Cambashi's annual seminar was held on April 5th at Chilford Hall, Cambridge.  The seminar took a pragmatic look at how the Internet is changing the sales and marketing process. During the day we examined the current best practice including ideas for web sites and e-zines and suggestions for using Internet and Intranet to support sales.

Navigating the Labyrinth
A Review of Cambashi's 11th Annual Seminar - "Ariadne's Assistant" "Post Y2K, the 'net changes everything"

Most businesses have survived the "millennium bug", and a new industrial century begins. "People are looking a long way forward," says Mike Evans, founder of the Cambashi UK industrial consultancy. "Post Y2K," he told Cambashi's annual seminar, "The 'net changes everything. How will it change our business?", he asks. "And how will it change yours?"

Cambashi's annual seminar, on April 5, made clear how devastating the arrival of "in anger" Internet trading might be for some companies, but it also detailed lots of possible ways for manufacturing-IT vendors to survive the transition.

A key theme was web design. Web-sites assume ever greater importance - whether their function is to dot-com a company's own sales force, or to present perhaps the only face users and others outside a company will ever see. Cambashi consultants Ralph Seeley and Edwin Ecob listed in graphic detail the differences between web designs that had already failed and those that would generate enough business to carry IT vendors well into the new century.

But which vendors? Software developers have little to fear from the Internet revolution. But the fate of intermediaries - channel partners, systems integrators and resellers - is a different matter. Their fear of being cut out of deals, says Evans, "is the only market intelligence question for them this year."

But the net revolution has limits. And it doesn't mean some very old problems have gone away, as seminar attendees learned from Matra Datavision co-founder Michel Theron, director of Cambashi's French partner MT Consulting. He reported wild and largely unfocussed e-enthusiasm at this year's Daratech conference in Boston, USA. The Internet was the answer to every issue, he discovered, including quality, time to market, and cost reduction. But on the third day of the Daratech-fest, when the IT vendors had gone, users were demanding:

• Interoperability between systems and applications
• Easier data exchange with partners amd suppliers
• Greater ease of use
• Better documentation.

These are hardly new concerns. In the near future, says Theron, users see "a gap between what users want and what the vendors offer  You can't produce on the web; you can't deliver a spare part on the web; you can only place the order."

Theron also declared that there was still an identity crisis between PDM, designed to manage the product life cycle, and ERP, developed to manage the order-to-cash cycle. He suggests that managing the crossover between these two views in a company is as much of a challenge for manufacturing IT vendors and their customers over the next few years as getting the most out of the web.

Much of this was echoed by Jill Ballinger, business improvement director of the tactical products division at BAe Systems' avionics group, who gave a user perspective. She said the web would be of immense value in delivering the information users needed in managing big projects, but the way IT suppliers behaved was sometimes less than helpful: "We would love some stability," she said. "Whenever there's a particular feature we would like the vendor always tells us it's 'due in the next release'. Another release, another upheaval - it does give us grief. If you're working on large projects to tight deadlines and the vendor comes in and says 'We're just upgrading to another version', that gives us a great deal of pain. We do need to be able to control when we want to upgrade." Evans is in no doubt what IT vendors, intermediaries and manufacturing customers have to do in the new web-created conditions, and he's leading by example: "Cambashi is reinventing itself," he said, "and you have to do the same."

Seeley told attendees at Cambashi's 11th annual seminar that the first thing website users expect is "an urgent, immediate response." Though users would like certain features - search buttons, and "back" buttons that work intuitively - what they most insist on is good content and "speed, speed and speed again."

Site owners have three to five seconds to make an impression before the user loses patience and moves on. On average, he says, one of the main distinctions between the most popular sites and the average corporate site is a speed ratio of two to one: "It's not unknown for users to set up two websites in competition and buy from the one that comes up first."

Seeley's research covers both business to business (B2B) sites and business to consumer (B2C) sites. His list of the most popular sites is full of surprises: "If you believe the hype about e-this and e-that," Seeley says, "e-commerce sites should be well up there in the list of most-visited sites. They're not."

Most web users want information, not ways of buying things. Only two of the top 50 most popular dot-coms are shop or auction sites like eBay and only three are chat sites. Some 16 are in a group which includes search engines, directories and Internet portals, and a further 10 are news sites. The top two UK sites are BBC Online and New Scientist: "This is not what you expect from reading the media," Seeley observes. The industrial website rankings are just as surprising. Seeley finds that, while almost four engineers in five want general overviews of products or services, nearly as many want contact details and detailed product or service information. Only eight per cent want on-line buying.

Another shock is that, in the list of top 100 computer-components websites in the last year, IBM is 95th and chip makers Intel and AMD don't make the list at all. But "Tom's hardware page", run by former medical doctor and Internet amateur Tom Pabst, is one place above IBM. A site called The Motley Fool streaks ahead of E-trade, Nasdaq, Bloomberg On-line and Charles Schwab in the top 100 investment oriented sites.

One lesson, Seeley says, is that sites can be successful by "word of mouse" and no marketing. Another is that users value independent information untainted by advertising. Amateur sites are thought dispassionate, often give wider coverage, and don't clutter their sites with "fluff" - advertising and corporate statements. Designers who want to get a site noticed, Seeley says, "must provide content which other sites will think it worth making links to.

• Do include basic things like prices, sizes, what the product will work with and what it won't, whether it's in stock, and how quickly it can be delivered.
• "Be succinct," he advises, "and use searchable keywords in the text."
• Respond to emails if there is an email facility: "Forty per cent of questions to site email addresses go unanswered," Seeley notes.
• Don't hide content behind Flash or Shockwave.
• Don't require users to download plugins or ActiveX controls unnecessarily.
• Avoid changing website addresses unnecessarily. "Web sites work for their authors," Seeley concludes, "only if they work for consumers."

Ecob, a geoengineering expert with extensive sales and marketing experience, says too many IT vendors think they can sack expensive sales staff and get all their sales leads from a website. But Ecob points out that many companies already generate more leads than they can deal with: "And there may be particular areas," he says, "where waiting for people to come to the website isn't the right approach. There is some material you have to go out and find."

Providers such as Dun & Bradstreet or OneSource sell information about prospective customers and their executives: "These are very good at giving up to date contact information - executive positions, phone numbers and so on."

Even companies who value sales staff give them expensive tools - laptops, mobile phones, cars - but not always the information that makes the tools useful.

Ecob notes that customers' expectations are changing: "They are looking for more from vendors than they used to. They want to know about industry trends, information about who's doing what, who's made the big deal... They want the salesman to go in and act as a knowledgeable source of information."

A company extranet can put the right information at the sales person's fingertips. An extranet is a secure, Internet-based source of information set up so that employees and partners working outside the office can access data or applications on the company network - even when on the road, or outside normal office hours.

Ecob suggests such a network should include information usually available on the company's intranet if only they could find it. For example:

Internal information. Industry-sector information, recent news of takeovers or closures, customer information, product information, case studies and documents such as presentations or demos for downloading. It might include win-loss analysis - Why did we lose the last deal this company offered?

• Visits - who saw the customer last? What happened?
• Proposal information. Prices, arguments, possible configurations, references.
• Co-channel information. Some of the extranet data could be made available to channel partners in return for similar information.
• Supporting information - "No two people approach the sales process the same way. So you have to make sure that all the information they may need is available and they know where to look for it," says Ecob.
• Updates. People on the road soon feel out of touch. They should be given daily updates on anything that affects them from news feeds or other sources.
• Links to other sites.

Ecob warns that such an extranet needs careful planning. It is bound to take longer, and cost more, than you think. Much of this effort involves cleaning existing data then filling in the gaps that are left.

The extranet has got to be flexible - every salesperson will use it a different way - and easy to use. Just as for any website, the extranet has to be fast. "The response time," says Ecob, "is the key to its usefulness." If it's too slow, the sales people won't use it. To make extra sure the sales force do use it, Ecob suggests, ask them what they'd like it to include. Design the content first, then decide what it will look like. And make sure all the information is stored and accessed in a consistent way.

Ecob has been closely involved in setting up a sales extranet for a large manufacturing-IT supplier. It went live at the beginning of April.

Evans told Cambashi's annual seminar on April 5 that the biggest question appears to hang over intermediaries - channel partners, systems integrators and resellers. But their fear of "disintermediation" - being cut out of deals by 'net-related trade - is just the clearest example of changes that are going to affect every business.

Evans says changing technology and economics are already affecting relationships between IT vendors and customers. There are fewer opportunities for vendors now outside these relationships to win new business. It will be more difficult for intermediaries to get face to face interviews with prospective clients: "They'll be fighting today's battles and won't have time to see you," says Evans. "So a lot of the processes you use now are going to have to change."

There's a lot of hype about the Internet but, Evans suggests, if you use the basics to bring genuine benefits to customers, they will share the money they make with you. Evans suggests, for example, that customer relationship management (CRM) is a many-to-many tool that improves the productivity of a whole group, rather than the individual one-to-one productivity promised by contact management systems. Call centres, on the other hand, "have had it," Evans maintains. Most customers prefer to serve themselves on the web than hang on listening to Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Evans suggests that industrial customers will choose three kinds of IT: personal productivity tools (Office); best of breed departmental solutions (Advanced Planning and Scheduling, CRM); and enterprise applications (high end CAD, MRP and factory networks). "Users want these supplied in different ways," Evans says. "When you have something you understand, you want to minimise the price. When you have something new you want to reduce your risk. You minimise the risk by buying in real experts."

So retailers will sell personal productivity tools; resellers will sell the departmental solutions; and direct sales teams, management consultants, and systems integrators will sell the enterprise projects. "

There is always going to be a role for intermediaries," Evans believes. Whether intermediaries survive depends on whether they are prepared to change. E-selling, he says, will replace telesales. So your survival as an intermediary depends on whether you can:

• Use web technology to build an identifiable community and attract their emails
• Put a lot of content on your site and
• Send e-zines to motivate those who respond to them, promising not to sell them things they are not interested in.

As soon as prospects ask you something you have to respond immediately, showing them how you can solve their problem. Currently, says Evans, hardly anybody does this. The technology that's making these changes already exists "and it works, though it rarely all works together  E-commerce is very difficult and most of those adopting it are going to need help." Developers will only maintain websites which are built round their own product, and configuring systems is too difficult over the web: "Order fulfillment can be self-service if the order is for software, but you can't download a solution."

The scale of the changes the intermediaries have to make apply to everyone, says Evans. Trade magazines will be affected by radical changes in advertising patterns, and trade fairs will have to be run very differently. But Evans's message for all these groups is: "You can change your business model and gain competitive advantage." Nevertheless, Evans believes, the greatest success will go to those who already have the biggest customer.

The 12th Annual Cambashi seminar "Chinese Whispers win Marketing Marathons" took place on April 4th 2001.

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