through recruitment and linking distributors to contractual issues and unwanted email. Unlike many Internet books, it is written from an UK perspective (an advantage to our UK readers or people wishing to do business from the UK). This is illustrated by its sensitivity to what is acceptable business practice in the UK and Europe. It also offers a host of UK based contacts that can provide local assistance or information.

Reviewer: Ian Dabney

Recommendation: An excellent briefing for UK Managers

Ian.dabney@brainsells.com

e-CHAT - WILL THE ASP BUSINESS MODEL DOMINATE THIS DECADE?

Recently there has been a significant growth (albeit for a small number) in the number of companies that are moving to an ASP (Application Service Provider) model of doing business.

Some may say it is a reinvention of the mainframe bureau computer services of the 60s, yet the combination of availability through the web, pay as you use it software and the potential for remotely delivering specialist world class services may make this the business model of this decade.

One recent example is "3Dmodelserver.com named Technology of the Year by INDUSTRYWEEK. Prestigious Award confirms Spatial's leadership position in providing Internet service for the manufacturing supply chain

12/01/99 - Spatial Inc. announces that 3Dmodelserver.com - the world's only ASP for the healing and repair of 3D CAD models for the
manufacturing supply chain - has been awarded Technology of the Year by INDUSTRYWEEK.

Winners of the Technology and Innovation Awards presented by INDUSTRYWEEK are recognized for technology developments that show high potential for redirecting business opportunities and creating new growth in the manufacturing world. 3Dmodelserver.com has been recognized for offering potential and broad significance in the manufacturing industries and joins previous winners that include Rockwell Automation, IBM Corp., Apple ComputerInc., Intel Corp., SAP Corp., and Oracle Corp."

To see the complete press release, please go to www.spatial.com/news/current_pr/nov30_99.htm

THE 11TH ANNUAL CAMBASHI SEMINAR - ARIADNE'S ASSISTANT OR NAVIGATING THE LABYRINTH

The theme for the 11th in Cambashi's annual series of seminars is a pragmatic look at how the Internet is changing the sales and
marketing process. Cambashi examines current best practice including ideas for web sites and e-zines and suggestions for Intranet to support sales representatives.

The guest speaker is Mike Evans, a director of systems integrator Logsys, and immediate past president of the CSSA. He is probably best known for his time at Oracle, where he was a director for ten years. His talk shows how Internet based products and services, via ASPs, will provide a far wider range of possibilities than anything we have seen before, and what the partners and their clients should realistically expect from them.

Cambashi researches best practice and assists IT suppliers in best practice implementation. For more information on Cambashi services please email info@cambashi.com

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