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Interactive Product Descriptions: The Killer App for Sell-Side Content
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 details of the buying process.
The irony is this: for companies with complex products and services, the buy side of the selling process represents just a small portion of their overall cost of sales.
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 details of the buying process.
The irony is this: for companies with complex products and services, the buy side of the selling process represents just a small portion of their overall cost of sales.
Most Popular Whitepapers
The fully loaded cost of salespeople 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 salespeople 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 this 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 salespeople 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 the limitations of a rectangular document to cyberspace.
But the emergence of XML as a standard and the new interactive capabilities available with dynamic HTML enable - literally - 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.
Interactive Product Descriptions and Message Management
Interactive Product Descriptions and Message Management are two examples of this innovative interactive thinking at work.
Interactive product descriptions are a new way to deliver product knowledge on the Web in a three-dimensional format that allows people to find information faster, drill down into more product detail without scrolling or losing context, and personalize their learning experience by taking notes as they navigate.
Message management is a repeatable best practice process for marketing organizations that establishes a framework for creating, delivering, and continuously improving key product messages and content.
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 allowing more of the prospect education and qualification activities to be done 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 interactive form of an IPD is attractive to any Web surfer. And that form also helps create focused, relevant, personalized content that helps prospects make better buying decisions. Effective message management means effective content management - a good content management system can help you create dynamite IPDs.
The Message Ain't The Message Anymore!
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 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 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 more 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 is 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 be 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 using 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 viewed 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 to 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.
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 audience. 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:
Actively engaging prospects
An interactive product description increases the prospect's interaction with the content and creates a user-controlled experience much like a video game. This engages their prospects, improves their concentration and comprehension, and makes them more receptive to the messages and selling points your site is delivering.
Additionally, the increased click stream data generated by content interaction provides invaluable information about what prospects are really interested in.
Personalizing the interaction
The interaction model of an interactive product description is inherently more personalized than a static Web page. This personalization can also be significantly enhanced with a new customization technique called e-notes, or message-level bookmarks.
Since each interactive product description is comprised of many small chunks of XML-enabled information, you can allow visitors to mark the messages and other content that is of specific interest to them and then create a customized set of electronic notes for them. These e-notes are a virtual "knowledge shopping cart" and, like the act of highlighting a book, represent a tangible, highly personal activity.
Increasing market feedback
When a prospect interacts with a well-constructed interactive product description, it is like having a point-and-click question and answer conversation with your best sales person or product specialist. Great conversations go both ways, however, and the same chunking technology that allows e-notes also supports message level feedback, so visitors can engage the vendor in a conversation about the individual messages.
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 e-marketing 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.
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 salespeople 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 this 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 salespeople 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 the limitations of a rectangular document to cyberspace.
But the emergence of XML as a standard and the new interactive capabilities available with dynamic HTML enable - literally - 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.
Interactive Product Descriptions and Message Management
Interactive Product Descriptions and Message Management are two examples of this innovative interactive thinking at work.
Interactive product descriptions are a new way to deliver product knowledge on the Web in a three-dimensional format that allows people to find information faster, drill down into more product detail without scrolling or losing context, and personalize their learning experience by taking notes as they navigate.
Message management is a repeatable best practice process for marketing organizations that establishes a framework for creating, delivering, and continuously improving key product messages and content.
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 allowing more of the prospect education and qualification activities to be done 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 interactive form of an IPD is attractive to any Web surfer. And that form also helps create focused, relevant, personalized content that helps prospects make better buying decisions. Effective message management means effective content management - a good content management system can help you create dynamite IPDs.
The Message Ain't The Message Anymore!
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 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 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 more 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 is 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 be 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 using 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 viewed 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 to 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.
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 audience. 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:
Actively engaging prospects
An interactive product description increases the prospect's interaction with the content and creates a user-controlled experience much like a video game. This engages their prospects, improves their concentration and comprehension, and makes them more receptive to the messages and selling points your site is delivering.
Additionally, the increased click stream data generated by content interaction provides invaluable information about what prospects are really interested in.
Personalizing the interaction
The interaction model of an interactive product description is inherently more personalized than a static Web page. This personalization can also be significantly enhanced with a new customization technique called e-notes, or message-level bookmarks.
Since each interactive product description is comprised of many small chunks of XML-enabled information, you can allow visitors to mark the messages and other content that is of specific interest to them and then create a customized set of electronic notes for them. These e-notes are a virtual "knowledge shopping cart" and, like the act of highlighting a book, represent a tangible, highly personal activity.
Increasing market feedback
When a prospect interacts with a well-constructed interactive product description, it is like having a point-and-click question and answer conversation with your best sales person or product specialist. Great conversations go both ways, however, and the same chunking technology that allows e-notes also supports message level feedback, so visitors can engage the vendor in a conversation about the individual messages.
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 e-marketing 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.
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