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Capturing Customers.com

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Capturing Customers.com

Radical Strategies for Selling and Marketing in a Wired World

Career Press,

15 min read
9 take-aways
Text available

What's inside?

The dotcom postmortem.

Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

You read the manifestos, the prophecies and the change-or-die ultimatums. Now read the postmortem. George Colombo begins his dissection of the dotcom corpse by stating the now obvious: Many Internet companies didn’t offer viable business plans, the Internet stock boom was mostly hysteria, and the average Internet start-up had no clue how to acquire or serve customers. But picking through the carnage, he identifies elements of the dotcom business model that are worth salvaging. In clear, spare prose he explains how businesses can blend brick-and-mortar operations with electronic innovations like permission marketing and mass customization to capture long-term customers - the key to success in a market of hyper-informed and fickle consumers. getabstract strongly recommends this book to any and all professionals, especially those left wondering what’s to become of their vaunted Web strategies in the post-dotcom era.

Summary

A Flood of Failures

In case you haven’t noticed, things are not going so well lately in the dotcom world. The stream of dotcom failures began with a trickle, but it didn’t take long to turn into a full-scale flood. So much for the experts who told you that business as you knew it was over, that traditional companies just could not compete with these "nimble start-ups" that weren’t weighted down with stores, sales offices, or salespeople.

Given excellent hindsight, you can see that the dotcom armor had a couple of obvious chinks. The biggest reveals a basic truth: All other things being equal, it’s better to have a physical presence in your marketplace than not to have one. The biggest lie turns out to be that the Internet changes everything. The Internet changes many things, but it doesn’t change everything. A business still has to serve clients and make a profit.

Bob Lewis, a columnist for InfoWorld and co-author of Selling on the Net, put it best when he said, "Technology without a business purpose is just a bad idea."

Plain, Solid and Reliable

So to what purpose you do put your technology? Start by looking at the hyper-competitive nature of the...

About the Author

George Colombo  is an expert on the effective use of technology in the areas of sales and marketing. He is the author of the best-selling Sales Force Automation, and Sales and Marketing Management magazine recently named him as one of the CRM industry’s ten most influential people.

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