Transcript Electronic Commerce

Electronic Commerce
Semester 2 Term 2 Lecture 18
Intranets & Sales Automation
• The Intranet-enabled sales automation
framework has multiple benefits
• Bridging “islands” of information
• Building a smart solution
• Electronic publishing
• Extending information sharing
Bridging Islands of Information
• It helps bridge the islands of information that can
exist within a company, especially within sales
and marketing
• Intranets are an important tool for augmenting
sales productivity as they provide a single point of
access to all essential information on customers,
prospects, products, marketing programs and
marketing channels
• Some existing systems supplement the essentials
with industry data and data on competitors
Building a Smart Solution
• The availability of interactive web monitoring
software and intelligent agents makes it possible
to build a ‘smart’ solution that delivers vital,
specific sales intelligence directly to the desktop
of each sales representative instead of mounds of
general information
• These intelligent agents make direct sales and
direct marketing more efficient by automating
highly repetitive support tasks, like answering
requests for product literature and writing letters
and by reducing the time the salespeople spend on
non-selling tasks
Electronic Publishing
• Intranets can also be used for electronic
publishing, to educate and inform sales
representatives and make the selling process more
proactive by providing all the information and
tools necessary to close the sale on-site at a
customer location
• Using Intranets as a publishing medium offers an
inexpensive, easy-to-use, easily updated
alternative to paper-based , LAN-based and CDROM-based documentation systems
• Also, Intranets remove the obstacles inherent with
publishing information in multiplatform
environments
Extending Information Sharing
• Once the Intranet-based solution is in place,
companies find it possible to extend information
sharing beyond the boundaries of the enterprise, to
outside parties critical to the sales effort
• The collection and analysis of marketing
information improves the timeliness and quality of
marketing and sales executives’ decision making
• Organisations can extend marketing and sales
intelligence to distributors, third-party partners or
even customers
Benefits of the Intranet for Sales
• Shorten the sales cycle through prequalification of
prospects
• Increase revenue through targeted marketing
• Automate the management and qualification of
Web leads
• Capture all customer information directly into
sales databases
• Enhance order management with access to data on
pricing, promotions, availability, production
schedules, export regulations, carriers, and
transportation schedules
Intranets & a Mobile Sales Force
• The ability to act quickly often implies that the
salesforce is mobile
• No longer do sales people have to be in the office
or logged onto a LAN system in order to do their
work
• The more recent trend in sales automation is
towards solutions designed to serve the unique
needs of remote or mobile user populations –
whose job limits their ability to be connected
while they work
Integrating the Web with Contact
Management
• Many organisations have set up Web sites for
customer contact
• The goal now is to seamlessly integrate the Web
front-end with the existing sales process to
achieve better productivity
• E.g. leads are collected from an organisation’s
Internet Web site, and then sorted and
automatically e-mailed to the appropriate sales
person
• With the click of a mouse thesee leads are
transferred directly into the sales database
• Automatic e-mail notifications are sent ot the
prospects, acknowledging their website request
Contact Management
Requirements
• Track and manage prospect targeting, direct marketing
campaigns, response measurement, and prospect
qualification
• Apply target profiles to lists to identify prospects
• Assign leads based on product type, regions, territories
and markets
• Share access to information among headquarters staff,
field locations, and channel partners to support team
selling
• Pull all information about an opportunity into a single
consolidated viewto facilitate complex sales
• Assist is quote preparation based on customer sales
history and expected purchases