Compaq Intranet Case Study

Conjoin: A Sales & Marketing Solution

Compaq Computer first went live with its sales-focused Planet East intranet in June of 1999, and recently rolled out the site nationwide. As is often the case, the field responded quite positively, with page views peaking at nearly 100K per month within six weeks of the site's launch.

In fact, it could be said that the field marketing and IT professionals sponsoring the site became victims of their own success. The field, anxious to see the site expanded and enhanced, began clamoring for additional functionality. At the same time, the resource demands just to post and manage content and keep the site running were overwhelming.

Joe Batista, Compaq's director and chief creatologist of Internet and enterprise initiatives, and the visionary behind the site, knew that Compaq either had to ramp headcount to support the effort, or apply a product that could bring order to chaos.

Conjoin's single click ratings mechanism accompanies every piece of marketing content posted to the intranet. Using this system, sales reps can let marketing know exactly what they think of each particular piece of selling power they use.

That product was Field.First from Conjoin, Inc., Bedford, MA. In deploying several of Field.First's sales-focused application modules along with Conjoin's intranet backbone, Batista realized he could provide leading edge functionality to the field and maintain the site with existing resources. Batista's vision, however, extended far beyond this simple ROI equation.

"Field.First serves as the foundation for Compaq's cyber-toolkit, designed to help field salespeople better serve their customers. Field.First is one of the pillars of our sales effort," Joe Batista said. "It collects, categorizes and assimilates the vital information that our sales people use to close sales."

Today, more than 1,400 users access the site almost daily. Most of these users are salespeople out in the field, sales support and marketing staff responsible for publishing content to the intranet.

Field.First gives Compaq an electronic door to content that mobile professionals use to respond in real time to Compaq's needs. According to Batista, "In addition to time-to-market and time-to-solution, there is a new measurement that must be met: time-to-client. The Internet is all about velocity and time to client. How soon can you respond to give the client what he or she needs?"

With Field.First, salespeople spend much less time preparing for sales calls and searching for answers to customer inquiries. And, while preparation time has decreased, the quality of information delivered to the customer/prospect has increased. Field.First collapses the amount of time necessary to secure an order by decreasing the 'back and forth' between sales and marketing. Field.First also increases the bandwidth back to mobile professionals, who can now multi-task because the intranet is supporting a number of actions.

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