A web strategy with real bite

Nation's Business, July, 1998 by Martin Plaehn

At Viewpoint DataLabs, we know more than a little about monsters. For instance, there's the Godzilla model we created for big-screen animation in this summer's megabudget movie about the giant reptile.

Then there's the electronic-commerce monster unleashed by the Internet. Unlike our fictional Godzilla, e-commerce is a real force. You can either harness it as an integral part of your business or get squashed by it as your competition figures out how to put it to work.

An Internet strategy is not merely having an online presence. It has to be central to your daily business operation.

At Viewpoint DataLabs, we're a leader in creation of 3-D models used in communications, advertising, video games, and movies. Our clients bring these models to life through computer animation. Viewpoint's work has been featured in recent films, including "Titanic," "Independence Day," and "Air Force One." We created the dancing baby in the Blockbuster ads and the photorealistic 3-D computer models of the Brooklyn Bridge and a New York City taxicab used at the climactic end of "Godzilla."

We have come to recognize the Internet as the marketplace for doing business in the future. To that end, we have made electronic commerce via our World Wide Web site, www.viewpoint.com, central to how we do business. Our customers have access to more than 10,000 models in Viewpoint's online archive.

The challenge with e-commerce is to make it fit in with your existing business.

When you launch a Web site, it's important to pay close attention to relationships with your current sales force and distributors. Don't let your Web presence send a message that you are pursuing only direct Internet sales at their expense. Such a perception might shift their view of you from partner and supplier to competitor. That might cause them to direct business away from you, even though you did not intend to cut them out of your business plan.

Truth be told, no distributor or sales employee would ever encourage a supplier to offer direct sales via a Web site.

Product sales over the Internet require a strategy that serves both your interests and those of your current sales and distribution network.

For example, offer your sales team and distributors private Web pages that contain special information on sales, products, pricing, and packaging. You might also create an exclusive Web-based order-entry system, real-time responses (especially important for international sales), and faster delivery times for sales-force or distributor orders placed through your Web site.

You may even want to give resellers (sales representatives) a credit on future orders every time a customer bypasses them and orders direct from you. This will make your Web site less of a threat. And because resellers are the local reps who promote and service your products, keeping them productive is crucial.

From an internal perspective, build your Web site so that it provides your business-development team with timely customer and sales information. The team needs to know who's visiting, how long they stay, and where they go within your site. It also needs to know how customers learned about the site--from a partner's site, for instance, or a banner ad elsewhere on the Web--where they go from your site, and the correlation between marketing efforts and registrations (individuals signing in as customers).

This information is vital to how you refine marketing, sales, and product promotions. And it may be equally important for developing new client services or products ahead of your competition.

Ultimately, to succeed, your Web strategy must continually take into account how you will do business in the future. Building an incomplete Web site, or failing to integrate and continuously refine your Web strategy, will only increase costs.

If you build the Web site into your infrastructure and business plan, however, you'll create a new mechanism for achieving your business goals--from increased sales to better responsiveness when the marketplace changes--all of which will help you tame the beast and give you a competitive edge in today's "new economy."

Martin Plaehn is chief executive officer of Viewpoint DataLabs in Orem, Utah. He prepared this account with Contributing Editor Susan Biddle Jaffe. Readers with insights on starting or running a business are invited to contribute to this column. Write to: Entrepreneur's Notebook, Nation's Business, 1615 H Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20062-2000.