The other day I was talking with my partner Jamie Yoder about a client who was asking him: What does it mean to be a world class online organization?  Here are seven things that I think are critical to be world class online.

• Frictionless Contact: You must know as much about your customer as they know about you.  There is an easy test for this, when the customer calls, does your organization have all the product, services and transactions you have had with the customer or do they have to regive you their name, address, number, etc., etc.  It should be frictionless contact.  USAA does this in insurance, and Zappos does it for shoes.
• Anywhere, Anytime, Anyway Commerce: You must be ready to do business anywhere, anyway and anytime.  There are over 4.6 billion cell phones in the world, and in the USA the 8-18 year old generation uses media 10 hours and 45 minutes a day.  People expect to be served where they are and the way they want to.
• Continuous Customer Context: If you have a hybrid distribution channel with some direct, some agents, a separate service center, and other touchpoints, the world class organizations have create a continuous context for the customer.
• Real Time Brand Management: World class organizations have a real time brand management and service organization.  For example, when Southwest had a problem with Kevin Smith and Twitter, they knew about it immediately and were able to react.  Their web, social media, and call center activities are fully integrated and continuously managed.
• Super Sensitive Listening: The very best also listen for complaints ten times as carefully as they listen for satisfaction. The reason they should do this is that bad news spreads seven to ten times as far and good news.
• Seamless Integration With Social Sites: It is essential to interoperate with existing social content sites like Facebook and Linked-In so that customers find it easy to connect to you and your services.
• Gifting as Branding: Market leaders like Coke and Pepsi have created gifting campaigns to help build their brands in the social media realm.  Pepsi’s Refresh the World Campaign gave away about $20 million to charities suggested by and voted on by the world at large.

In a world of too many choices, those who ease the stress of choosing with the ideas above, will gain more market share and have happier customers.  How well does your organization stack up?

Recent or related posts and links:

• iPad a Killer App for the Enterprise: (CIODashboard Post)
• How Coke and Pepsi Use Social Media to Build Their Trust Bank (HBR Blog Post)
• Continuous Brand Management for the 10:45 Generation: (HBR Blog Post)
• Creating an Information Advantage: (PowerPoint Presentation)

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Valaria Moltoni, scion of the site Conversation Agent, has advocated (as many other have too) that you can benefit from creating communities of customers. On a recent post, she showed a cute video by Intel about how engineers love nerdy jokes.  It highlighted to me the difference between creating a customer community for a B2C product and one for a B2B product.  In a B2C realm, you can create customer communities with end consumers.  Kraft has done an amazing job of this over the years with their Kraft recipes site, and my firm Diamond helped Southwest Airlines create their community site.

But the challenge in B2B is that often the product or service is customized to the needs of the buyer, and the community is very varied.  There are technicians and scientists who specify the needs for the product; there are installers and maintainers who get the product into the company, and the end users may be scientists or doctors or engineers.  The question is, how does the audience “gather” around your product or service?  I believe the key is communities of practice, usually defined by a number of professions within them.

For example, the Intel video points out, there are expert communities who love math and science.  In the field of radiology and imaging there is a very popular site with the quirky name, www.auntminnie.com. They claim to be the largest community of radiology and imaging professionals and participants — a community of practice if you will.  This very specific kind of community is the type of place where I believe B2B companies can make headway.  I know when I as on the board of Amicas, a radiologic image management company which was acquired recently by Merge Healthcare (NASDAQ: MRGE), our marketing department did pay attention to Aunt Minnie and the participants in that community.

So, have you figured out which customer communities and/or communities of practice you need to participate in?

Recent or relevant links:

• Digital Technology and Business (A radio show I did back in 2009.)
• Industrial Sales & Marketing by Kash Rangan & Ben Shapiro (Great textbook, and definitely worth the $0.01 for a used copy.)

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Time hurts all deals. — Anonymous

A key reason innovations fail is that inventors neglect to correctly assess how long it takes to sell something truly new, and while they figure this out they usually run out of capital.  I came to believe this because from about 1995-1998 I had the great good fortune of directing a “field studies course” when I was an Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School.  In a this course students were free to designed new businesses, or solutions for major parts of existing businesses.  For example, back in 1995, Tim Brady was a student and he crafted the early marketing plan for Yahoo!.  Tim has been a roommate of Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo while at Stanford.  You can imagine how fascinating it was to see the passion and brilliance of all these young people across a wide variety of topics.

Warp Speed Conception Courtesy of How Stuff Works

In this role, I discovered that every business plan had a “high”, “medium” and “low” sales projection — but none had a fast, medium, and slow sales cycle.  When I told students to redo their spreadsheets assuming the first sales would take 2, 3, or 5 times as long as they had assumed the character of their analysis changed radically.  Here’s at least five things they did:

1. Became much clearer on their exact target audience — beyond the generic title, down to the types of buyers within target accounts;
2. Focused much more on getting the first real sale with a referenceable account — not just with a friendly audience;
3. Hoarded cash just in case it might take a lot longer to get new cash in;
4. Crafted creative ways to see if their assumptions about the benefits of their product were real and valued by the target buyer;
5. Came to the realization that sales speed is critical to reducing risk.

So, in your innovation efforts do you only deal with high/medium/low, or do you realize the real trick is slow/medium/fast?  I’d love to hear your stories.

Related and/or Recent Links:

• Close Encounters of the Four Kinds: Managing customers in a rapidly changing environment, by Ben Shapiro
• Sales Reinvention: Why the iPad is a person to person innovation
• How to Take Advantage of the Web for Customer Connection

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Nothing happens until somebody sells something. — Anonymous

I admit it.  I love salespeople.  There are few things more precious to an enterprise than someone who can create demand.  I have also been using my iPad for a couple months now, and as someone who studied the productivity of field salesforces for many years (see my 1996 research article on Knowledge Workers and Radically New Technology), I’m convinced that it has the potential to boost sales productivity significantly.  There are three main reasons.

1. In my research, I found that when customer know more about the product or service being peddled they are more likely to buy more and buy “higher up” in the product line.  Most product lines are structured in such a way that the more expensive products are also more profitable to the company making the sale.  I studied configuration software and found that when a customer could “walk-through” a sales process, aided by the combination of a salesperson and a technological aid, the customer learned why they should care about different product features, and they bought them more often.
2. The main problem with technology used in the sales process today is that it is too individual.  Whether it is your iPod or your laptop, it is largely a solo experience.  The great thing about the iPad, as my friend Chris Curran recently wrote about on CIO Dashboard, is that it is a potentially social experience.  The iPad is easily shared by two, three, or more people and vastly more communal than a laptop is.  This means that it can be easily integrated into any face to face sales process with the right training and tools.  This type of tool enables a great salesperson to be even better, and helps raise the mediocre to good.
3. In selling, you often need to integrate a tremendous amount of data — some historical and some dynamic.  For example, the best salespeople have a very clear idea of what you have bought before, and what the current price & availability are.  It is an old yarn in selling, that there’s no meeting like the first meeting.  If a salesperson can go online and find availability, price, and shipping — they can often make a multiple-step sales call into a once and done.  And as they say, time hurts all deals so if the iPad can help close sales by being the platform for all relevant data in a facile manner, its worth its weight in gold.

What do you think?  Is there a recent sales experience in which you wish your salesperson had an iPad or can you imagine one?  I’d love to hear your stories.

Other relevant posts & links:

• How the iPad is Like the Tesla Roadster.
• iPad: The remote control for everything?
• Seeking Customers — a collection of HBR reprints edited by me and my dear friend Ben Shapiro.

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