Sealing the Deal and Collecting Their Due

Computerworld - Call it a classic case of silo syndrome. Every month, corporate marketing departments spend hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars conducting research, preparing reports and developing promotional materials designed to help their companies' salespeople sell more products and services. The problem is that salespeople often have no easy way to access the gold mine of information.

"Like a lot of companies, Kodak was good at collecting data but not very good at sharing and updating that data," says James Sanford, senior manager of sales communication and strategy development at Eastman Kodak Co.'s consumer imaging unit in Atlanta. The upshot was that a lot of scattered but valuable marketing information and other intellectual property, such as details about customer preferences and orders, was going untapped by the Rochester, N.Y.-based company's sales force.

That's the business challenge Eloquent Inc. is addressing with its LaunchForce content production and navigation software, which enables Kodak, Hewlett-Packard Co. and several other big companies to deliver a full range of product information—including text, synchronized video, graphics, audio and search capabilities—to globally dispersed sales organizations. Earlier this month, San Mateo, Calif.-based Eloquent merged with Open Text Corp., a knowledge management and collaboration software vendor in Waterloo, Ontario.

Dan Eldridge of Amersham Biosciences

In August, Kodak deployed Eloquent's software as a means of establishing a central Web-based repository for all product information and collateral marketing materials.

The results so far have been "very positive," Sanford says. But, he adds, "I don't think you can say it increases sales. What it has really done is allow people to get more done and spend more face time with customers as opposed to calling around for information on the phone."

At HP's Nonstop Enterprise Division in Cupertino, Calif., program manager Tom Hill says the Eloquent system has delivered a tenfold return on investment since its deployment in November 2001. One of the system's biggest tests came with the merger of HP and Compaq Computer Corp., when the newly combined company needed to get hundreds of salespeople up to speed very quickly on an expanded product line.

"The business problem was real simple. Before the merger was finalized on May 7, we couldn't do any [product] training of salespeople prior to that date," Hill explains. "We also didn't have travel money to spend."