Business-to-Business Internet Marketing, Fourth Edition - Lifecycle ...

Executing E-fulfillment 173
ucts, there is often an evaluation and review process that could take
considerable time before a purchase decision is made.
All of these factors contribute to the reality that, for many companies,
the fulfillment of an inquiry is just the very first step in an ongoing
mating dance between marketer and prospect. In some cases, a
sales cycle can extend to 6, 9, 12, 18 months or more. Periodic contact
with the prospect during this extended period can be costly via traditional
mail, and even more costly via telemarketing or sales calls, yet
cultivating the prospect is imperative. Continuing to requalify the
prospect’s interest becomes just as important in an effort to get the
cream to rise to the top.
With the inevitable dominance of the Internet as the core of business
communication, it is likely that more and more business people
will likely prefer to get their information electronically. IDC says over
50% of online business people download information from the Internet
several times a week.
Push technology offers a whole new form of fulfillment to marketers.
Pushing information pages, special offers, and requalification forms
to a targeted group of prospects could prove to be an expedient, lowcost
method of direct marketing. It could extend the life of direct marketing
campaigns and make them much more effective at an attractive
incremental cost.
Push technology could offer a real service to prospects, fulfilling a
need for automatically delivered information readily provided by marketers
who sponsor its creation and delivery. If it is well executed, push
technology could affordably and easily create a unique one-to-one relationship
with prospects—a goal that many traditional high-end direct
marketing programs strive for, but that is costly and logistically difficult
to achieve.
Some Interesting Variations on Pushing Information
Some companies have made the most of the push concept and have
created what is, in effect, continuous Internet fulfillment. One interesting
example is Individual.com (www.individual.com), a unit of
Office.com (www.office.com). Individual.com (Figure 6.1) is the world’s
leading provider of free, individually customized news, information, and
services to business people over the Internet. With over a million subscribers,
Individual.com covers more than one thousand topics, uses
more than 40 news sources, and has information on more than 50,000