Most new technology is first applied in pretty traditional ways. TV programs were first created by recording live stage plays. Computers were used as advanced calculating machines, then as electronic typewriters. And today, web and multimedia communications are predominantly electronic mail, website and presentation formats.
Asking: "given my business and how I market and sell, how should I use web and multimedia communications?" is fundamentally the wrong question. But that's the approach most customers and vendors have taken today. "Get Webex and cut down your sales travel, have more meetings."
A more helpful question is: "Given web and multimedia communications technologies, how should I be marketing and selling?"
Multimedia technologies were first applied in the corporate space in the learning organizations (e-learning) and then in marketing as short video clips on websites, or webinars for internal, customer and prospect communications.
Despite Webex and others spending millions to promote the use of live, synchronous web communication technologies, in the selling domain, adoption is still in its infancy. Often the initial experiences are under-whelming, below expectations set by vendors. To date there has been little education around best practices beyond how to use the functions of the tools. I'm hard pressed to name a "whole solution" provider, in the Geoffrey Moore sense.
Breakthrough comes when we re-engineer the process before we apply the new technology.
How have you changed the way you sell by using web and multimedia communications, beyond putting your transactional sales online as online catalogs?
How have you changed the way marketing support sales with new processes and content to support the use of these new technologies?
Are you looking at these as limited tactical tools providing efficiency benefits, or as strategic applications that can fundamentally alter selling, customer engagement and competitive advantage factors? I'm thinking of ways to make it the latter.
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