Intranet Design Magazine: Getting to Yes in Internet Time

Getting to Yes in Internet Time

A new generation of intranet tool finds the intersection of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA)

Field sales people need to access and manipulate information faster in order to stay ahead of their competition and accurately respond to customer requirements. A new intranet solution provided by Conjoin, Inc. enables field sales reps to dramatically reduce the effort required to prepare for sales calls, and in so doing significantly shorten the time it takes to respond to a client's needs. The system not only provides access to available marketing content, it also gives salespeople the tools they need to rapidly assemble presentations, brief themselves on a competitor or product, and build and distribute literature kits – all over the Internet using Conjoin's thin client software.

Here's how it works:
Field.First, a new intranet portal for marketing and sales, decreases 'time-to-client' by enabling marketing teams to efficiently publish content in its native format directly to a corporate intranet, without requiring an intermediary - or any knowledge of HTML or a web publishing tool. Salespeople or channel partners can then access and act upon this content from any browser-enabled computer. Field.First also allows marketing to manage 'content lifecycle,' automatically tracking the expiration date, level of usage, and value ratings for all content over time.
"Conjoin's sales & marketing intranet portal product, Field.First, has enabled us to make a quantum leap in end-user functionality, while dramatically reducing the administrative and IT overhead required to maintain and manage our intranet site," states Joe Batista, Director of New Business Value for Compaq Computer. "In short, we can now provide the field with much better access to our knowledge assets, and significantly shorten what we call 'time-to-client' - without increasing headcount."
According to Chris Fletcher, Aberdeen Group, Boston, MA, "The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) marketplace is booming, but the need for Internet-based marketing content management systems remains greatly underserved. Conjoin's new intranet portal product, Field.First, provides a powerful solution for the delivery and management of accurate marketing information for sales reps and channel partners in the field."
Case study: Compaq Computer
Compaq Computer recently went live with its sales-focused Planet East intranet. As is often the case, the field responded quite positively, with page views peaking at nearly 100K per month within 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 to post and manage content and keep the site running were overwhelming.
Joe Batista, Compaq's Northeast Regional Director of New Business Value 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.
Batista realized that by deploying several of Field.First's sales-focused application modules along with Conjoin's intranet backbone, he could provide leading edge functionality to the field while maintaining 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 new cyber-toolkit, designed to help field salespeople better serve their customers. Field.First is one of the pillars of our sales effort," Joe Batista states. "It collects, categorizes and assimilates the vital information that our sales people use to close sales."
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?"
Field.First collapses the amount of time necessary to secure an order by decreasing the 'back and forth' between sales & marketing, and by increasing the quality of information that is given to customers the first time. Field.First also increases the bandwidth back to mobile professionals, who can now multi-task because the intranet is supporting a number of actions.
"As our marketing files get bigger, Field.First will actually deconstruct 'artifacts' (in this case PowerPoint slides) so that they download fast. That way, mobile professionals can tailor their presentations to particular prospective clients with zero latency," Batista said. "If I can get my mobile professionals to function at increased velocity using the right artifacts for each prospective customer, we will increase sales dramatically."