The vast majority of companies that have attacked the problem of improving communications from marketing to sales have looked to the building of a conventional intranet as the solution. These intranets, modeled after early external web sites, mostly consist of static web pages, written in HTML, hierarchical in structure and possibly containing links to files such as PowerPoint presentations and marketing collateral. While these intranets represent a huge improvement over previous solutions. weekly FedEx packages or directories on network drives. there are severe limitations to their effectiveness.
The experience of field sales people in using these standard intranets is often frustrating and seldom as productive as it could be. In addition, the marketing people responsible for populating these sites with meaningful materials experience bottlenecks in the publishing process and receive nothing in the way of useable feedback to help them refine their messages and better target the needs of the field.
Some of the limitations of conventional intranets for the field users:
It is difficult for the field to find the information they need
Conventional intranets allow two ways to find the right tools and information: "wander and drill" or keyword searches. Wander and drill means to traverse through the forest of web pages, clicking on links to drill down into the site until something useful is found. Not only is this tedious and time-consuming, it will only yield the pages and documents that happen to be on the branches selected. There may be many equally relevant documents that are missed using manual navigation. The other way to find information is using keyword searches. This usually results in many more useful hits, but also can result in an overwhelming amount of irrelevant results. As sites get larger and more complex, neither "wander and drill" nor keyword searches work very well and eventually become completely useless to the sales people. The result is that they give up on using either method to find things and simply
continue to use the few pieces of collateral or web pages that they
know have value. For this reason, most conventional intranet sites for
sales are under-used and ineffective.
Once anything useful is found, the intranet does not provide any tools to use the information
Most conventional intranets are simply passive
repositories of information. Sales people are action-oriented people
who think of their jobs in terms of tasks, action-items, deadlines and
goals. In addition, sales people are sometimes not very technical and
not comfortable with manipulating information on the computer.
Intranets do not provide sales people with tools to assemble a
targeted presentation, assemble and send a literature pack to a
prospect, brief themselves on a competitor or technical topic,
etc.
Marketing users also face a limited set of capabilities with conventional intranets:
Publishing to the intranet is usually a multi-step process
that requires depending on IT or a marketing "webmaster" for
completion
A marketing publisher cannot just publish to a conventional intranet. The information must be converted to HTML, formatted for the site and linked to all the appropriate places on the site so it can be found. If an IT person or webmaster does this, the publisher has to depend on that person to get the right links in place. Eventually management of all the information on a sales intranet becomes an overwhelming process and the site diminishes in effectiveness as it grows.
The marketing publisher rarely gets feedback on what they
have published and what feedback they get is neither systematic nor
complete
A conventional intranet is a one-way communication medium. It has been long known that people only can improve their performance with immediate and relevant feedback.
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