Introduction
The information economy is redefining the roles of marketing and sales in almost all industries, from consumer goods to companies that sell multimillion-dollar products and services. In the past few years, the Web has become the preferred vehicle to sell simple commodity products and services, when buyers know what they want, when they are focused on getting the best price, and when there are few differences among the alternatives. In the future, the Web will also become a fundamental resource for the marketing and selling of complex business-to-business (B2B) products and services for which effective product positioning and messages are a critical business success factor.

Financial executives need to be aware of this changing landscape and the critical success factors of this new communication environment. This will help ensure that your company has an effective Web site and is getting the maximum return on investment (ROI) from its investment in e-business technologies.

Executive Summary
The information economy is driven by several underlying cultural, economic, and technology trends that will require significant change in the go to market strategies of B2B companies that sell complex products and services. While these strategies evolve, it is important to remember that the fundamentals of marketing and selling will not change. They will continue to be about efficient and effective message delivery and knowledge transfer between the marketing organization, the sales channels, and the prospects.

As the Web emerges as a primary communication vehicle for B2B, marketing and sales executives will use it to align their sales and marketing efforts and to educate, influence, and qualify prospects for complex products and services. As such, marketing and sales professionals will need to master the intricacies of the Web as a message delivery, knowledge transfer, and sales support medium in order to effectively compete and prosper.

Web-enabled knowledge transfer and message delivery requires a greater focus on quality marketing communication (much like the quality movement in manufacturing) to ensure that a company's messages and value propositions are crisp, consistently delivered, and continually evolving to meet the needs of the marketplace. To accomplish this, B2B marketing and sales organizations will need to implement more disciplined message-management processes and systems to fully leverage and exploit the interactive communication capabilities of the Web.

Twenty-First Century Marketing and Sales Strategies
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Effective marketing and selling of complex products and services in the new information economy will still require consistent execution of the fundamentals. Traditionally there have been four fundamental strategies that marketing and sales management could employ to increase productivity. These will not change, but will be affected by the Web in various ways.

1. Change the Organization
This strategy is simple, but sometimes is painful to accomplish. It is very visible, which is why it is usually the first change new management implements to establish their leadership and control. It is also the reason that many sales organizations are in a constant state of chaos and may be less productive than they could be.

The Web will allow B2B companies to reconfigure their channels and change the balance between field sales and telesales. Although some products and services can be sold exclusively over the Web, thereby reducing selling costs, complex products and services will require a coordinated strategy that exploits both the Web and traditional sales channels.

2. Change the Compensation Plan
This strategy is also pretty simple to implement, and can have significant short-term impact if done effectively. Unfortunately, most salespeople are good at playing the angles, and have the uncanny ability to quickly circumvent the intent of some of the complex compensation schemes that management creates.

New Web-based compensation management systems will allow salespeople to calculate their commissions on each deal in real time. This approach should clear up much of the confusion over commission plans, so that salespeople can focus on selling.

3. Automate Repetitive Administrative Processes
Because of the need to improve sales efficiency, customer relationship management (CRM) systems have become a hot application for IS departments. CRM allows companies to implement processes and systems that automate lead tracking, contact management, pipeline management, product configuration, order entry, and forecasting.

All major CRM companies are actively porting their functionality to the Web. The result will be reduced software costs, less user education, and hopefully, greater salesperson acceptance and use.

4. Improve the Messages and Their Delivery
Message delivery and knowledge transfer has always been at the heart of what marketing and sales organizations do day in and day out. This is especially true for B2B organizations with complex products and services for which success is directly related to how effectively the sales staff is trained and how well the organization's unique capabilities and value propositions are communicated to the marketplace.

The Web will evolve into the primary communication vehicle between marketing, sales, and prospects. As a result, effective knowledge transfer and message delivery between these three groups will take on even more importance than it has today.

The Importance of the Message
The best product or service does not necessarily become the market leader. In today's hyper-competitive markets, it is usually the company with the best product positioning, marketing communications, and sales execution that outflanks and outdistances its competition. This is why positioning and effective messages are so critical.

Complex B2B products and services can have hundreds of different micro-messages. Effective messaging provides clear answers to seven key questions that prospects and buyers pose throughout the sales cycle:

1. What does the product or service do?
2. What is unique about the product or service?
3. Why is that uniqueness important?
4. How do you address my concerns and objections?
5. What else should I know about the product?
6. Who else is using the product or service?
7. Why do I need to buy it now?

Marketing and sales organizations that do a better job of creating messages that provide effective answers to these questions and implement processes that ensure consistent delivery across all media and their sales channels will have a distinct advantage in the new information economy.

Great Messages Need to Be Managed
Over the past two decades, however, seven major trends have emerged that have significantly increased the internal and external communication challenges faced by B2B marketing and sales organizations. These trends have put a premium on a company's ability to fine-tune the hundreds of micro-messages over time and deliver the right messages and knowledge to the right person just when they need it. The seven key trends are as follows:

1. The explosion of product-related information
2. A business environment in which constant change is a fact of life
3. Increased product complexity
4. Shorter product development and life cycles
5. Increased competition in most markets
6. Increased prospect and buyer sophistication
7. The emergence of the virtual office

These trends have led to a phenomenon called the message life cycle (Figure 1), because they have created an environment in which messages have become highly perishable and need to be constantly refreshed and refined.

We are all familiar with the typical product life cycle, in which revenues follow a normal bell curve from product inception through market acceptance, product growth, and finally to product maturity and its corresponding phase of declining revenue.

However, as shown in Figure 1, throughout the modern product life cycle, there are now multiple "positioning and message life cycles" as positioning and many messages are continually refined to respond to increased competition and changes in the marketplace. Today, as soon as a message begins to work, the competition puts a new spin on their positioning, or adds a new feature, and marketing organizations are forced to adjust.

As you can also see in Figure 1, during product launch and decline, the positioning and messages are the most dynamic with shorter message life cycles. This is due to the fact that marketing and sales are going through an aggressive learning curve during product roll out, and later in the product life cycle they are constantly trying new approaches and scrambling for every last nickel during the declining revenue phase.

In order to effectively respond to this phenomenon, B2B marketing organizations must establish formal message and knowledge management processes to ensure that they are continually monitoring and refining their market and competitive intelligence, their product positioning, and their messages. Management needs to support this continuous message improvement process through visible actions and incentives to ensure that current elevator speeches, value propositions, product differentiators, and competitive positioning are being delivered to the market, and that the sales channels are aggressively sharing and leveraging best selling practices and other sales intelligence.

Message Management and the Web: The New Communication Model
The Web represents the perfect platform for managing messages and market intelligence because it is instantaneous, pervasive, and can be changed and updated with current information and messages in real time. This "real time" message-management paradigm will have a profound effect on the dynamics of marketing communication and requires companies to adapt to a new communication model for marketing complex products and services.

The old B2B communication model (Figure 2) between marketing, sales, and prospects is based upon static print media and verbal communication. This model is inefficient, tough to keep current, and in many ways, less than effective. This often leads to a high level of misalignment between marketing, sales, and prospects. Characteristics of this model are as follows:

• Marketing is responsible for creating the messages, printed collateral, and sales tools.
• Printed information has limited effectiveness.
• To lengthen shelf life, the information needs to be general and non-specific.
• Portions of the information quickly get out of date.
• The information is not "customizable" to reflect the different prospects' specific interests.
• In most cases, marketing communications with sales is spontaneous, reactionary, and costly.
• Salespeople rarely keep sales tools and binders, and when they do, it is relegated to the bookshelf and rarely referenced.
• Sales rarely gives marketing timely feedback on what is working and what is not.
• Sales can change the message whenever they want, sometimes promising more than can actually be delivered, confusing the prospect, and loosing the sale.

The Web will force a new communication model (also Figure 2) in which marketing will assume more control and will take a direct role in delivering the messages and educating the prospect. This new model will require more precise product positioning and crisper messages, and will force a tighter alignment between marketing, sales, and the prospect. The keys to this new model will be as follows:

• A greater focus on the quality of the message
• A requirement for consistent delivery
• A higher level of feedback from the sales channels
• The ability to change and update the messages in real time
• The ability to automatically customize the messages to the prospect

The Message-Management Process
This new communication model will make message management a strategic priority for B2B companies, and it will require a high level of discipline and executive commitment because of the following:

• Great positioning and messages do not just happen. They are the result of much thought, give and take, and, sometimes, great moments of insight.
• Today's emphasis on one-to-one marketing puts a premium on the quality of the messages.
• The requirement to sell to multiple buyers throughout a complex sales cycle demands continual message mapping to ensure that messages are targeted at the different buyer business needs.
• The rate at which messages need to be changed has accelerated exponentially. As mentioned earlier, this is due to shorter product development cycles, advances in information and communication technology, and increased competition. This is especially true during product launches when messages need to be constantly tested and refined in real time.

Successful product positioning and messaging demands that management become the champion of the process for creating, deploying, and continually refining the messages. This is best accomplished with message-management software (Figure 3) that helps organize the hundreds of messages, supports a work flow model for continuous message improvement, and provides high performance knowledge transfer environments for product positioning, value propositions, sales intelligence, and best sales practices.

Message-management systems can drive prospect education and qualification as well as sales training and coaching on the Web, and they can be easily incorporated into the content-management strategies for both Internet and Intranet sites. You can view message-management systems as best practice applications for B2B marketing and sales organizations. These powerful workflow applications will become the glue for establishing tighter alignment and synchronization between marketing and sales and can provide a company with a significant sustainable competitive advantage.

Message-management systems employ relational database technology to manage a central knowledge base for product messages, sales intelligence, and best sales practices. Wrapped around this knowledge base is a work flow system with a closed-loop methodology that reinforces the process for the development, deployment and continuous refinement of messages and other important content. This process creates a common framework for building and improving key marketing messages like elevator speeches, value propositions, key product differentiators, and competitive positioning. This central knowledge base also serves as a framework for capturing and sharing best sales practices and selling tactics.

This centrally maintained knowledge base of up-to-date messages, sales intelligence, and best sales practices becomes a valuable marketing and sales asset that can be effectively used as the foundation for all the company's interactive selling and prospect facing Web sites as well as its channel facing sites. It also becomes the central resource for marketing and sales collateral and support and training materials that ensures consistency and maximum market impact.

Delivering True Value
If you are successful at implementing an effective on going message-management process, you can create significant and sustainable competitive advantage. However, in order to achieve this, your prospects and sales channels must continually receive value from visiting your Web site. Because prospects are the sole judges of the value they receive, how can you assure that they have a compelling and rewarding experience?

Engage the Prospect
The goal of any Web-based message-management strategy should be to engage the user on three different levels, each being more difficult to achieve. The first level is to answer the prospect's specific questions. That is best done through FAQs (frequently asked questions), which, because of their specificity, are one of the most effective text-based knowledge transfer techniques available. Unfortunately, the sequential organization of FAQs on most Web sites makes it extremely difficult for visitors to find what they are looking for. The next generation of FAQs will be managed in a relational database, which will simplify searching and navigation and give the prospect a more personalized experience.

The second level is to educate prospects and provide them with new information that is of value to them. Most B2B sites currently do a good job of this in the "news" section and in white papers. Few B2B Web sites, however, provide effective education on the value of their products and services.

The third level is to influence the prospects' thinking and align them to your point of view. This requires a more interactive and conversational user experience in which their questions are answered, they receive a great education, and they begin to trust your site as a dependable source of knowledge.

Respect Human Nature
Attaining this third level, and actually influencing prospects through Web sites that deliver your messages is very difficult to attain because of three particularly powerful human traits that come into play on the Web.

1. People do not like to read. Even though most of us can read much faster than we hear, reading is a chore. Each day we are bombarded with textual information from lots of different sources. The last thing we want to do is scroll through large chunks of on-line text to find out what we are looking for.
   Additionally, it has been estimated that the text on some computer screens is 100 times more difficult to read than paper. While screen clarity is improving with new technologies, readability will always limit a site's ability to actively engage the user and provide a compelling Web experience.
   
   
2. People want personal attention. One of the next major developments on the Web will be the use of relational databases to manage content in order to dynamically generate individualized messages and other content based upon the visitor's interests, job type, or other demographic information. People respond well to personalized attention and the more they get, the more open they are to being influenced.
   
   
3. People want to feel in control. Most of us do not like to feel that we are being sold to. We want to feel like we are in control of the situation and everything is happening on our terms. Many Web sites fail miserably to address this very powerful human trait. Common mistakes are:
   
   
   • Having cumbersome navigation so that it is easy to get lost. Becoming lost is frustrating because there is a sense of having no control.
   • Requiring the visitor to fill in lots of information to get white papers and demos. Although it is important to collect some information, most sites have taken this to the extreme and are actually turning away prospects.
   • Using static Web pages that require extensive scrolling as opposed to more dynamic sites that are more conversational and interactive.

People can learn more and absorb vast amounts of information when the delivery of that information is more interactive. The reason for this is that we have been conditioned over the past several decades to engage with electronic mediums through the action of clicking some type of control and navigation device. So, when we click a mouse, for example, we are actually preparing our mind to rapidly receive and process information.

If you want to test this phenomenon, just sit next to someone who is clicking through the TV channels with a remote control and see if you can follow along. Most of us find this enormously frustrating because we cannot follow rapid change of information. The other person can because they are in control of the click their mind is processing the information faster than ours.

Simply put, people want to feel in control, and they want to "read less and learn more." So, if the Web experience provides this, users will trust you, continue to visit your site, and allow you to influence their thinking. This is what effective knowledge transfer and message delivery is all about.

Assessing Quality
The human traits mentioned here and the challenges of Web communication can be overcome by B2B marketing teams with a commitment to quality content and quality delivery. This can only by done by taking an outside-in view of your site and seeing it from the visitor's perspective. There are several criteria that non-technical managers can apply to the development of their Web sites to force this outside-in perspective and increase the quality of both the content and the delivery.

Quality Content
In order to get the most from your B2B Web site you must be sure that your messages provide clear answers to the seven key prospect questions that were mentioned earlier in this chapter. Beyond this, however, several techniques can be employed to maximize the quality of the content and help you influence the visitors to your site.

Force prospect-centric explanations. Always try to describe your products in terms of the prospect's business issues.

Focus on value. Do not spend a lot of time talking about your product features. Instead, talk about the benefits to the prospect.

Be honest and forthright. No product is perfect. If you can honestly admit areas where you are not strong, and what you are doing to improve, it will enhance your company's credibility.

Be precise and succinct. Use the FAQ metaphor whenever possible, and avoid large blocks of text. Information should be "chunked" as much as possible to facilitate quick reads and improved learning. Make sure that the information is well organized and easy to navigate.

Provide context. Always relate information on your products and services to the needs of the prospect and the other alternatives that they could employ. Do not describe what you do without relating it to how it best solves their particular business issues.

Quality Delivery
In the 1960s media guru Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, "The medium is the message." In the early days of the Internet, Web developers took this to the extreme and created lots of flashy graphics to attract visitors. Flash may be good for entertainment, but it can inhibit knowledge transfer and get in the way of the messages. B2B Web sites should be strong on messages and content and more conservative on graphics. This does not mean that you should not take advantage of the visual power of the Web, but you should focus on the following areas:

Ensure a consistent look and feel. The visitor should not have to use any of their thinking time trying to figure out different presentation styles and page layouts for different product lines. Choose a look and feel and stick with it.

Make the site more interactive and conversational. This can be achieved by increased chunking of the information and using more of a Q&A paradigm to deliver your messages.

Personalize the site. Use filtering techniques to create a personalized experience, and make it simple for visitors to grab the information they need and take it with them. In the future many sites will allow the user to take personalized electronic notes, much like using a highlighter to mark the information in a book that you want to remember.

Encourage feedback. Asking for feedback makes your site more human and personal. You will be surprised at all the good information you will collect that can lead to increased revenue.

Capture statistics. Measure how visitors navigate your site and which sections and information are important to them. This helps you fine-tune your messages for maximum effectiveness.

Give before taking. Make sure that you earn the right before asking a visitor to provide information on themselves or their company. And, when you do ask, limit your questions to the information you really need and respect their privacy.

Cost and Technology Factors
Unlike other enterprise software initiatives like ERP and CRP, which can cost several million dollars in software costs alone, message-management systems are less expensive and can cost anywhere from $ 50,000 to $250,000 depending on the complexity of the Internet and intranet sites, and the functionality required.

The key ingredients to look for in a message-management solution are as follows:

• Solution providers that can help your marketing and sales organizations implement a repeatable message-management process.
• Workflow software that simplifies the creation of Web content by marketing communications professionals without the need for Web programmers.
• Measurement and closed-loop feedback systems to capture best practices ensure constant refinement of the messages.
• Flexible knowledge models that can manage "intelligent content" that more effectively describes complex products or services and relates them to the prospect's business issues.
• Flexible delivery systems that can be customized to the look and feel of your Web site.
• The ability to deliver portions of the site to your sales channels through hand held devices, not just the PC.
• Personalization technologies that are highly interactive and that engage visitors to create a compelling Web experience that makes them stay longer and come back for more. Web developers call this "stickiness."

Finally, the total cost of ownership of message-management systems (Figure 4) follows a different pattern than traditional enterprise systems like ERP and CRM, which require an enormous technology integration effort that usually exceeds estimates and provides little business benefits in and of itself.

Message management does require some technology integration, but the bulk of the implementation effort is in developing and adopting the business process that are required to develop better messages, keep them current, and actively share and leverage knowledge and best sales practices. These are healthy activities for any business whether or not there is any software implementation involved.

Summary
The Web is fast becoming the primary marketing communication medium for B2B companies to market and sell complex products and services. Smart management will drive their organizations to exploit the Web to more effectively describe their offerings, deliver their messages, and qualify prospects. They will accomplish this by managing their messages and sales intelligence as strategic assets and implementing processes and systems to ensure that this knowledge asset is current and continually being improved.

The result will be high performance Web sites that dynamically generate interactive message delivery and knowledge transfer pages that enable one-to-one Web dialogues with prospects, partners, and employees. These point-and-click conversations will better educate, influence, and qualify prospects and deliver situation-specific and personalized sales coaching that will make salespeople and re-sellers more effective.

The benefits that companies will achieve from effective message management and sales intelligence initiatives are many. Marketing benefits include the following:

• Increased control
• Improved positioning and messages
• More qualified leads
• Faster response to competition
• Improved product launches
• Increased cross selling
• Extended product life cycles

Sales benefits are as follows:

• Shortened qualification and sales cycles
• Faster salesperson ramp up
• Improved solution selling
• Increased ability to attract and retain salespeople
• Reduced selling costs

In many ways the Web will have an impact on B2B marketing and sales organizations in the way Japan changed the U.S. automotive industry in the 1970s. Forward thinking management that understands that effective messaging is about quality and continuous improvement, and has the commitment to implement the processes and discipline for message management, will be the winners when the dust settles.