January 2002

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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