Charlie Wood, who tracks the emerging Enterprise RSS market and has recently joined Newsgator Technologies as VP of Enterprise Solutions recently wrote a couple of posts on his Moonwatcher weblog about the potential uses of Enterprise RSS in marketing and sales organizations.
In Adoption: RSS: Field Sales Use Case Charlie notes that:
Field sales reps are experts at using technology to stay on top of their markets, customers, and competitors. Enterprise RSS provides a powerful new tool for these road warriors.
Field-based sales reps are responsible for keeping current on a flood of constantly changing information from a wide array of sources. But the very fact that these mobile reps spend so much of their time out of the office means that they are often hours or days behind. A single sales rep who misses a critical update to the corporate price list or a strategic announcement by a prospect or competitor can have an instant and adverse material impact on a company’s top line.
To help their mobile sales forces stay productive, most companies have invested in the infrastructure of mobile data delivery—laptops, PDAs, cellphones, and BlackBerrys. But infrastructure is not enough. What remains missing is an application to track the constant stream of information a mobile sales force depends on, including:
- current product information, price lists, presentations, competitive information, positioning papers, and data sheets from sales enablement and product marketing personnel at corporate headquarters
- updates to outstanding customer support issues, critical situation notifications, consulting engagement status reports, and license renewal reminders from internal corporate systems
- breaking news, corporate financial results, and govenmental filings regarding prospects, customers, and competitors from external data sources
- best practices, win-loss reports, anecdotal information, contacts, and “watercooler talk” from peers
Such an application can be found in an Enterprise RSS system that continously aggregates information from a wide varierty of sources (including people, automated systems, and information feeds), provides a management interface to let adminstrators and users specify which information gets routed to whom and how, and pushes that information directly to users’ desktops and handheld devices. To enable information sharing among peers, the system should also provide its users the ability to publish their own feeds.
And in Adoption: RSS: Marketing Use Case Charlie notes that:
I recently spoke with a marketing director at a multibillion dollar semiconductor manufacturer who had just spent a year and $1 million on an integrated portal/content management system. As it turns out, what she really needed was Enterprise RSS.
The company she works for is a $2 billion semiconductor manufacturer that markets its products to design engineers creating new industrial, communication, computer, and consumer products. The company sells its products through an extensive network of distributors. Both customers and distributors need access to updated information about the company’s products, and since the commonditization curve for these products is very steep, the sooner the information gets into the customers’ hands, the higher the margin on the sale will be.
Last year, the company made a large investment in building a customer portal to make sure that the latest product information was always availble.They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on software, and that much again on professional services, to implement a fully personalized site that allowed customers and distibutors to create custom pages for themselves containing information on the types of products in which they were interested. But even though the company built it, no one came. As it turns out, their audience didn’t want to constantly check the web, even a personalized site, for sporadically updated information. They wanted notifications.
So the company spent more time and money building out an elaborate system to email users with notifications of new products, with links back to the personalized site. But users in North America, fatigued by unwanted commercial email, mostly opted not to provide their email addresses. Sales of the company’s newest, highest-margin products languished while customers and distributors remained unaware of their existence.When I spoke to the marketing director, she told me that what her company needs is a way to allow users to subscribe to personalized information updates without using the overburdened email channel. She had heard of “blogs”, but associated them with politics, and didn’t know anything about RSS.I described a system to her in which she could use the content management system they owned to publish product information to the web, and with a slight addition could also publish the same information to a number of RSS feeds, one for each product category. Links from her site would let her audience subscribe to the product categories in which they were interested, effectively allowing each user to personalize his own notifications. Then when new products were released, users would receive notifications without ever having to divulge their email addresses. She said that was exactly what she wanted and asked how long it would take. Not how much it would cost, just how long it would take. Not long, I told her.
Is it any wonder the CMS and portal guys are so quiet about RSS?
