This Article originally appeared as a series of articles in “Content Rules”
A public site dedicated to Enterprise Content Management

Sell-Side Economics
To date, most e-commerce innovation has taken place on the “buy side” of the revenue generation process: take the development of “e-buying” technologies like reverse auctions, shopping carts, and product configuration and pricing engines, for example.

While most of these technologies have been successfully applied to consumer products, some of them are appearing on B2B sites promoting complex products and services. It’s a smart way to try to disintermediate sales channels from some of the administrative detail of the buying process.

The irony is this: for these companies with complex products and services, the “buy side” of the selling process represents just a small portion of their overall cost of sales. 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 percent of a company’s total sales budget.

Give the Prospects What They Want
The fact is, most prospects don’t require, or want, the kind of face-to-face attention that has historically been associated with the sale of complex products. 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, customized product information and answers to their specific questions on a 24/7 basis.

This means that the sell-side is quickly becoming a more Web content-driven process where the effective transfer of knowledge to the prospect is a critical success factor. Combine that fact with the promise of reduced sell-side costs, and you’ve got a significant opportunity for sell-side content management solutions.

The Sell-Side Challenge for Content Management Vendors
To date, content management vendors have focused on providing their customers with library administration and workflow tools. The new sell-side landscape means they must offer sell-side content management solutions that include high performance knowledge delivery applications that compress the selling process, reduce large chunks of the “sell side “ costs, and generate more revenue.

Understanding Knowledge Transfer
At the core of these new content management solutions is a deep understanding of the knowledge transfer process — the effective communication of facts, ideas, and opinions.

The knowledge transfer process comprises:

• Understanding prospect needs,
• Educating them effectively,
• Answering their specific questions, and
• Influencing their behavior through rational, honest, information rich interactions.

Conventional wisdom has it that effective sell-side knowledge transfer 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.

New Thinking for New Technologies
Effective knowledge transfer and the delivery of detailed information is in fact limited on traditional web pages — partly because of design limitations such as screen size and readability, and the loss of context that comes with scrolling and jumping from page to page.

But mostly it’s because the two-dimensional, document centric paradigm we’ve come to rely on limits our thinking about content construction on the Web. Traditional web pages do little more than transfer thelimitations of a rectangular document to cyberspace.

The emergence of XML as a standard, and the new interactive capabilities available with Dynamic HTML, enable a paradigmatic shift in our thinking about content delivery. With these technologies, we can create web sites that are more three-dimensionally interactive, and conversational. And this allows us to more closely replicate the one-to-one interactions that are the hallmarks of traditionally successful sell-side conversations.

The Advantage of Interactivity
It is obvious that effective sell side content includes comprehensive product messages along with the key sales intelligence that helps convince prospects that purchasing a product or service is in their best interests. But just as important is delivering these messages and exploiting the sales intelligence through an informative and engaging experience that uses the Web’s interactive power to fortify and personalize them.

Such interactivity helps build credibility and trust in the vendor,, maximizes product differentiation, and generates higher quality leads.

Why Do We Like Interactivity?
It’s common sense: when a person is in control of a medium, he or she is more receptive to its content, and is more willing and prepared to absorb information.

When we click a mouse, for example, we are actually preparing our mind to rapidly receive and process new information. This type of control is one of the most powerful aspects of interactivity on the Web.

Liken it to channel surfing on the TV. Most of us know how annoying it is sitting next to someone who is indiscriminately changing channels. But when we do it, it’s enormously satisfying. Why? Because we are in control of the click.

The act of clicking e anticipates context change, which enables processing information, and learning at a faster rate. We are interacting with, and controlling our experience more than we are being controlled by it.

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 you “do it yourself” or when the person doing the demo goes excruciatingly slow from their standpoint.

But perhaps 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 the 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 information is enhanced.

Interactive Product Descriptions and Message Management
Interactive Product Descriptions and Message Management are two examples of this innovative interactive thinking at work.

The combination of a message management process and more interactive product descriptions will raise the bar for marketing professionals and force a higher level of content quality that more effectively positions and differentiates a company’s products and services.

Improved content quality and delivery can reduce a large portion of the selling costs and increase revenue by doing more of the prospect education and qualification activities over the web. Additionally, it will enable marketing to provide just-in-time assistance to sales people to make them work more efficiently during the rest of the sales cycle.

The Message Ain’t The Message Any More!
Traditional print and static Web site messaging doesn’t offer enough. Tag lines and short product overviews are fine for establishing overall product positioning, but they are not enough to satisfy prospects that 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 are micro-messages that, when linked together, have the potential to present an entire product story.

Exploiting Micro-messages
Creating, organizing, and delivering these micro-messages on the Web so they provide more focused and personalized content for prospects can be a challenge for even the best marketing team.

Most prospects have seven key questions about a product or service as they proceed through the sales cycle. Effectively answering these seven questions are the key to successful marketing and sales.:

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 or service?
6. Who else is using the product or service?
7. Why do I need to buy it now?

The messages are constantly changing
Unfortunately, the answers to the above questions are constantly changing in “Web time” due to:

• Increased, constant innovation,
• Marketplace volatility,
• Increased competitive activity, and
• Shorter product life cycle.

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, 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
Managing a company’s micro-messages and sales intelligence to ensure relevancy, consistency, and maximum leverage sounds difficult — but it can by easily done using a single centrally administered relational database with workflow software that assists in the creation and maintenance of the content.

In order to be effective, this product knowledge and sales intelligence base needs to be created and maintained by marketing professionals and product subject matter experts, not Web developers.

Turning Laymen Into Experts
A good message management solution will help you do this by providing a simple authoring system that generates “knowledge templates.” These templates 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 do they reinforce a repeatable process for creating product positioning and developing the messages, but they also reinforce best communication practices and improve the overall quality of the marketing effort.

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

Effective message management results in a valuable enterprise knowledge asset containing the most current messages and sales intelligence available to, and about, the company and its products and services.

Dynamically Generating IPDs
What if we were able to create interactive product descriptions on the Web 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. But maturing delivery technologies — especially the refinement of Dynamic HTML coding and the Active Content Pages (ACPs) it enables — are changing our options

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 another page, limit a visitor’s ability to quickly absorb and understand information.

ACPs
These shortcomings are addressed with a new content delivery technique called “Active Content Pages” (ACPs), which can be used to build more interactive product descriptions. 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, as it is with 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.

Example of an Interactive Product Description

The list on the left contains concerns or “issues” that prospects have about a fictitious computer, the “LT4000.” The right column displays “answers” to those concerns. Clicking on a question displays the first level of information — or “answers” — that responds to each issue.

A user can “drill down” to further detail by clicking on a particular “answer” — and each subsequent level of more specific information gets displayed without scrolling or losing context.

The XML Advantage
Web programmers can handcraft interactive product descriptions with Dynamic HTML.

But comprehensive content management solutions can automatically generate them from an XML product knowledge base — a database maintained by subject matter experts and marketing communication professionals through the message management process via knowledge templates.

The advantages of automatically generating interactive product descriptions from a knowledge base are significant.

• Business users and marketing professionals — not Web programmers — control the content, which saves time and money
• Companies can 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 displays best practices — objection rebuttals, questions to ask, and traps to lay for the competition — that are integrated into the prospect viewable content.

More importantly, IPDs can maximize your Web effectiveness in several key ways, by:

Look Out!
The effects of the Web will hit B2B marketing organizations the way Japanese competition 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 interactive product descriptions will be the ones left standing at the end of the day.

Bob Schmonsees (bobs@web2one.com) is the CEO of Web2one, Inc. Web2one helps B2B companies accomplish more of the selling process on the Web. Its patented Interactive Product Page software replaces static product descriptions with highly conversational and personalized prospect education and self-qualification sessions that clearly differentiate a company’s products and services, generate higher quality leads, and shorten the sales cycles. He has managed high tech marketing and sales organizations of all sizes for more than 27 years.