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The Emerging Enterprise - Lessons From The Fortune 500 -- Part Duex
Lessons From The Fortune 500 -- Part Duex
HP, EMC and CA sure know how to brand an acronym. It's sales leads they don't quite understand!
By Dayna Haberle-Delmonico
What's the one thing you don't do when business is bad? Ignore a lead - right?
Not according to an amazing press release that landed on my desk. This one came hot on the heels of a column on how big biz is screwing up customer relationships. So here's a little more fodder for what's becoming a Lesson's From Big Biz Primer.
A recent study by Boston-based Summit Strategies' siteIQ research team, found that less than one third of the vendors responded to Web-based requests for sales call-backs. Vendors that failed to respond to prospects' requests are a "Who's Who" of the IT industry, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell Computer, EMC (an Enterprise storage vendor) and Computer Associates (of Enterprise software fame).
You might think there that sales reps are too swamped with leads to keep up because their companies have downsized resources or stagnated hiring. However, that doesn't seem to be the entire story here. Though companies clearly don't respond to web requests, they also fail to encourage web requestors (who are also known as potential customers). Yet the customers still send in requests (every SMBs dream!), and what emerges is a clear lesson to all on WHAT NOT TO DO on your company web site.
The study showed, according to siteIQ Practice Director, Marty Gruhn, "vendors create huge barriers for prospects on their Websites. These companiesı
- hide their 'Contact Us' and 'Request More Information' forms all over their Websites;
- expect visitors to complete multiple forms when they are looking for an integrated solution;
- ask a mind-boggling array of questions;
- and play hide-and-seek with their privacy policies. Then they either ignore qualified prospects completely or call them back so late that prospects must wonder whether the vendor is really interested in their business."
Presumably, large companies have far more to respond to but they also have customer service staffs and the technology to provide these services. Jupiter estimates that spending on online CRM (customer relationship management), the category customer service falls into, will soar from $2.3 billion in 2003 to $4.7 billion in 2008. Actually using it effectively, however, seems to be a larger challenge.
Summit's study took an in-depth look at the Website-related lead-generation capabilities and performance of leading IT vendors in five market segments. Vendors included in the study are IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell Computer, Sun Microsystems, EMC, Storage Technology, Nortel Networks, Cisco Systems, 3Com, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Oracle, J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft, SAP, Computer Associates, Siebel Systems, BroadVision, EDS, Accenture, BearingPoint and IBM Global Services.
Although the majority of vendors in the study failed, you can almost certainly guess who the big winners were. "Microsoft's Business Solutions and Great Plains (Microsoft owns Great Plains, a Quicken competitor) won hands down," continued Gruhn. "Microsoft is the only company that covered all of its bases by responding in less than one hour with an e-mail linking us to a personal buying page; calling us within two hours; and then reaching out four more times over the next nine days."
A handful of other vendors also fared well in the study. Juniper Networks received the award for the fastest sales response by sending a well written e-mail, and calling five minutes after a request was submitted. All five of IBM's product groups responded with sales calls, although only two (eServer and Storage) responded within five days. Sun Microsystems received kudos from the siteIQ team for meeting its promise to contact prospects within 24 hours.
So what does that tell me? That the basic foundation of the technology industry (and business in general) still exists-the best sales and marketing organizations win. Just study any of the technology companies, with names you never heard of, that are or were run by engineers who thought that "building a better mouse trap" would carry the market.
Dayna Haberle-Delmonico is Managing Editor of TechWeb Small Biz.
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