Overview:

The revenue generation process can be broken down into two distinct phases.

• Selling, where prospects are educated, their needs are identified, solutions are evaluated, and the decision to purchase a specific product or service is made.
• Buying, which is the execution and administration of the purchase transaction after the prospect has decided to buy.

To date, most of the action and innovation in e-commerce has been on the "buy side" of the equation with the development of "e-buying" technologies like reverse auctions, shopping carts, and product configuration and pricing engines. Most of these technologies have been successfully applied to consumer products, and some of them are beginning to find there way to B2B sites promoting complex products and services in an attempt to disintermediate their sales channels from some of the administrative detail of the buying process.

Unfortunately, for companies with complex products and services, the cost of the "buy side" of the equation pales to the cost of the "sell side". The fully loaded cost of sales people and product specialists during the time they are personally qualifying, educating, and working with prospects can easily approach 75 to 85% of a company's total sales budget.

The good news is that prospects want to help their vendors disintermediate the sales person, and reduce that expense! While personal communication with sales people and product experts is required during some portions of the selling process, B2B prospects are increasingly demanding access to detailed product information and answers to their specific questions on a 24 by 7 basis, when it is convenient for them.

This relentless market demand for richer and more detailed product information, that is customized for each prospect, requires that we develop a better way to more effectively organize information and transfer knowledge in order to accomplish some of the real selling activities over the Web

Since the "sell side" is a content centric process, the cost of selling, combined with the market's demand for independence, represents a significant opportunity for content management vendors. Their focus needs to shift from providing library administration and workflow tools that more efficiently "manage content", to providing high performance knowledge delivery applications that compress the selling process, reduce large chunks of the "sell side " costs, and generate more revenue.

In other words, content management companies need to begin providing business solutions that enable their customers to improve the effectiveness and sales results from their web site.

The Knowledge Transfer Challenge:

If you analyze the fundamentals of marketing and selling, it becomes evident that their foundation is the knowledge transfer process, and the effective communication of facts, ideas, and opinions. This includes understanding prospect needs, along with the ability to effectively educate them, answer their specific questions, and influence their behavior through rational, honest, information rich interactions.

You might say that this kind of knowledge transfer and selling can only be accomplished by sales people and product specialists, and that content in documents or web pages, no matter how detailed, will never be as effective as one to one personal interactions.

It's true, that effective knowledge transfer and the delivery of detailed information is limited on traditional web pages. This is due to a lot of factors such as screen size and readability, and the loss of context that comes with scrolling and jumping from page to page. But, we need to start thinking outside the box a bit and forget that we have been living with the paradigms of paper and documents for thousands of years. These constructs have limited our ability to envision anything more than the two-dimensional rectangular presentation of information we get from a traditional web page.

But now, the emergence of XML as a standard and the new interactive capabilities available with Dynamic HTML enable us to extend and enhance this two-dimensional approach to information delivery, and create web sites that are more three-dimensional interactive, and conversational. This will allow us to more closely replicate the one-to-one conversations that people have with an expert when they are learning about something.

This is where a new web interaction paradigm for product knowledge delivery called "Active Content Pages" and a new "best practice" process for marketing organizations called "Message Management" fit in.

The combination of a message management process and more Active Content Pages will raise the bar for marketing professionals and force a higher level of content quality that more effectively positions and differentiates their products and services. But, if they are able to improve content quality and delivery, they will be able to reduce costs and improve revenue by doing more of the "sell side" activities over the web, and provide just in time assistance to sales people to make them more effective with the others.

The Message Ain't The Message Any More!

Tag lines and short product overviews are fine for establishing over all product positioning, but they are not enough to satisfy prospects who really want to understand a complex product or service.

As David Weinberger says in The Cluetrain Manifesto, "for every message, there are dozens or hundreds of facts...useful facts". These facts along with other ideas, opinions, and FAQs are in reality micro-messages, that when linked together present an entire product story. Effective prospect communication involves organizing and delivering these many micro-messages so they provide crisp, clear, honest answers to seven key questions that prospects pose through out a sales cycle.

• What does the product or service do?
• What is unique about the product or service?
• Why is that uniqueness important?
• How do you address my concerns and objections?
• What else should I know about the product?
• Who else is using the product or service?
• Why do I need to buy it now?

In today's hyper competitive markets, the answers to these questions are constantly changing in "web time" due to increased innovation, marketplace volatility, increased competitive activity, and shorter product life cycles. It is not unusual for a complex product to have hundreds of constantly changing micro-messages that need to be selectively communicated in a coordinated fashion by your web site and your channels depending on the specific prospect and competitive situation.

These micro-messages and pieces of sales intelligence represent an important corporate asset, and as such, this mission critical content needs to be aggressively managed and more effectively leveraged.

Managing the Messages

Formally managing all of a company's micro-messages to insure currency, consistency, and maximum leverage can accomplished with a single centrally administered relational data base and workflow software that assists in the creation and maintenance of the content. In order to be effective, this product knowledge and sales intelligence repository needs to be easily created and maintained by marketing professionals and product subject matter experts, not web developers.

This can be achieved with a simple authoring system that generates "knowledge templates" that simplify the effort of creating and maintaining the hundreds of different messages and pieces of sales intelligence that are required to effectively position, differentiate, and support the sale of complex products and services.

Knowledge templates can be looked at as a "paint by numbers" system for marketing professionals and product specialists. Not only will they reinforce a repeatable process for creating product positioning and developing the messages, but they will also reinforce best communication practices to improve the overall quality of the marketing effort.

Additionally, any good message management process should have a closed loop feedback system to capture prospect reactions and input from the sales channels and product specialists to insure the continuous improvement of the message

The result from a formal message management initiative is a valuable knowledge asset containing the most current messages and sales intelligence available in the corporation.

The Power of Interactivity

Building a comprehensive message and sales intelligence knowledge base solves only half of the problem of increasing web effectiveness. To maximize their differentiation and generate higher quality leads, B2B companies need to deliver the many different messages through an informative and engaging web experience that is more interactive, conversational, and personalized then traditional web pages.

It is a well-known fact that when a person is in control of an interactive medium, they are more receptive to the content, and are able to absorb and understand vast amounts of information very quickly. We have been conditioned over the past several decades to engage electronic mediums by clicking a control or navigation device. So, when we click a mouse, for example, we are actually preparing our mind to rapidly receive and process new information. This control is one of the most intoxicating aspects of the Web, and explains a lot about its adoption rate.

If you want to test this phenomenon yourself sometime, 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 loose context and can't follow the rapid change of format. The other person, however, is engaging the TV at a higher level because they are in control of the click. They are anticipating context change, processing information, and learning at a much faster rate than we are. This phenomenon also explains why it is so difficult to demo a new software product to a group of people, and why the most effective results occur when the person doing the demo goes excruciatingly slow from their standpoint.

The best example of a person's heightened interactive learning capacity is a video game, where the player controls the interaction to create an intense and highly personal experience. The intensity of the interaction and player's concentration is extreme, because of this "outside-in" control. It heightens the player's receptiveness to change, and as a result, their ability to process and absorb chunks of information is enhanced.

In other words, when we are learning through an interactive medium the more interactive the session, while still maintaining context, the better!

Active Content Pages

What if we were able to create web pages that came close to the high intensity interactive knowledge transfer experience of a video game, while prospects learned about products and services?

Unfortunately, the two-dimensional format and static nature of traditional web pages prohibits them from delivering the level of interactivity required to really enhance a prospect's learning experience.

When you put a lot of detailed product information on a two dimensional web page, it increases scrolling which results in the loss of context and reduced comprehension. Intra-page links, like those found on some FAQ pages, try to address this problem by creating a more dynamic and interactive experience by linking the questions at the top of a page to their answers at the bottom. In doing so, however, many web sites have replaced the scrolling problem with a jarring visual experience that breaks concentration and interferes with a person's ability to retain context. Both scrolling and the jarring visual change that occurs with traditional hyper-links, whether to the bottom of a page or to a whole other page, limit a visitor's ability to quickly absorb and understand information.

These shortcomings are addressed with a new content delivery technique called "Active Content Pages" (ACPs), that can be used to build more Active Content Pages. . ACPs are constructed with Dynamic HTML and use a Q & A metaphor to better organize and deliver complex information. They can contain hundreds of small chunks of information, or "Active Content" much of which is hidden, much like the "folder" metaphor in Windows Explorer or the "arrow metaphor in Lotus Notes.

This allows you to deliver a more three-dimensional product description session for prospects that lets them drill down into more and more detailed product information while still maintaining context. It creates a more conversational interaction and knowledge transfer experience that more closely resembles a one-to-one question and answer session with a product expert.

The following screen shot shows an example of an interactive product description that describes an imaginary product called the " LT 4000 Notebook Computer"

The list on the left contains items or "questions" that prospects have about the LT4000. The right column contains the answers to those questions. Clicking on a question displays the first level of information or "answers" for that question.

Answers can have more "drill down" detail that can be displayed without scrolling or loosing context by clicking either on the answer or the little arrow.

HTML programmers can hand-craft Active Content Pages, or they can be automatically generated from an XML product knowledge base that is maintained by subject matter experts and marketing communication professionals through the message management process and the knowledge templates mentioned earlier.

The advantages of automatically generating Active Content Pages from a knowledge base are significant. Not only does it give the business users control of the content and save time and money, it allows companies to create different web views for different audiences. For example, you could have a view for prospects on your corporate web site and have a modified view for sales people that also displays best practices like objection rebuttals, questions to ask, and traps to lay for the competition, that are integrated into the prospect viewable content.

Active Content Pages increase web site effectiveness and stickiness by:

Summary

The web is like a freight train that will hit B2B marketing organizations the way Japan hit the manufacturing sector in the 1970's. Prospects will continue to demand higher quality and more specific content along with a more rewarding and personalized web experience just to let you into the game. B2B eMarketing organizations that realize that their web content is a mission critical asset, embrace the message management process, and implement more Active Content Pages will be the ones left standing at the end of the day.