Week 7 Discussion - MKT 571 Example

Week 7 Discussion Week 7 Discussion It has been said that we are in the ‘dot com age’ yet e-commerce still remains new and often chaning in terms of business management and information technology. Today a lot of publicity has been given to e-commerce and this is because of lack of understanding rather than its understanding. E-commerce can be diffined as the sharingof business information, maintaining business relations and conducting business transactions. The benefits of e-commerce on the other hand go without say and they include overcoming physical bounderies to open international market. E-commerce has helped reduce operational cost and also helped in mass customization. E-commerce has taken many forms and one of those is Business to Business (B-to-B) which is most profitable with 7.29 trillion dollars by 2004 Gardner Group.Despite the huge amounts of revenue created through B to B e-commerce they instances poor results and this can mainly attributed to poor mmeassages in B to B e-commerce.Models for B-to-B1. Update and Verify Data: Hire a temp or a telemarketing firm (I personally like Business to Business Marketing) to place a call to every one of your prospect companies to verify names, titles, functional titles, mailing addresses, and other information that helps target communications with each one.2. Enhance Data: Data sources are available (D&B, infoUSA, ReachForce) that can append information to data such as annual sales, years in business, number of employees, headquarters vs. branches and more. There are also sources for less common information such as number of computers, software presence (Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Apple), building square footage, etc. While this data may not be perfect, it can help B2B marketers better target their marketing and sales efforts.3. Profile Buyers: B2B marketers can take their customer base and build a profile of size, SIC code, annual sales, etc. and rank them. This ranking profile can be used to identify marketing lists that will more li kely contain qualified prospects. If the B2B company’s target universe is small, this is not cost effective. But for those with larger prospect pools it’s a valuable tool.