I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
I was talking to another CEO this morning on how we can use the web as a support tool for selling higher value solutions. That is to move past a brochureware site.
If our bottleneck is getting front of customers in a physical meeting, then by taking some of the physical time out of the process our resources can be more leveraged.
Selling low value, low complexity solutions has been done before but there are not many examples of how to sell high value solutions.
Our first step was analyze the sales process to see what parts we could better support through the web. We saw those steps as:
- Awareness
- Education
- Evaluation
- Building a Business Case
- Purchase
- Support
These will form the basis of the design brief for a new site.
For most of these steps there are fairly well known mechanisms for support through the web. E.g. WebEx for education and evaluation. Newsgroups and FAQ’s for support. Puchasing for high value items will not, of course, be credit card so we have to think more about the traditional world of Purchase Orders and banking.
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