Losing by Forfeit

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Losing by Forfeit

Written by Bill Friday, 14 May 2010 14:53

Imagine for a moment you are on a football team. Not just any team – this one is a real contender – great athletes and a strong work ethic that has become contagious. Everyone is pulling together, training hard to make the playoffs. Winning the games remaining in the regular season will put you there. You control your own destiny, as they say. It is easy to get every player fired up to give peak effort....

Now imagine arriving at the stadium on game day. Everything involved in prepping for the game is going smoothly. The spirit in the locker room is one of energy and confidence. Your team is poised to rock the opponent back on their heels from the very first play. As you run out onto the field, adrenalin building, you are puzzled to see that there is no one in the stands. You look to the far sideline and the opposing team is nowhere in sight. No one else has showed up for the game. Well, there is a groundskeeper busying himself with some turf maintenance. He seems equally puzzled about you being there. Lacking alternatives, you walk over to query him, your teammates following closely behind:

“Hey, what’s going on? Where is everybody?”

“Well,” he replied while scratching his head, “I’m not sure what you’re talking about… but I can tell you that there is no game here today.”

He studies your team uniforms and insignias. “Why aren’t you guys at your game, at the domed stadium downstate? They moved it there to handle the crowd. It’s sold out, you know.”

You hear the thuds of helmets falling to the ground behind you. The adrenalin has vanished and has been replaced with a sense of panic. You showed up ready to play, and to really show your fans that your team can deliver. You showed up, but the fans and your opponent are on a different playing field. You just lost the game… by forfeit.

The story you just read is true. Except, it’s not really about football. It’s about business. Perhaps it’s about your business?

Everyday there are companies with top-notch staff, going to market with strong brands, good reputations and well honed products and services, but customers don’t turn out in the numbers that they expect. The reason is because the marketplace is moving to a different venue. It’s moving to the web.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re not reading this because you like rehashed exhortations about the Internet. Certainly having a website for your business is important - who would dispute that? Almost no one, of course. But keep reading.

According to Barlow Research, as quoted by SellingToSmallBusiness.com, over 70% of companies with revenues greater than $5M now have a website. That’s the good news. The bad news is that a scary large portion of those website-owning companies believe they have addressed the Internet challenge - got their website up and running, and then returned to focus on the blocking & tackling that has been the historical basis for their success.

Returning to the story about the football team… Funny thing, but the cheer leaders got the word about the change in venue and showed up at the right place. They’re an excellent cheer squad and well-liked by the fans. But, the fans didn’t remain interested for very long. It was time to play football and cheer leaders can’t offer that. The cheer leaders showed up at the right place but you still lost the game.

Websites are an excellent cheer leader for your company and they show up right where you need to be - in the marketplace on the web. They provide a place for you to inform your web savvy customers about your products and how to purchase them. But they can’t go it alone. If buying a domain name and creating a website is all you’ve done to engage the Internet marketplace then you may be forfeiting customers to the competition. Website equipped is good, but you must become an “Internet Leveraged” company.

Of the many functions in your business, there are six that face the market:

Informing – you must responsively provide the pre-sales information that prospective buyers might seek in support of their decision process.

Marketing – you must proactively educate the marketplace about the problems that need solved, the advantages of your solutions, and why they should choose your solution now.

Selling – you must turn a prospect that understands their problem and your solution into a customer that has acted to purchase your solution for their problem.

Payment – you must document the purchase agreement and collect payment from the customer or a third party financing company.

Fulfillment – you must deliver your solution to the customer.

Support – you must provide all of the post-sales information and follow-up that will maximize the success of your solution for the customer

These six functions must be considered as you move your business down the path to becoming Internet leveraged. There are state of the art methods and technologies for each one of them that implement automated Internet systems where manual systems have been previously entrenched.

An Internet leveraged business is optimally using automated Internet systems to address the growing online marketplace at continually decreasing costs.

If your business is not Internet leveraged then you are over relying on manual offline systems to address only a declining subset of your market at continually increasing costs. A sobering situation that you should not let stand.

Some businesses are not optimally Internet leveraged until all six of the market facing functions have been implemented with automated Internet systems. Other businesses are optimal with two of them. In any case, you should find the point that is optimal for your business and move to become Internet leveraged. Pay special attention to your Marketing function. The emerging systems and technologies for web based marketing are nothing short of revolutionary, and it’s likely one of the functions that is central to your Internet integration strategy.

A business that has deployed a website has made the initial step towards becoming Internet leveraged. And although your in-house or outside web developer is competent in creating websites they are not competent in building a strategy for becoming Internet leveraged. Internet integration is a business strategy in every regard, and it cannot be delegated to a website developer.

There’s really good news in all this. When your business shows up at the web marketplace, you’ll find new ways to achieve competitive advantage, new ways to gain efficiency, and more customers within reach with each passing day.

(More on this topic can be found in Where Does The Internet Fit?)

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