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Well Manage BY
ERIK LOUNSBURY, CUSTOMER INTER@CTION Solutions Distributing
information that is vital to businesses and their clients has become ever
more difficult with the proliferation of communications devices. Should
you contact them at the office, give a call to their cell phones, send an
e-mail blast? Perhaps you have an important software update announcement
to get out, but your users are spread across the phone, fax, e-mail, PDA
spectrum as far as their preferred means of communication. How can you
manage getting the message out despite the disparate media?
One company fighting this messaging war is EnvoyWorldWide,
which provides a suite of services that provide one to many outbound
notification that can be sent to all devices a companys clients may
choose to use. Envoys system is designed to send personalized,
proactive content that contains the same information no matter what the
media, optimized for the type of device that will be receiving it.
EnvoyXpress is the hosted, enterprise application messaging platform
that delivers the outbound communications while providing tracking and an
actionable response mechanism. EnvoyProfiles, an enhancement to the core
EnvoyXpress platform, enables recipients to control where, when, how and
what messages they receive, while giving the senders the ability to set
pre-defined events that trigger automatic notification. EnvoyXtend
provides customization capabilities to facilitate the integration of Envoys
messaging capabilities into Envoys clients business processes. Users
can customize the look and feel of the messages and delivery templates.
EnvoyXtra gives senders and recipients a set of intelligent messaging
capabilities that include person-to-person and device-to-device
escalation, multiple-choice questions that can be used to base the next
actionable steps, and recipient capabilities to personalize when and how
to receive messages.
Handling Sales
Industrial sales is a long, complicated process involving the
coordination of various parties, in various locations, often over an
extended period of time. Keeping up with changing contacts and contracts
in this environment is difficult, to say the least. Addressing this
process with an eponymous sales force automation tool is Selltis,
which has designed its products for industrial manufacturers,
representatives and distributors to proactively follow the industrial
sales process from lead generation though to quote management. All lead
functions are driven into the database, so that sales and marketing have a
window into each others activities.
All information is stored in a personalized, distributed database that
is synchronized with a central server, so that a sales person can get a
view of all activity, no matter who has dealt with the lead. Selltis
provides hundreds of predefined fields, forms and templates, so sales
people generate e-mail, letters, faxes, quotes, sales forecasts, reports
and other documents from directly within Selltis. Selltis also integrates
with third-party applications, such as Microsoft Word, Outlook and Excel,
and information can be transferred to the Internet for printing and
sharing.
Selltis also features an offline hosting infrastructure. Because
industrial sales teams work so frequently in the field, this model enables
them to access Selltis full functionality offline, without needing an
Internet connection. Sales representatives can use Selltis to document
their activities from any location, and simply connect to the Internet at
any time to quickly update and exchange data through a secure,
firewall-protected link.
Selltis also recently released its partner relationship management
tool, Selltis WebPartner, which manufacturers can use to consolidate leads
into a centralized database, and then link them to product details and
activities. Information that is entered into WebPartner is automatically
published to the Web, allowing access to the information by partners,
distributors and resellers.
For collecting Web-based information, Selltis WebForms provides
pre-built HTML forms designed to capture inquiries directly from a companys
Web site. Prospects can fill out a simple, Web-based form and receive
instant notification that their requests have been received. Information
is automatically populated into the Selltis database, providing sales
agents with the details they need to follow up on leads. All subsequent
information and activities are recorded by Selltis, enabling sales teams
to centrally track the progress of the leads. Selltis also offers CardScan
Link to scan business cards directly into Selltis with a standard CardScan
scanner. CardScan Link captures information from the card and
automatically populates the corresponding contact fields and an activity
log for the prospect in Selltis.
The author may be contacted at elounsbury@tmcnet.com.
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