****A Must Read From Fortune.com...
<<9 Ways to Win on the Web
1. Selling to Businesses
Dell Computer
by: Eryn Brown
When you think about it, it's funny that Dell Computer has come to be the poster child of business-to-business e-commerce. It deploys an army of real, live salespeople and executives to cater to the large corporate customers that account for 80% of its business. You'd imagine such customers would have little need for Dell's no-frills, self-service Web tools.
But you'd be missing the point. What makes Dell a great online player is its ability to take its customer-obsessed direct-sales practices and enhance them using the Web. There isn't anything the company does online that it doesn't do in the physical world. Yet Dell and its customers know that nothing beats the Web for taking care of the annoying stuff.
Dell's main weapon is its Premier Page program, which serves over 5,000 U.S. companies. When Dell wins a corporate customer with more than 400 employees, it will build that customer a Premier Page. The Page is little more than a set of smaller Web pages, often linked to the customer's intranet, which let approved employees go online to configure PCs, pay for them, and track their delivery status--about $5 million of Dell PCs are ordered this way every day. Premier Pages provide access to instant technical support (no more waiting on hold!) and Dell sales reps.
"We often set up Premier Pages for prospective customers before we've won their business. It blows them away," says Chris Halligan, who runs business-to-business e-commerce. Premier Pages aren't just good for customers; they're also good for Dell. The Pages cut Dell's costs by minimizing ordering errors, and they free its people to do things only humans can do. Simply put, if a sales rep isn't bogged down chasing purchase-order faxes, he'll have more time for talking face to face with customers--and serious selling.
To see how this works, look at Bayer Corp., the $8.1-billion-a-year U.S. subsidiary of Bayer AG in Germany. Bayer has an exclusive contract with Dell to lease its PCs. Leasing makes maintaining the machines cheaper and easier but makes the paperwork (coordinating inventory, scheduling payments) a total mess. So Bayer asked Dell to build a Premier Page tool to link all the people who needed to keep track of its 20,000 leased PCs. The Page does so and regularly generates lease-management reports. The cost of administering the contracts has plummeted. "Without the Pages we couldn't have pulled off leasing without hiring a bunch of new people," says Joseph Crowe, manager of hardware and software procurement at Bayer.
With the lease mumbo jumbo taken care of online, Dell's sales rep has more time to learn Bayer's concerns from Crowe. "He solicits input. He knows the heartbeat of Bayer," says Crowe. "He's there to solve our problems, not just get commissions."
Dell plans to revamp Premier Pages this summer with new features. One will tell buyers which Dell models will be discontinued--and which introduced--over the next 12 months. Halligan says that customers, as they have for years, will guide the evolution of the Pages. "There are customer-service pieces we want to upgrade because Amazon does it better," he admits. "But ultimately, what our customer wants is way more relevant than what other companies are doing." In other words, it will be business as usual for Dell. >>
cgi.pathfinder.com
Kemble: I sure wouldn't want to be against MSD and his team..!! They are the e-commerce pioneers and DELL will move higher as people really start to understand what's happening.
Best Regards,
Scott
-----------------------------------------------------------------
BTW: the excerpt above from Fortune.com may also be in the new issue of Fortune that is about to hit the news stands. I think the Growth Fund Managers need to consider this carefully..<GG>!! Business-to-Business e-commerce is HUGE and DELL will be a major player. |
