Art
Siegel

Pulling Resellers To Your Web Site

Not too long ago, your company had to spend a fortune on training manuals, data sheets and other printed documents to support your independent sales force. Today, most of that expense can be eliminated by posting the information on your Web site. The only remaining challenge: Pulling Resellers To Your Web Site. 

Value-added dealers, VARs, independent agents, manufacturer's reps -- whatever you call them, independent salespeople can have an enormous impact on your company’s revenues. The big trick with independents, though, is keeping them fully trained on your product line.

In the past, you used printed documents -- brochures, manuals, data sheets -- to keep them up to speed on your products. These printed documents have three big downsides:

• It costs a fortune to print and mail literature for your independent reps.
  
  
• You know that many of them are not going to take the time to weed out the prior materials and neatly file the new ones for convenient reference.
  
  
• It’s often like pulling teeth to get reps to read, particularly a thick manual.

The answer for most companies has been to move their product information into the Web, where it can be accessed easily by all reps. Web-based product information is current, accurate, requires no rep filing and can be designed for much easier access by reps. Still, to make your product information truly valuable, and make your reps want to visit your site, you have to design it around their needs. Here are five ways to do that:

Design Pages For Printing

Although Web delivery is the medium of choice for frequently updated product information, many of your reps will still prefer hard-copy pages, particularly for detailed data sheets and feature lists. But when a user prints a Web page, the result is often less than useful.

Here are five ways to make printed versions of Web pages as valuable as the on-screen versions:

1. Keep individual Web pages short enough to fit on one printed page
This is the best approach if most pages (e.g., product descriptions) will each fit on a single page. If there are only a few longer pages, test printing to make sure the pages still make sense if broken arbitrarily during printing.

2. Design with page-size tables
Most browsers will attempt to keep tables together on a page when printing, causing a page break between tables rather than breaking a table. To take advantage of this:

• Divide your content into less-than-page-length tables, so the page breaks always occur at logical places in the content.
  
  
• Make sure the first table on the page is short enough so that it doesn't become separated from the content on the top of the page.

3. Provide PDF (Adobe Acrobat) versions of pages
This is the ultimate way to absolutely ensure printed page quality. On every Web page having important content that reps are likely to print, offer a link to download a PDF version of the page that is expressly designed for printing.

If you do this, watch out for this frequent mistake: Many companies already have PDF versions of their catalogs/data sheets which are sent to commercial printers to make conventional printed documents. The problem with these is that they are typically designed with very high resolution graphics suitable for commercial printing, which makes them very slow to download on the Web or print.

When you create downloadable PDF documents, make them as lean as possible, and keep the resolution of graphics to no more than 300 DPI.

4. Avoid frames
Framed pages may be great for developers, but they are often terrible for printing. Only the latest browsers make printing of complete, framed pages convenient (or even possible). And even with those, a small user error can result in only the navigator bar showing up.

5. Make page URLs visible
Suppose one of your reps navigates to the page having the product he wants, and he prints a copy of the page. Next month, he wants to verify that the specs haven't changed by rechecking that same page on your Web. If he set up his browser to automatically print the page URL, he knows how to go directly back o the page. Otherwise, he has to enter from your home page and find the right page from scratch. But when you include the page-level URL on every page your reps are likely to print, you make it much easier for them to return to the same page on your Web.

Clear page references are also a big help when reps contact you by phone, fax or e-mail to ask additional questions (or even to report an error on the page).

Offer Multiple Paths Through The Site

I recently visited the site of a major manufacturer of inkjet printers. I was specifically looking for specs on printers capable of handling at least 11" x 17" sheets. When I got to the site, I was asked to choose which company division I wanted: Photo Products? Commercial Products? Graphic Arts?

When I found the right division, I was ask to choose between "Professional" and "Home" products. I thought my printer would be a professional device, but it turned out to be in the home section.

Then I clicked on "Printers" and was presented with a list of about 40 model numbers, none of which gave any clues to paper size. I had to click on most of them to finally be sure I had visited all pages at the site for 11 x 17 or larger printers.

I'm sure the organization of this site makes a lot of sense to the people who built it. For the rest of us, there should have been multiple menu structures, each designed for a different type of user perspective, such as:

• Printers vs. other products
• Color vs. B&W printers
• Paper sizes
• Resolutions
• Price range

Have your telephone sales and customer service people keep a list of how resellers ask for product information, and then add pages and corresponding links from your home page that match the ways your reps look for information.

Update Frequently

If reps believe the site is static, they’ll visit less often. Worse, they may rely on printouts of pages that have long since been updated. To keep reps coming back:

• Post new content on a regular basis, such as every month on the first of the month, and tell your reps about this schedule.
  
  
• When you make major changes, send an e-mail to your reps advising them of the changes ("Lower prices on Model 1234"), along with links to important changed pages.
  
  
• Place a date on every page in the site that is subject to change, so reps can easily see whether the hard copy they printed is the latest.

Offer Value-Added Attractors

Highly motivated resellers will frequently browse your site for information to support a current sale, or just to stay informed. For the rest, you need additional reasons to visit your site.

A Web site attractor is a feature of the site that has natural pull to independent reps, whether they are interested in your products or not. Here are a few examples:

Helpful content
One company we know of sells its products primarily through mom-and-pop small businesses. This company has added to its Web site a small business management sub-site featuring management articles, tax tips for small business owners, small business Web links and ideas on recruiting staff.

There is no information about the vendor's company or products in this special section of their Web, but every page has links which encourage browsers to refer to other areas of the site.

This helpful content area accomplishes two things:

• It gives these small resellers a reason to frequently revisit the site.
  
  
• It enhances the credibility of the vendor -- they are willing to make an investment in their resellers without immediate promise of a return.

To remain effective as an attractor, this helpful-content area needs to be maintained. That means adding new content, taking down obsolete content and rechecking links to external pages.

An informational newsletter
This serves a similar purpose to that of the helpful content, but differs in these ways:

• Rather than being updated on an irregular basis, it is "published" on a predetermined schedule.
  
  
• A newsletter has a more consistent layout and area of content.

The ideal rep newsletter resembles a printed magazine or newsletter in that it has a predictable range of content. Depending upon the nature of your resellers, a newsletter might focus on:

• Technical how-to content - This is information your resellers want and need to better perform their primary work. If you sell windows to residential contractors, for example, every issue might include expert tips on various aspects of home construction -- not just windows, but other problems your resellers deal with on a frequent basis.
  
  
• Sales and customer service content - All of your resellers can benefit from improved selling skills, and few of them work for companies big enough to provide them with formal sales skills training programs. You can fill that gap by offering them a sales skills newsletter that provides practical tips and techniques to make them more successful.

Business news
One company has an employee check major online newspapers every day for important business articles. This company than creates a page which is delivered daily via e-mail to managers of their reseller organizations, as well as to individual reps who request it. The e-mail has brief descriptions of the major articles and links to the newspaper Web pages having the full text. This e-mail has become a morning starting point for many of the company's top resellers, who use it as a quick update on what's happening that might affect their business.

You can also subscribe to services, such as Accu-Weather, which enable you to provide daily updates on weather, stock markets, sports and many other topics that will pull people to your site.

Tying attractors to your business
With any of these value-added approaches, the key to its success is keeping the focus on the readers' interests, not on what you want to tell them. But since it is your site, you want more than just good will.

The best way to combine these two goals is to do what  is common in magazines -- keep editorial and promotion separate -- but nearby. So, if you have a newsletter about selling skills, keep the sales content generic -- no references to your own products. But within the newsletter, set aside an area that is clearly an advertisement to discuss a new product, present company news or announce a major staff change.

Not Just Web

As handy as the Web is for sharing information, it has two drawbacks: It's tough to browse the Web away from the office, and it's often slow. The answer is to provide your resellers with a copy of your complete Web site on CD-ROM -- plus a full set of all PDF pages, PowerPoint presentations, masters of contracts and forms, ad reprints, customer testimonial letters, press releases, industry articles and anything else they might benefit from having in soft form.

This allows them to browse your site at maximum speed wherever they are, including at a laptop traveling at 33,000 feet.

With commercial production and distribution of CD-ROMs now running about $3.00, it is practical to provide them to many of your resellers on a frequently updated basis.

A similar approach to the CD-ROM, practical for only your top resellers, is for you to create a mirror of your site on their LAN. As with a CD, this gives their salespeople the ability to browse your information much faster than they could on the public Web. And if the information is on a suitably controlled, in-house only server, you can add information that applies only to this reseller, such as their special pricing, terms and delivery schedules. You can also add facilities for special access to special price quotes, order processing and priority customer service.

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90% of the cost and labor that go into your Web site is spent on providing the information your resellers need to effectively represent your company in the marketplace. The other 10% should go into making the site more attractive to them, substantially increasing the number of reps who visit and learn from your site.

SeaBird Associates Inc
3011 NE 7th Drive
Boca Raton, FL 33431
Phone: 561-750-9233
E-mail: Art Siegel

About Art Siegel