About business-to-business e-commerce...
Honestly, I don't know which companies are best positioned
to benefit from the coming, and existing, boom in business-to-business
e-commerce. (My area right now is consumer-focused,
but two new clients are changing that for us. I'll try
to extract lessons from that experience.)
Cisco (or is it Bay?), I believe, sells soemthing like $6 million
a day over the Web. Those are business-to-business sales.
That's a chunk right there.
DELL is proving to be absolutely masterful in its
direct business-to-business sales to major accounts and
or preferred accounts (the lingo changes with each new
reorganization at DELL.)
What we are seeing with DELL and others is a
MESHING of customer and provider (manufacturer,
service company, etc) that is facilitated by
the Web. Old lines that used to divide a customer from
a provider are now getting very blurred. DELL's key
corporate customers each have a web site provided by
DELL. Those web sites facilitate business-to-business
transactions amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars
each year. They also become amazing conduits of information
about new product pricing, discounts, end-of-life offers, etc.
They can even become venues for announcements about
employee purchase programs available to key accounts.
This is TRANSACTION-based marketing. And RELATIONSHIP
marketing. All in one.
The Web is becoming a kind of CONTACT ADHESIVE
which bonds suppliers, providers, customers in giant
value chains. Everything gets very nuance-y, Web
quick, just-in-time, etc. THIS IS AN UTTERLY FASCINATING
TIME.
Competitive advantage is quickly going to those
companies who are BINDING themselves to their key customers
by means of the Web and electronic transactions. With
all these many ways that the customer and provider
are linked, indeed enmeshed, it becomes harder for
a de-linking or for a customer to go somewhere else.
This is much like the principle of RELATIONSHIP marketing
as developed by banks in the 1970's. They felt that if
a customer had a checking account, a savings account,
CDs, etc with one institution it would be harder for
that customer to uproot and leave.
Sorry to ramble...
Best Regards,
c m
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