Monolith ERP

ERP solutions have grown into large and complex application that try to suit most industries.
The problem is:
- The setup and deployment becomes complex and time consuming.
- One solution cannot fulfill the needs of a diversity of industries

The choice of web services

Web services are market specific applications providing a limited number of functions or features.
These solutions range from simple and easy to use (and to implement) solutions to more complex ones.
Any company could select different solutions from different vendors and have a relatively fast implementation.

Web services is the solution from the bottom up

A company could select the most appropriate web service solution for every function in the company. If a service doesn’t satisfy anymore due to the changes in the company, then another will be selected and implemented.
Thus instead of tying up with one ERP vendor, a selection of vendors supply web services to the company.

The integration problem

The main problem is the integration of these web services into one.

Typically a company has only company wide data on:
- Products:
- Customers: leads and customers
- Suppliers
And a several processes
- Marketing
- Sales
- Support
- Production
- Administration

These different processes require integrated process flow and shared data from the different web services in order not to have enter the same data multiple times. This integration can be delivered by On Demand Business Integration and Process (also called SaaS integration platform).

Integration solution

For the integration a company can choose from a range of alternatives for different requirements:
- RunMyProcess
- IBM WebSphere
- WappWolf

Web services are the future as these bring the freedom of choice from a wide range of solutions from different vendors.

What are you going to select next time? A monolith or web services?

All companies have or should have a website for several reasons which all attribute to your success:

1. Discovery:
When people are looking for solutions to business or company problems and issues they will be enlightened by discovering your offering as it adds another solution or an alternative solution to their list.

2. Findability:
Not getting found on the Internet is the worst that can happen as it will leave the potential customer wondering why. Is the company too small to have a website. Is the company (getting) out of business?

3. Website off line:
The immediate or obvious reaction is that the company is out of business, which can only be verified by calling the company.

4. Trustworthy:
Trust in your company can be maintained or enhanced by being able to visit the website and getting confirmation on the already received information.

5. Craving knowledge:
As your website supplies ample information the need for craving knowledge will be satisfied.

6. Conversion:
All visitors have the possibility to eventually convert into customers. The website will play a major role in this before, during and after the purchase process.

7. Contact details:
The website provides contact details: email address or telephone number

8. Location:
For certain people the location of the company in certain cities or neighborhoods of cities are an indication of the success of the company.

9. Worldwide or countrywide presence:
As your website will list the office locations it will enhance the image of your company.

10. Management:
As management is/should be presented on the website it will give a face to the company and more identification.

How essential is your website for your business ?

Most B2B websites are designed from a vendor or supplier prospective.
- The design should be approached as if you were your potential customer.
- The content should be written abut what the customer is looking for.

When designing and creating content for your website think like your probable customers.

The design of your website should not be defined by your products or solutions, but by the problems and issues the customer are looking to solve.
What is the intention of the visitor? What is he looking for and what will he be expecting to find next? More information, contact details, specs sheets, local resellers?

The content should not solely be about the greatness of your products but should address how your solutions solve their problems and issues.

How customer minded is your website?

1. Prepaid

The best thing about Internet business is prepaid.
As a merchant you get the money before you supply the goods or the (web) service.
Most other businesses you need to wait at least 30 days after delivery to get paid (if you are lucky).
Prepaid decreases entrepreneurial risks significantly.
The main draw back is in case of physical goods as they can be returned which has a high burden.

2. Recurrent

The second best is recurrent payments for Internet services.
If you can mange to get an Internet business with a recurrent business model (subscription) then your business will grow almost exponentially.
In case the first subscription pays for the sales & marketing and set-up costs, then your margin will be high as each recurrent payment only needs to cover the operational costs.

3. Open 24 / 7

The third best is that your shop or service is available 24 hours seven days a week, allowing serving your potential customer whenever he feels the need for buying.

4. Geography without borders

As the web is worldwide, your Internet business can easily go worldwide if you invest in the localization (translation).

5. Small can be big

On the Internet a small company can portray an image of being big. It is not the physical size or the revenue but the presence on the Internet that creates the image of the size of the company. The more the company appears on top of the searches the more important it will look. The more a company or product is findable on the Internet, the perception of a big company is generated.

6. Sales & marketing costs

As both use digital communications the costs involved will be lower and can be better optimized as all efforts and investments can be measured.
The marketing will be all digital: SEO, Website, email marketing, visitors information,
The sales will be digital too using online forms and email.

7. Growth costs

If the revenue grows, the operational costs ill increase at a lower pace due to the scalability of the business model. Especially the workforce doesn’t need to be increased at the same pace as the growth of the revenue due to the fact many operation and procedures can be handled electronically and not need human intervention.

What is your experience with Internet business ?

Consumerization of IT

A few years ago a new business model for B2B had emerged onto the market: Consumerization of IT.
Just like consumerization happened for mobile devices pushing companies to buy smartphones, the same would apply to software.
The concept was by getting enough consumers as users which will create interest in the media, the software/web service would trickle over into the enterprise world – even into Fortune 500 companies.
Several start-ups started to build web services that where well-designed and easy to deploy. This allowed them obtaining large shares of consumers these services were based upon the Freemium model: a free basic version and a paid subscription for more features or more space.

B2B Sales Cycle

Although many employees are using these web services at home and even in their work environment (as long as IT isn’t aware), resulting in pop-and-mom and very small companies to embrace these web services (paid or not), the sales to enterprises and large corporations never happened.
The sales cycle in B2B still requires sales reps, salesmen, product marketers and enterprise grade marketing.
Moreover the requirements of consumers don’t match the requirements of enterprises having Active Directory, LDAP, Oracle or IBM DB2 requirements.

Dropbox, Yammer, Box and many others can testify about this failed business model.

Internet and websites have changed the business of most companies, especially in lead generation, however not for closing the deals as the salesman is still required in B2B.

What’s your B2b business model?
How many sales reps or salesmen do you have ?

Web analytics

In B2C Marketers drive their visitors to the check-out like cowboys drive their cattle. They are both herding their cattle towards their goal.
Cowboys used their eye vision and their horses whereas marketers use web analytics to get insight in the flow on their website. The difference is that not a single cow can escape whereas many visitors will escape by leaving the website. Are marketers under performing cowboys ?

Companies versus traffic

In B2B it is not about driving the traffic as cattle towards the goal as:
- Each visitor can be a potential customer and shouldn’t be lost
- Each visitor belongs to a company thus the need to know which visitors belong to which company
- Each visitor has specific needs
Web analytic systems aren’t sufficient and sophisticated enough to know about each visitor and every visiting company.

Website visitor identification

This requires a different kind of website visitor information that:
- Reveals the companies visiting
- Indicates the interest for your products or services by company
- Shows the level of interest by company
- Shows the increase or decrease of the interest level over time by company

This information will allow contacting the interested companies timely with a to their needs suiting message.

Are you a Cowboy or a B2B Marketer ?

The Four P’s of marketing

About 50 years ago, The Four P’s of Marketing
- Product
- Place
- Price
- Promotion
were coined for describing the product mix.

Applying these Four P’s of Marketing to the Internet / your website will not bring in the expected results:

Product

If your website focuses on your products or services it indicates you create web content about the wrong things.

Besides you and other people in your organization, nobody cares about your products and services.

What your buyers do care about are themselves and a great deal about solving their problems. Getting their problems solved easily, conveniently with a low risk is what most people are looking for.

The best way to market on the Internet is to create valuable information and content for the target market you are trying to reach.
The problem presentation in order to be found and the problem solving are primordial, whereas your products or services are secondary.

Promotion

Promotion usually means advertising or email campaigns that target a market segment over a predefined time span.
However marketing efforts and investments on the Internet take a rather long to get going (especially in Social Media), but are likely to last very long as content on the Internet almost never disappears: search engines have a long memory.

Place

The Internet is the place which is everywhere. Getting found or your content getting found on the Internet is very challenging due to the high competition for attention from all possible other content: news, entertainment, competitors.
Place is not the issue, but getting found is.

Price

The price is likely to be influential on getting found or getting selected.
However the price is not the money but the currency is the content that is getting exchanged for the attention.The better or more valuable the content the more or the longer the attention given by the potential customers.
True Internet success comes from informing, educating and entertaining people in order to make them eager to do business with you.

Content marketing

Content marketing on the Internet is a different beast
The Four P’s of Marketing don’t apply to Internet Marketing as these are changed into:
- Valuable content
- Long lasting
- Getting found
- Content currency

What’s your experience about content on the Internet ?

Zapping TV ads

We all have gotten used to the publicity on TV in between ‘interesting’ shows and during TV series. People have gotten used to waste a lot of time during their daily entertainment time.
And of course many people zap away during these commercial breaks.

Zapping online ads and commercials

People could have the same reaction on the Internet: when a page is loading slowly due to the dreaded commercial or ad (waiting forever for DoubleClick). Then they just need to have multiple browsers open and will be able to zap away to another website. They might come back after
the commercial has played and then they will only look at the content they are interested in.

TV passive – Internet active experience

We all learned to live with TV and the let passively the sequential feed of information and entertainment come to us. Still we make most out of TV by selecting shows and we all zap.

On the Internet we are even more eager to get the content we want immediately – on our demand. Hence our zapping on the Internet will only increase as we use this media and communication channel more actively than television (no couch potatoes). Due to this active use of the Internet, people take less time to zap as they feel they are wasting time quicker than in front of their TV set.

Change slow loading web pages into fast for the business

If your web pages are slow loading, it is likely people will zap away almost instantly.
This has several back lashes:
- Not only your interesting content will not reach your target group
- You search engine results ranking will drop as the time “away” on the website is measured by search engines indicating your website is not interesting
- Google ranking takes into account the speed of loading
- The people who do take time to have the page loaded are or very interested or accidental visitors that you don’t want
- The perception of your company or brand will be negative

Enhance instead of being an annoyance

Online ads and commercials on your website shouldn’t be an annoyance, instead they should enhance the website experience.
Besides loading fast, the online ad or commercial should be targeted to your audience and generate interest by the content. There is always information related to the product that your audience will find interesting – even it are statistics about the use or the market.

Make sure your website loads fast and have interesting ads / commercials are beneficial for your business.

How fast is your website ?
How interesting are the ads or commercials on your website

The Internet presence and website

Most brick-and-mortar companies consider their website and Internet presence is just an addition to their marketing.
However for most of their possible potential customers the website and Internet presence is primordial as they:
- Find: First they need to find the business
- Solve: Then retrieve information related to their problem that needs to be solved
- Trust: build trust by content provided and general Internet presence
- Convince: Getting persuaded to contact the company or to enter the company on the short list

If your website misses on any of these four, your online presence will be wasted and a large part of your potential customers will never address to you or take your company into consideration for purchase, RFI (Request For Information), or RFP (Request For Pricing).
Less interest or leads generated online means less business than your competitors.

Become an Internet expert

As your website and/or Internet presence needs to achieve these challenges you better be or become an Internet expert as you will need the skills and know-how.

This requires learning, time for learning and exercise for trial and failures.
Take your time to invest well in your knowledge and experience in order to let your business benefit from it as the presence on the Internet and website have become primordial.

How much of an expert on website and Internet presence are you ?

High bounce rates are bad

All webmasters and Internet marketers detest bounces as all their efforts of SEO, SEM, online and offline marketing lead to just a bounce. The higher the bounce rate the higher their personal failure as they become obsessed with bounce rates.
We all are convinced that high bounce rates are bad. Which is true compare to people visiting multiple pages, but not all bounces are that bad.

Bouncing is not that bad

However a bounce is better than nothing: not finding your website is even worse as you didn’t catch their attention at all.

Three types of bounces can be defined:
- Visitors that bounce after finding the information required quickly
- Visitors that bounce after reading a large part of the page
- Visitors that bounce almost instantly

The quick
Those that enter your website and found the searched information have quickly and happily left your page, but they do have a positive feeling about your website. A positive feeling will make them remember your website, brand name or even what your product is for.

The readers
Those that have read your page have at least found information relevant to what they were looking for. Unfortunately they didn’t stay on your website to investigate more about your company or solutions. However they sure will remember your brand and the solution you provide.

The immediate
The immediate bouncers have at least seen a glimpse of your website as they had to decide stay or leave. They might even remember your company name or products as they had to make their decision to leave or not.

In most cases something like an impression or a feeling will remain: it will stick in their memory for a longer time. Just make sure the memory and the website experience is positive by short page load times and a pleasing usable layout.

Branding bouncing actions

Two actions for brand naming:
- On every page you should indicate what the company or product is all about or the problem it solves. Then the chance exist the bouncing visitors at least remember your brand name and relate it to the solution or problem it solves.
- In the website description visible in the search results it should clearly state brand name and the purpose of solution you provide as after returning to the search engine page it is likely they will read the description of the last clicked link before scanning the rest of the search page for interesting links.

Of course high bounce rates should be decreased by all means. However bounces are not all that bad and at least they have found your page.

What kind of bounces has your website ?