Showing posts with label search. Show all posts
Showing posts with label search. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

How WWT Took an Enterprise Tower of Babel and Delivered Comprehensive Intelligent Search

Transcript of a discussion on how WWT reached deep into its applications data and content to rapidly and efficiently create a powerful Google-like, pan-enterprise search capability.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Welcome to the next edition to the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Voice of the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation. Stay with us now to learn how agile companies are fending off disruption in favor of innovation.

Gardner
Our next enterprise case study highlights how World Wide Technology, known as WWT, in St. Louis, found itself with a very serious yet somehow very common problem -- users simply couldn’t find relevant company content.

We'll explore how WWT reached deep into its applications, data, and content to rapidly and efficiently create a powerful Google-like, pan-enterprise search capability. Not only does it search better and power users, it sets the stage for expanded capabilities using advanced analytics to engender a more productive and proactive digital business culture.

Here to describe how WWT took an enterprise Tower of Babel and delivered cross-applications intelligent search, we’re joined by James Nippert, Enterprise Search Project Manager at World Wide Technology. Welcome, James.

James Nippert: Hello, thank you for having me.
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Gardner: We're also here with Susan Crincoli, Manager of Enterprise Content at World Wide Technology. Welcome, Susan.

Susan Crincoli: Good afternoon.

Gardner: It seems pretty evident that the better search you have in an organization, the better people are going to find what they need as they need it. What holds companies back from delivering results like people are used to getting on the web?

Nippert
Nippert:  It’s the way things have always been. You just had to drill down from the top level. You go to your Exchange, your email, and start there. Did you save a file here? "No, I think I saved it on my SharePoint site," and so you try to find it there, or maybe it was in a file directory.

Those are the steps that people have been used to because it’s how they've been doing it their entire lives, and it's the nature of beast as we bring more and more enterprise applications into the fold. You have enterprises with 100 or 200 applications, and each of those has its own unique data silos. So, users have to try to juggle all of these different content sources where stuff could be saved. They're just used to having to dig through each one of those to try to find whatever they’re looking for.

Gardner: And we’ve all become accustomed to instant gratification. If we want something, we want it right away. So, if you have to tag something, or you have to jump through some hoops, it doesn’t seem to be part of what people want. Susan, are there any other behavioral parts of this?

Find the world

Crincoli: We, as consumers, are getting used to the Google-like searching. We want to go to one place and find the world. In the information age, we want to go to one place and be able to find whatever it is we’re looking for. That easily transfers into business problems. As we store data in myriad different places, the business user also wants the same kind of an interface.

Crincoli
Gardner: Certain tools that can only look at a certain format or can only deal with certain tags or taxonomy are strong, but we want to be comprehensive. We don’t want to leave any potentially powerful crumbs out there not brought to bear on a problem. What’s been the challenge when it comes to getting at all the data, structured, unstructured, in various formats?

Nippert: Traditional search tools are built off of document metadata. It’s those tags that go along with records, whether it’s the user who uploaded it, the title, or the date it was uploaded. Companies have tried for a long time to get users to tag with additional metadata that will make documents easier to search for. Maybe it’s by department, so you can look for everything in the HR Department.

At the same time, users don’t want to spend half an hour tagging a document; they just want to load it and move on with their day. Take pictures, for example. Most enterprises have hundreds of thousands of pictures that are stored, but they’re all named whatever number the camera gave, and they will name it DC0001. If you have 1,000 pictures named that you can't have a successful search, because no search engine will be able to tell just by that title -- and nothing else -- what they want to find.

Gardner: So, we have a situation where the need is large and the paybacks could be large, but the task and the challenge are daunting. Tell us about your journey. What did you do in order to find a solution?

Nippert: We originally recognized a problem with our on-premises Microsoft SharePoint environment. We were using an older version of SharePoint that was running mostly on metadata, and our users weren’t uploading any metadata along with their internet content.
Your average employee can spend over an entire work week per year searching for information or documentation that they need to get their job done.

We originally set out to solve that issue, but then, as we began interviewing business users, we understood very quickly that this is an enterprise-scale problem. Scaling out even further, we found out it’s been reported that as much as 10 percent of staffing costs can be lost directly to employees not being able to find what they're looking for. Your average employee can spend over an entire work week per year searching for information or documentation that they need to get their job done.

So it’s a very real problem. WWT noticed it over the last couple of years, but as there is the velocity in volume of data increase, it’s only going to become more apparent. With that in mind, we set out to start an RFI process for all the enterprise search leaders. We used the Gartner Magic Quadrants and started talks with all of the Magic Quadrant leaders. Then, through a down-selection process, we eventually landed on HPE.

We have a wonderful strategic partnership with them. It wound up being that we went with the HPE IDOL tool, which has been one of the leaders in enterprise search, as well as big data analytics, for well over a decade now, because it has very extensible platform, something that you can really scale out and customize and build on top of. It doesn’t just do one thing.

Gardner: And it’s one solution to let people find what they're looking for, but when you're comprehensive and you can get all kinds of data in all sorts of apps, silos and nooks and crannies, you can deliver results that the searching party didn’t even know was there. The results can be perhaps more powerful than they were originally expecting.

Susan, any thoughts about a culture, a digital transformation benefit, when you can provide that democratization of search capability, but maybe extended into almost analytics or some larger big-data type of benefit?

Multiple departments

Crincoli: We're working across multiple departments and we have a lot of different internal customers that we need to serve. We have a sales team, business development practices, and professional services. We have all these different departments that are searching for different things to help them satisfy our customers’ needs.

With HPE being a partner, where their customers are our customers, we have this great relationship with them. It helps us to see the value across all the different things that we can bring to bear to get all this data, and then, as we move forward, what we help people build more relevant results.

If something is searched for one time, versus 100 times, then that’s going to bubble up to the top. That means that we're getting the best information to the right people in the right amount of time. I'm looking forward to extending this platform and to looking at analytics and into other platforms.
That means that we're getting the best information to the right people in the right amount of time.

Gardner: That’s why they call it "intelligent search." It learns as you go.

Nippert: The concept behind intelligent search is really two-fold. It first focuses on business empowerment, which is letting your users find whatever it is specifically that they're looking for, but then, when you talk about business enablement, it’s also giving users the intelligent conceptual search experience to find information that they didn’t even know they should be looking for.

If I'm a sales representative and I'm searching for company "X," I need to find any of the Salesforce data on that, but maybe I also need to find the account manager, maybe I need to find professional services’ engineers who have worked on that, or maybe I'm looking for documentation on a past project. As Susan said, that Google-like experience is bringing that all under one roof for someone, so they don’t have to go around to all these different places; it's presented right to them.

Gardner: Tell us about World Wide Technology, so we understand why having this capability is going to be beneficial to your large, complex organization?
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Crincoli: We're a $7-billion organization and we have strategic partnerships with Cisco, HPE, EMC, and NetApp, etc. We have a lot of solutions that we bring to market. We're a solution integrator and we're also a reseller. So, when you're an account manager and you're looking across all of the various solutions that we can provide to solve the customer’s problems, you need to be able to find all of the relevant information.

You probably need to find people as well. Not only do I need to find how we can solve this customer’s problem, but also who has helped us to solve this customer’s problem before. So, let me find the right person, the right pre-sales engineer or the right post-sales engineer. Or maybe there's somebody in professional services. Maybe I want the person who implemented it the last time. All these different people, as well as solutions that we can bring in help give that sales team the information they need right at their fingertips.

It’s very powerful for us to think about the struggles that a sales manager might have, because we have so many different ways that we can help our customer solve those problems. We're giving them that data at their fingertips, whether that’s from Salesforce, all the way through to SharePoint or something in an email that they can’t find from last year. They know they have talked to somebody about this before, or they want to know who helped me. Pulling all of that information together is so powerful.

We don’t want them to waste their time when they're sitting in front of a customer trying to remember what it was that they wanted to talk about.

Gardner: It really amounts to customer service benefits in a big way, but I'm also thinking this is a great example of how, when you architect and deploy and integrate properly on the core, on the back end, that you can get great benefits delivered to the edge. What is the interface that people tend to use? Is there anything we can discuss about ease of use in terms of that front-end query?

Simple and intelligent

Nippert: As far as ease of use goes, it’s simplicity. If you're a sales rep or an engineer in the field, you need to be able to pull something up quickly. You don’t want to have to go through layers and layers of filtering and drilling down to find what you're looking for. It needs to be intelligent enough that, even if you can’t remember the name of a document or the title of a document, you ought to be able to search for a string of text inside the document and it still comes back to the top. That’s part of the intelligent search; that’s one of the features of HPE IDOL.

Whenever you're talking about front-end, it should be something light and something fast. Again, it’s synonymous with what users are used to on the consumer edge, which is Google. There are very few search platforms out there that can do it better. Look at the  Google home page. It’s a search bar and two buttons; that’s all it is. When users are used to that at home and they come to work, they don’t want a cluttered, clumsy, heavy interface. They just need to be able to find what they're looking for as quickly and simply as possible. 

Gardner: Do you have any examples where you can qualify or quantify the benefit of this technology and this approach that will illustrate why it’s important?
It’s gotten better at finding everything from documents to records to web pages across the board; it’s improving on all of those.

Nippert: We actually did a couple surveys, pre- and post-implementation. As I had mentioned earlier, it was very well known that our search demands weren't being met. The feedback that we heard over and over again was "search sucks." People would say that all the time. So, we tried to get a little more quantification around that with some surveys before and after the implementation of IDOL search for the enterprise. We got a couple of really great numbers out of it. We saw that people’s satisfaction with search went up by about 30 percent with overall satisfaction. Before, it was right in the middle, half of them were happy, half of them weren’t.

Now, we're well over 80 percent that have overall satisfaction with search. It’s gotten better at finding everything from documents to records to web pages across the board; it’s improving on all of those. As far as the specifics go, the thing we really cared about going into this was, "Can I find it on the first page?" How often do you ever go to the second page of search results.

With our pre-surveys, we found that under five percent of people were finding it on the first page. They had to go to second or third page or four through 10. Most of the users just gave up if it wasn’t on the first page. Now, over 50 percent of users are able to find what they're looking for on the very first page, and if not, then definitely the second or third page.

We've gone from a completely unsuccessful search experience to a valid successful search experience that we can continue to enhance on.

Crincoli: I agree with James. When I came to the company, I felt that way, too -- search sucks. I couldn’t find what I was looking for. What’s really cool with what we've been able to do is also review what people are searching for. Then, as we go back and look at those analytics, we can make those the best bets.

If we see hundreds of people are searching for the same thing or through different contexts, then we can make those the best bets. They're at the top and you can separate those things out. These are things like the handbook or PTO request forms that people are always searching for.

Gardner: I'm going to just imagine that if I were in the healthcare, pharma, or financial sectors, I'd want to give my employees this capability, but I'd also be concerned about proprietary information and protection of data assets. Maybe you're not doing this, but wonder what you know about allowing for the best of search, but also with protection, warnings, and some sort of governance and oversight. 

Governance suite

Nippert: There is a full governance suite built in and it comes through a couple of different features. One of the main ones is induction, where as IDOL scans through every single line of a document or a PowerPoint slide of a spreadsheet whatever it is, it can recognize credit card numbers, Social Security numbers anything that’s personally identifiable information (PII) and either pull that out, delete it, send alerts, whatever.

You have that full governance suite built in to anything that you've indexed. It also has a mapped security engine built in called Omni Group, so it can map the security of any content source. For example, in SharePoint, if you have access to a file and I don’t and if we each ran a search, you would see a comeback in the results and I wouldn’t. So, it can honor any content’s security.  

Gardner: Your policies and your rules are what’s implemented, and that’s how it goes?

Nippert: Exactly. It is up to as the search team or working with your compliance or governance team to make sure that that does happen.

Gardner: As we think about the future and the availability for other datasets to be perhaps brought in, that search is a great tool for access to more than just corporate data, enterprise data and content, but maybe also the front-end for some advanced querying analytics, business intelligence (BI), has there been any talk about how to take what you are doing in enterprise search and munge that, for lack of a better word, with analytics BI and some of the other big data capabilities.
It is going to be something that we can continue to build on top of, as well and come up with our own unique analytic solutions.

Nippert: Absolutely. So HPE has just recently released BI for Human Intelligence (BIFHI), which is their new front end for IDOL and that has a ton of analytics capabilities built into it that really excited to start looking at a lot of rich text, rich media analytics that can pull the words right off the transcript of an MP4 raw video and transcribe it at the same time. But more than that, it is going to be something that we can continue to build on top of, as well and come up with our own unique analytic solutions.

Gardner: So talk about empowering your employees. Everybody can become a data scientist eventually, right, Susan?

Crincoli: That’s right. If you think about all of the various contexts, we started out with just a few sources, but we also have some excitement because we built custom applications, both for our customers and for our internal work. We're taking that to the next level with building an API and pulling that data into the enterprise search that just makes it even more extensible to our enterprise.

Gardner: I suppose the next step might be the natural language audio request where you would talk to your PC, your handheld device, and say, "World Wide Technology feed me this," and it will come back, right?

Nippert: Absolutely. You won’t even have to lift a finger anymore.

Cool things

Crincoli: It would be interesting to loop in what they are doing with Cortana at Microsoft and some of the machine learning and some of the different analytics behind Cortana. I'd love to see how we could loop that together. But those are all really cool things that we would love to explore.

Gardner: But you can’t get there until you solve the initial blocking and tackling around content and unstructured data synthesized into a usable format and capability.

Nippert: Absolutely. The flip side of controlling your data sources, as we're learning, is that there are a lot of important data sources out there that aren’t good candidates for enterprise search whatsoever. When you look at a couple of terabytes or petabytes of MongoDB data that’s completely unstructured and it’s just binaries, that’s enterprise data, but it’s not something that anyone is looking for.
The flip side of controlling your data sources, as we're learing, is that there are a lot of important data sources out there that aren’t good candidates for enterprise search.

So even though our original knee-jerk is to index everything, get everything to search, you want to able to search across everything. But you also have to take it with a grain of salt. A new content source could be hundreds or thousands of results that could potentially clutter the accuracy of results. Sometimes, it’s actually knowing when not to search something.

Gardner: That would be the "not-too-intelligent" search, right?

Nippert: Exactly.

Gardner: It sounds like this is an essential part of any organization to become a digital company and data-driven, an intelligent and fit-for-purpose approach to gathering that assets wherever they are.

I want to thank our guests. We've been exploring with World Wide Technology how a very serious and somehow difficult problem of users simply finding relevant content can be solved. We've seen how WWT has reached deep into its applications data and content to rapidly and efficiently create a powerful Google-like, pan-enterprise search capability.

So, please join me in thanking our guests, James Nippert, the Enterprise Search Project Manager at World Wide Technology. Thanks, James.

Nippert: Thank you very much for having me.
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Gardner:  And we've also been joined by Susan Crincoli, Manager of Enterprise Content at World Wide Technology. Thank you, Susan.

Crincoli:  Thanks, Dana, I appreciate it.

Gardner:  And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining us for this Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Voice of the Customer digital transformation discussion.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HPE-sponsored interviews. Thanks again for listening, and please do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on how WWT reached deep into its applications data and content to rapidly and efficiently create a powerful Google-like, pan-enterprise search capability. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2016. All rights reserved.

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Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Holiday Peak Season Hits for Retailers Alibris and QVC -- A Logistics and Shipping Carol

Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast on peak season shipping efficiencies and UPS retail solutions with Alibris and QVC.

Listen to the podcast here. Sponsor: UPS.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, a sponsored podcast discussion about the peak holiday season for retail shopping -- online and via television -- and the impact that this large bump in the road has logistically and technically for some major retailers.

We’re going to discuss how Alibris, an online media and bookseller, as well as QVC, a global multimedia shopping network, handles this peak demand issue. The peak is culminating for such shippers as UPS this week, right around Dec. 19, 2007.

We’re going to talk about how the end-user in this era of higher expectations is now accustomed to making a phone call or going online to tap in a few keystrokes, and then -- like Santa himself -- having a package show up within a day or two. It's instant gratification, if you will, from the logistics point-of-view.

Helping us understand how this modern miracle can be accomplished at such high scale and with such a huge amount of additional capacity required during the November and December shopping period, we’re joined by two guests. We’re going to be talking with Mark Nason, vice president of operations at Alibris, and also Andy Quay, vice president of outbound transportation at QVC. I want to welcome you both to the show.

Mark Nason: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Tell us a little bit about what’s different now for Alibris, given the peak season demands, over just a few years ago. Have the expectations of the end-user really evolved, and how do you maintain that sort of instant gratification despite the level of complexity required?

Nason: What we strive for is a consistent customer experience. Through the online order process, shoppers have come to expect a routine that is reliable, accurate, timely, and customer-centric. For us to do that internally it means that we prepare for this season throughout the year. The same challenges that we have are just intensified during this holiday time-period.

Gardner: For those who might not be familiar, tell us a little about Alibris. You sell books, used books, out-of-print books, rare media and other media -- and not just directly, but through an online network of independent booksellers and retailers. Tell us more about how that works.

Nason: Alibris has books you thought you would never find. These are books, music, movies, things in the secondary market with much more variety, and that aren’t necessarily found in your local new bookseller or local media store.

We aggregate -- through the use of technology -- the selection of thousands of sellers worldwide. That allows sellers to list things and standardize what they have in their store through the use of a central catalogue, and allows customers to find what they're looking for when it comes to a book or title on some subject that isn’t readily available through their local new books store or media seller.

Gardner: Now, this is a very substantial undertaking. We're talking about something on the order of 70 million books from a network of some 10,000 booksellers in 65 or more countries. Is that right?

Nason: Roughly, that’s correct. Going in and out of the network at any given time, we've got thousands of sellers with literally millions of book and other media titles. These need to be updated, not only when they are sold or added, but also when they are priced. Prices are constantly changing. It’s a very dynamic market.

Gardner: What is the difference in terms of the volume that you manage from your slowest time of the year compared to this peak holiday period, from mid-November through December?

Nason: It’s roughly 100 percent.

Gardner: Wow!

Nason: In this industry there are actually two peak time periods. We experience this during the back-to-school season that occurs both in January and the latter-half of August and into September.

Gardner: So at the end of the calendar year you deal with the holidays, but also for those college students who are entering into their second semester?

Nason: Exactly. Our peak season associated with the holidays in December extends well into January and even the first week of February.

Gardner: Given this network and the scale and volume and the number of different players, how do you manage a consistent response to your customers, even with a 100 percent increase at the peak season?

Nason: Well, you hit on the term we use a lot -- and that is "managing" the complexity of the arrangement. We have to be sure there is bandwidth available. It’s not just staffing and workstations per se. The technology behind it has to handle the workload on the website, and through to our service partners, which we call our B2B partners. Their volume increases as well.

So all the file sizes, if you will, during the transfer processes are larger, and there is just more for everybody to do. That bandwidth has to be available, and it has to be fully functional at the smaller size, in order for it to function in its larger form.

Gardner: I assume this isn’t something you can do entirely on your own, that you depend on partners, some of those B2B folks you mentioned. Tell us a little bit about some of the major ones, and how they help you ramp up.

Nason: In the area of fulfillment, we rely heavily on our third-party logistics partners, which include carriers. At our distribution centers, typically we lease space, equipment, and the labor required to keep up with the volume.

Then with our B2B partners -- those are the folks that buy from us on a wholesale or distribution basis -- we work out with them ahead of time what their volume estimates might be and what their demands on us would be. Then we work on scheduling when those files might come through, so we can be proactive in fulfilling those orders.

Gardner: When it comes to the actual delivery of the package, tell us how that works and how you manage that complexity and/or scale.

Nason: Well, we have a benefit in that we are in locations that have scalable capacity available from the carriers. That includes lift capacity at the airport, trucking capacity for the highway, and, of course, railheads. These are all issues we are sensitive to, when it comes to informing our carriers and other suppliers that we rely on, by giving them estimates of what we expect our volume to be. It gives them the lead time they need to have capacity there for us.

Gardner: I suppose communication is essential. Is there a higher level of integration handoff between your systems and their systems? Is this entering a more automated level?

Nason: It is, year-round. For peak season it doesn’t necessarily change in that form. The process remains. However, we may have multiple pick-ups scheduled throughout the day from our primary carriers, and/or we arrange special holiday calendar scheduling with those carriers for pick-up, perhaps on a Saturday, or twice on Mondays. If they are sensitive to weather or traffic delays, for example, we know the terminals they need to go through.

Gardner: How about returns? Is that something that you work with these carriers on as well? Or is that something you handle separately?

Nason: Returns are a fundamental part of our business. In fact, we do our best to give the customer the confidence of knowing that by purchasing in the secondary market, the transaction is indemnified, and returns are a definite part of our business on a day-to-day basis.

Gardner: What can we expect in the future? Obviously this volume continues, the expectations rise, and people are doing more types of things online. I suppose college students have been brought up with this, rather than it being something they have learned. It’s something that has always been there.

Do you see any prospects in the future for a higher level of technology need or collaboration need, how can we scale even further?

Nason: Constantly, the improvements in technology challenge the process, and managing the complexity is what you weigh against streamlining even further what we have available -- in particular, optimizing inter-modal transport. For example, with fuel costs skyrocketing, and the cost of everyone's time going up, through the use of technology we look for opportunities on back-haul lanes, or in getting partial loads filled before they move, without sacrificing the service interval.

These are the kinds of things that technology allows when it's managed properly. Of course, another layer of technology has to be considered from the complexity standpoint before you can be successful with it.

Gardner: Is there anything in the future you would like to see from such carriers as UPS, as they try to become your top partners on all of this?

Nason: Integration is the key, and by that I mean the features of service that they provide. It’s not simply transportation, it’s the trackability, it’s scaling; both on the volume side, but also in allowing us to give the customer information about the order, when it will be there, or any exceptions. They're an extension of Alibris in terms of what the customer sees for the end-to-end transaction.

Gardner: Fine, thanks. Now we’re going to talk with Andy Quay, the vice president of outbound transportation at QVC.

QVC has been having a very busy holiday peak season this year. And QVC, of course, has had an illustrious long-term play in pioneering, both retail through television and cable, as well as online.

Welcome Andy, and tell us a little bit about QVC and your story. How long you have been there?

Andy Quay: Well, I am celebrating my 21st anniversary this December. So I can say I have been through every peak season.

Although peak season 20 some years ago was nothing compared to what we are dealing with now. This has been an evolutionary process as our business has grown and become accepted by consumers across the country. More recently we’ve been able to develop with our website as well, which really augments our live television shows.

Gardner: Give us a sense of the numbers here. After 21 years this is quite a different ball game than when you started. What sort of volumes and what sort of records, if any, are we dealing with this year?

Quay: Well, I can tell you that in our first year in business, in December, 1986 -- and I still have the actual report, believe it or not -- we shipped 14,600 some-odd packages. We are currently shipping probably 350,000 to 450,000 packages a day at this point.

We've come a long way. We actually set a record this year by taking more than 870,000 orders in a 24-hour period on Nov. 11. This led to our typical busy season through the Thanksgiving holiday to the December Christmas season. We'll be shipping right up to Friday, Dec. 21 for delivery on Christmas.

Gardner: At QVC you sell a tremendous diversity of goods. Many of them you procure and deal with the supply chain yourselves, therefore cutting costs and offering quicker turnaround processing.

Tell us a little about the technology that goes into that, and perhaps also a little bit about what the expectations are now. Since people are used to clicking a button on their keyboard or making a quick phone call and then ... wow, a day or two later, the package arrives. Their expectations are pretty high.

Quay: That’s an excellent point. We’ve been seeing customer expectations get higher every year. More people are becoming familiar with this form of ordering, whether through the web or over the telephone.

I’ll also touch on the technology very briefly. We use an automated ordering system with voice response units that enable my wife, for example, to place an order in about 35 seconds. So that enables us to handle high volumes of orders. Using that technology has allowed us to take some 870,000 orders in a day.

The planning for this allows the supply chain to be very quick. We are like television broadcasts. We literally are scripting the show 24-hours in advance. So we can be very opportunistic. If we have a hot product, we can get it on the air very quickly and not have to worry about necessarily supplying 300 brick-and-mortar stores. Our turnaround time can be blindingly quick, depending upon how fast we can get the inventory into one of our distribution centers.

We currently have five distribution centers, and they are all along the East Coast of the U.S., and they are predominantly commodity driven. For example, we have specific commodities such as jewelry in one facility, and we have apparel and accessories as categories of goods in another facility. That lends itself to a challenge when people are ordering multiple items across commodities. We end up having to ship them separately. That’s a dilemma we have been struggling with as customers do more multi-category orders.

As I mentioned, the scripting of the SKUs for the broadcast is typically 24 hours prior, with the exception of Today's Special Value (TSV) show and other specific shows. We spend a great deal of time forecasting for the phone centers and the distribution carriers to ensure that we can take the orders in volume and ship them within 48 hours.

We are constantly focused on our cycle-time and in trying to turn those orders around and get them out the door as quickly as possible. To support this effort we probably have one of the largest "zone-jumping" operations in the country.

Gardner: And what does "zone-jumping" mean?

Quay: Zone jumping allows me to contract with truckload carriers to deliver our packages into the UPS network. We go to 14 different hubs across the country, in many cases using team drivers. This enables us to speed the delivery to the customer, and we’re constantly focused on the customer.

Gardner: And this must require quite a bit of integration, or at least interoperability in communications between your systems and UPS’s systems?

Quay: Absolutely, and we carefully plan leading up to the peak season we're in now. We literally begin planning this in June for what takes place during the holidays -- right up to Christmas Day.

We work very closely with UPS and their network planners, both ground and air, to ensure cost-efficient delivery to the customer. We actually sort packages for air shipments, during critical business periods, to optimize the UPS network.

Gardner: It really sounds like a just-in-time supply chain for retail.

Quay: It's as close as you can get it. As I sometimes say, it's "just-out-of-time"! We do certainly try for a quick turnaround.

Coming back to what you said earlier, as far as the competition goes it is getting more intense. The customer expectations are getting higher and higher. And, of course, we are trying to stay ahead of the curve.

Gardner: What's the difference between your peak season now and the more regular baseline of volume of business? How much increase do you have to deal with during this period, between late-November and mid- to late-December?

Quay: Well, it ramps up considerably. We can go from a 150,000 to 200,000 orders a day, to literally over 400,000 to 500,000 orders a day.

Gardner: So double, maybe triple, the volume?

Quay: Right. The other challenge I mentioned, the commodity-basis distribution that we operate on -- along with the volatility of our orders -- this all tends to focus on a single distribution center. We spend an inordinate amount of time trying to forecast volume, both for staffing and also planning with our carriers like UPS.

We want to know what buying is going to be shipping, at what distribution center, on what day. And that only compresses even more around the holiday period. We have specific cutoff times that the distribution center operations must hit in order to meet the customers' delivery date. We work very closely on when we dispatch trucks ... all of this leading up to our holiday cutoff sequence this week.

We try to maximize ground service versus the more expensive airfreight. I think we have done a very good job at penetrating UPS’s network to maximize ground delivery, all in an effort to keep the shipping and handling cost to the customers as low as possible.

Gardner: How about the future? Is this trend of that past 21 years sustainable? How far can we go?

Quay: I believe it is sustainable. Our web business is booming, with very high growth every year. And that really augments the television broadcast. We have, honestly, a fair amount of penetration, and we can still obtain more with our audiences.

Our cable broadcast is in 90 million-plus homes that actually receive our signal, but a relatively small portion actually purchase. So that’s my point. We have a long way to go to further penetrate and earn more customers. We have to get people to try us.

Gardner: And, of course, people are now also finding goods via Web search. For example, when they go to search for a piece of apparel, or a retail item, or some kind or a gift -- they might just go to, say, Google or Yahoo! or MSN, and type something in and end up on your web site. That gives you a whole new level of potential volume.

Quay: Well, it does, and we also make the website very well known. I am looking at our television show right now and we’ve have our www.qvc.com site advertised right on it. That provides an extended search capability. People are trying to do more shopping on the web, in addition to watching the television.

Gardner: We have synergies on the distribution side; we have synergies on the acquisition, and of using information and how to engage with partners. And so the technology is really in the middle of it all. And you also expect a tremendous amount of growth still to come.

Quay: Yes, absolutely. And it’s amazing, the different functions within QVC, the synergies that we work together internally. That goes from our merchandising to where we are sourcing product.

You mentioned supply chains, and the visibility of getting into the distribution center. Our merchants and programmers watch that like a hawk so they can script new items on the air. We have pre-scripted hours that we’re definitely looking to get certain products on.

The planning for the television broadcast is something that drives the back end of the supply chain. The coordination with our distribution centers -- as far as getting the operation forecast, staffed and fulfilled through shipping to our customers -- is outstanding.

Gardner: Well, it’s very impressive, given what you’ve done and all of these different plates that you need to keep spinning in the air -- while also keeping them coordinated. I really appreciate the daunting task, and that you have been able to reach this high level of efficiency.

Quay: Oh, we are not perfect yet. We are still working very hard to improve our service. It never slows down.

Gardner: Great. Thanks very much for your input. I have learned a bit more about this whole peak season, what really goes on behind the scenes at both QVC and Alibris. It seems like quite an accomplishment what you all are able to do at both organizations.

Nason: Well, thank you, Dana. Thanks for taking the time to hear about the Alibris story.

Gardner: Sure. This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. We have been talking with Mark Nason, the vice president of operations at Alibris, about managing the peak season demand, and the logistics and technology required for a seamless customer experience.

We’ve also been joined by Andy Quay, vice president of outbound transportation, at the QVC shopping network.

Thanks to our listeners for joining on this BriefingsDirect sponsored podcast. Come back and listen again next time.

Listen to the podcast here. Sponsor: UPS.

Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast on peak season shipping efficiencies and UPS retail solutions. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2007. All rights reserved.

Monday, September 17, 2007

Transcript of B2B Search Trends Podcast Based on Enquiro's Survey Findings

Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect[TM] podcast on B2B search usage, trends and future direction with host Dana Gardner, recorded June 26, 2007.

Listen to the podcast here
. Watch the video here. Sponsor: ZoomInfo.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Today, a discussion about online search and its role in business-to-business (B2B) activities, particularly the research and acquisitions process for people who are in businesses trying to find goods and services. They seem to be using search more than ever.

We're going to look at a survey conducted last March, a fairly recent look at B2B users, their relationship to search, and how search is shifting based on the findings. Joining us to discuss this we have the originator of the survey, President and CEO of Enquiro Search Solutions, Gord Hotchkiss. Welcome to the show, Gord.

Gord Hotchkiss: Thank you.

Gardner: Also joining us to add some analysis and perspective on where search for B2B activities is going is Bryan Burdick, COO of ZoomInfo. Welcome, Bryan.

Bryan Burdick: Dana, thanks for having me.

Gardner: It seems that people, whether they're buying consumer goods, small business supplies -- anything from Gorilla Glue to guided missiles -- are using search at some point in this process. Some people start and end with search. They actually buy the products through a search process. I want to start by understanding a little bit about the survey itself and the fact that it’s the second survey that’s been done on this B2B search activity, the first being in 2004.

So, let’s go to Enquiro with Gord. Tell us a little bit about the history and some of the major bullet points of this particular survey?

Hotchkiss: As you said, we did the original survey in 2004 and, at the time, there wasn't a lot of research out there about search in general, even on the consumer side. There was virtually nothing on the B2B side. We knew search was important, just from what our clients were saying and the results we had had, but we hadn’t done anything extensive enough outside our client base to start to quantify how important it was.

The first survey was an attempt to do that. It certainly proved that search was important. We found that online activity, in particular that connected with search activity, was consistent in a large percentage of purchases. In 2007, we added more insight to the methodology. We wanted to understand the different roles that are typical in B2B purchases -- economic buyers versus technical buyers versus user buyers. We also wanted to get more understanding of the different phases of the buying cycle.

We structured the survey so that we could slice the data based on those parameters and get more insight into those areas. As far as the main takeaways from the study, obviously online activity is more important than ever. In fact, we asked respondents to indicate from a list of over 30 influencers what was most important to them in making the purchase decision. Online factors, such as interaction with the vendor Website and interaction with the search engine were right up there with the traditional winner, word of mouth. What we see is a real link between those and looking for objective information and specific detail.

A lot of that search activity happens on specific properties, and we’ll be diving into that a little bit later in the podcast. We did notice an evolution of behavior as you move through the funnel, and the nature of the interactions with the different online resources changes how you navigate to them and how you go to different sites for information. But, online research was consistent through the entire process, from awareness right through to purchase.

There’s a lot of back and forth. Offline factors influence online activity and vice-versa. So, we saw a merging of the online and the offline worlds in making these decisions and trying to come to what’s the right decision for your company or what’s the right product or service.

Gardner: Tell us a little bit about Enquiro. You are a marketing, consulting, and research firm. Is that correct?

Hotchkiss: Yes. We work with clients in putting together their search campaigns in the B2B space, but we also have an active research arm. So, we're continually doing research primarily on the usability and qualitative analysis side, but we do survey work as well. The purpose of that is to provide more insight into how consumers use search and how businesses use search to make buying decisions.

Gardner: Three years between these surveys is probably not a lot for many businesses, but it’s a huge amount of time in the search industry. What would you say was the biggest difference in your results and findings over this three-year period?

Hotchkiss: Surprisingly, we didn’t notice huge trend differences in the three-year period. If anything, we saw increased reliance on online factors and probably just more activity online and more interactions with sites, but it was the continuation of a trend we saw in 2004. We didn’t see any big shifts. We just found increased reliance on online to do that research.

When we say "increased reliance," we're probably talking 10 percentage points up over the three years. So, if 65 percent of the people were doing it in 2004, 75 percent of the people are doing it now. That’s primarily where we saw the trends going.

Gardner: And, you say that that you're also seeing search applied to this process in different ways and different facets. For example, word of mouth would tip someone off to go look for something, and the first way that they look for it is by using search.

Hotchkiss: Yes. When we looked at the different phases of the buying cycle, it starts with awareness. You become aware that you need something. There was a high percentage of people -- in the high 60-percent range -- who said, "Once I become aware that I need something, the first place I'm going to go is the search engine to start looking for it."

A lot of that traffic is going to end up on Google. It was the overwhelming choice among general search engines for B2B buyers.

But, as you move through the process, you start doing what we call a "landscape search." The first search is to get the lay of the land to figure out the information sites that have the information you are looking for. Who are the main vendors playing in this space? Where are the best bets to go and get more information to help make this purchase decision?

So, those first searches tend to be fairly generic -- shorter key phrases -- just to get the lay of the land to figure out where to go. As you progress, search tends to become more of a navigational shortcut, and we’ve seen this activity increase over the last two to three years. Increasingly, we're using search engines to get us from point A to point B online.

As you get into the buying process, you’re familiar with the vendor site. You’ve been on the site. You’ve checked different product information pages. As you come back to that research process, you say, "I really want to find that product spec sheet that I saw on this vendor site." A lot of that navigation to those specific pages happens through a search engine. So, there are multiple touch points through the process.

Gardner: Now, you did this search in March, and you surveyed 1,086 people, North Americans, mostly women -- 63 percent -- average age 43 years old, with 67 percent of them having at least attended university.

Hotchkiss: Right.

Gardner: Can you tell us little bit more about these people? Are these people that you acquired through strictly business activities? How did you know that they were in a purchasing mode?

Hotchkiss: When we structured the study, we used our sampling partner, Survey Sampling International, for access to their B2B decision-maker panel. In two different parts of the survey, we asked, “Are you currently considering a purchase in excess of a thousand dollars?” That was a qualifying question. If they answered yes, they got to continue the survey.

That’s how we determined what role they were playing in this purchase that was happening right now. What were they considering purchasing? What was influencing them? We wanted to use a purchase process they were in the middle of, because it would obviously be fresh in their minds and they could really tell us what they were going through, as far as what influenced them.

We also wanted to get a retroactive view of a successful transaction. So, in the second part of the survey, we asked them to recall a transaction they had made in the past 12 months. We wanted to see whether that initial search led to a successful purchase down the road, and, at the end of the road, how the different factors influenced them. So, we actually approached them from a couple of different angles.

Gardner: Now, 85 percent of these people say they're using online search for some aspect of this purchasing process. It strikes me that this involves trillions of dollars worth of goods. These are big companies and, in some cases, buying lots of goods at over a hundred thousand dollars a whack. Do you concur that we're talking about trillions of dollars of B2B goods now being impacted significantly by the search process?

Hotchkiss: Absolutely. The importance of this is maybe the most mind-numbing fact to contemplate. Traditionally, the B2B space has been a little slow to move into the search arena. Traditionally, in the search arena, the big advertisers tend to be travel or financial products.

B2B is just starting to understand how integral search is to all this activity. When you think of the nature of the B2B purchase, risk avoidance is a huge issue. You want to make sure that whatever decisions you make are well-researched and well-considered purchases. That naturally leads to a lot of online interaction.

Gardner: I suppose if I am making a $100,000 purchases, and I make a mistake, I am not going to be around for long. Right?

Hotchkiss: Exactly. The other thing is that we don’t tend to be as emotionally involved with the B2B purchase. Things like branding play different roles than when you're doing consumer purchases. The brand affinity is something you might have if it’s an area where you don’t have a lot of experience. It may be a new need that’s coming on the horizon for your business. You are really starting from Square One, and that’s the perfect place for search to plug in and be the solution when you start researching those purchases.

Gardner: Right. These folks are looking for practical approaches and real information. Let’s go to Bryan Burdick at ZoomInfo.

This is growing quickly as an overall trend, but ZoomInfo, which is focused on business search, is growing much more rapidly. What’s driving your growth at ZoomInfo, and how does that relate to this B2B search activity?

Burdick: The business information search is a primary factor driving our growth. Our company right now is growing on two fronts. One is our traditional paid-search model, where we have subscription services focused on people information that is targeted at salespeople and recruiters as a source for candidates and prospects.

The more rapidly growing piece of our business is the advertising-driven business information search engine, which I think is a really interesting trend related to the concept you guys were just talking about. Not only does the B2B advertiser spend lots of money today trying to reach out, but the B2B searcher has new tools, services, and capabilities that provide a richer, better, more efficient search than they’ve had through the traditional search engines.

Gardner: By far, the largest player in this is Google with, according to the Enquiro survey, 78 percent use by this group of respondents. Way down the line was Yahoo!, and then far below that was MSN. It strikes me that Google is a general search engine, and yet we are asking for very specific business information.

Bryan, do you expect that we are going to see some sort of a specialization or a cleaving between general search and more vertical specialized search?

Burdick: Absolutely, and, in fact, that’s really ZoomInfo’s mission -- to do for the business-information search world what the Expedia or Travelocity did for travel search. When you think about it, you can actually go to Google and find an airplane ticket, but why would you?

It’s so much more efficient to go to one of these vertical search engines that are looking at the databases, looking at the data, and indexing it in a much more efficient way. You're starting to see that in a lot of other verticals. Travel has been the quickest to adopt that, but everything from business information, like ZoomInfo, to podcasts with Podzinger, and other types of vertical searches, have been focusing on a niche and organizing the content more efficiently.

Hotchkiss: One thing we found in the survey is that there's a natural evolution through the process. Although you might start on Google as you are trying to find those information sites, quite often it’s the verticals that people work into as they are starting to look for specific, more granular information on the companies they're thinking of doing business with. That’s where ZoomInfo and other vertical players fit a need.

Gardner: I suppose another thing that seems the same from 2004 to 2007 is the importance of a supplier’s Website. According to your survey findings, people are very interested in word of mouth. They use the search engine to move from that point to gather more information, but they're very quickly interested in solid, simple, straightforward, text-based information from the suppliers themselves. I suppose that underscores the need for sellers to have a very strong Website.

Hotchkiss: That was a really strong finding, and not really surprising. It made sense, but I think how important the straightforward information was to the people doing the research was somewhat surprising. It’s one of those things where you get findings in research and then afterwards, when you apply common sense to it, you say, "Yeah, that just makes sense."

But, remember these searchers are out to gather information for an organizational buying model. They are gathering information that will, in a lot of cases, be passed on to other individuals to help them make the decision as a group.

You don’t necessarily want to sit through a linear presentation of information, like an online video, or even a podcast, if your intent is just to pickup specific data and pass it along. Now, if you are the user, and this is that something you are going to be using, you may be a lot more open to a linear how-to demo. But, it’s important to match the content on your site to the types of buyers and individuals who are gathering the information.

The takeaway we got from this was to make sure you're covering the basics first. Make sure that you're getting the clear concise product information out. In a lot of cases, you know you are going to be compared to the competition. Why not enable some of that to happen on your site and make the buyer's job easier by arming them with the necessary equipment.

The number one thing that came across as desirable was pricing information, which is really tough for B2B marketers to put on the site, because in a lot of cases these are complex solutions. But, what the buyers are looking for is qualifying it in a budget range.

Is this a $10,000 purchase, a $100,000 purchase or a million dollar purchase? I need to know that to qualify, so I can move on. Please give me that information. It can be ranges. It doesn’t have to be specific, but I need to be able to qualify it.

Burdick: Dana, I would add that some of the typical mistakes that a B2B marketer will make from a search-engine marketing perspective is jumping too quickly or focusing too much on the actual advertising piece. They need to do that, but sometimes they forget about the search engine optimization. Very often, they leave that up to the technical team, which may optimize the search or the site in ways that aren't optimal from a marketing perspective.

Then, as Gord was saying, they get the user, or the potential customer, in there and the customer gets lost on their own site, searching for the type of information that they're looking for. It’s not like a consumer model, where the consumer already knows, in most cases that they are looking for a DVD player or whatever it is. They may even have a model number, and they're looking for the best price online. It’s much more of an information-gathering process in the B2B case.

Gardner: Perhaps the takeaway here would be that people want to get just the facts upfront and they want a ballpark figure, but they also want to be able to use search to get to that information fairly quickly.

So, if you’re going to optimize your site, your key information can’t be 18 pages deep into the search process, but you also have to consider that factual information needs to be as accessible as your main branding page.

Burdick: Absolutely.

Hotchkiss: One more point on that. A lot of B2B marketers like to capture as much information about a lead as early in the process as possible, so it can be handed over to the sales department, which can close the sale.

But, what happens in a B-to-B purchase is that the first touch point with your vendor Website is typically not the decision maker, the ultimate decision maker? It tends to be somebody who is gathering information to help arm the company to make that eventual purchase decision.

So, if you push to establish contact with that person, they're not ready to establish contact with the vendor, because they don’t have the buying power. Even if you do push to get it, your salespeople are spending a lot of time following up on leads that aren’t qualified buyers. They have to retrench down the road and try to re-establish connections with the person who has the economic power.

So, it’s really a "date," and, in a lot of cases, it’s a long series of dates. If you push too fast you are just going to push the prospect away.

Gardner: You don’t want to propose on the first date.

Hotchkiss: Yeah.

Gardner: On the other hand, one of the findings from the survey was that 50 percent convert to a sale online. So, that means that when the research, winnowing, triage, and the comparative shopping are over, the economic buyer, who is empowered to make a decision, will go back online and consummate the deal. Does that make sense?

Hotchkiss: Yeah. Here's some further insight into that, because we saw that number surprising when we did the overall data. When we pulled the data apart, we found that a lot of those purchases tended to be things like computer systems, where they might have been buying through a Dell or someone like that.

Gardner: The direct model.

Hotchkiss: We thought that was a really high online conversion rate. As we looked at the data a little more, we saw that in a lot of cases it was smaller software purchases or system-based hardware purchases. That made a little more sense, as we went down that road. There was a fairly strong manufacturing component, where people were buying parts and different things. In those cases, a lot of those purchases are made through an electronic marketplace. We're seeing that as an increasing trend too, e-commerce-enabled market places.

Gardner: I suppose it's also logical that when the price or the total purchase price is less than $50,000 or closer to $10,000, they’ll be more likely to do that online confirmation and make a purchase. To me, this says that small- to medium-sized businesses selling small types of goods should be very focused on search and B2B online activities. Does that follow?

Hotchkiss: Everybody needs to be focused on search. I can’t see an exception. You mentioned the percentage that said they would go online. We segmented out the group that didn’t indicate they go online to see what was unique about them.

The only thing unique about them was their age. They tended to be older buyers and tended to be with smaller organizations, where the CEO was more actively involved in the purchase decision. That was really the only variants we saw. If it’s a generational thing, then obviously that percentage is going to get smaller every year.

Burdick: Dana, could I ask Gord a follow-up question to that?

Gardner: Of course.

Burdick: I'm curious whether, as you dug into the data, you saw any differences between online follow-throughs to purchase on hard goods versus services. I'd think that people buy computers online, but if they're buying services from a B2B company, that tends to be offline.

Hotchkiss: When we were looking at influencing factors, B2B services was the one where word of mouth edged out online factors by a significant margin. When you're trying to retain a service, word of mouth is still very influential. In pretty much every other category, online was right up there with word of mouth, in some cases edging it out as an influencing factor.

Gardner: Okay, another number from this was that 95 percent said they use search to find what they want at some point or another, but 37 percent were still seeking other sources. There seems to be a recognition that search is very powerful, that it’s a tool that shouldn’t be ignored under any circumstances, but that it's not getting the entire job done. Bryan, I wonder if you could respond to that. What else needs to happen in order for these people to get what they need?

Burdick: The short answer is they just need to come to ZoomInfo.com. Seriously, I don’t think it’s a matter of needing more information, but, in some cases, finding better information. When you think about the traditional search engines -- the Googles and the Yahoos! of the world -- there are so many consumer-oriented search transactions on a day-to-day basis that they have optimized their experience with the consumer in mind.

Search engines like ZoomInfo and some of the other business-information search engines are taking a different approach and optimizing the search experience, and therefore the relevance of the results, with the business-information searcher in mind. You can much more efficiently and quickly get to the information you're looking for.

The simple example that I like to use is that if you search for "enterprise routers" on Google, you are going to get 32 million results that will include everything from Enterprise Rent-A-Car to the latest episodes of Star Trek. Search for that on a business search engine like ZoomInfo and you'll get 150 companies that sell enterprise routers or manufacture enterprise routers. It just becomes a much more efficient process.

Gardner: Well, even the alternatives cited in this survey are still very general. There was Business.com and Thomas Register. This is every good under the sun. It might as well be a general search. KnowledgeStorm was also mentioned, but it's very specific to IT. It seems like there’s a whole category that needs to be filled here around vertical business search.

Burdick: The original survey that Enquiro did for us in 2004 was a key factor in our decision to move to more of a search-engine model, because what we see happening is the same kind of evolution that happened with the big search engines way back. It’s happening now in the vertical-search categories, where search engines started out as directories or, if you think back to Overture in their early days, totally paid listings.

Eventually those two forces came together to provide a best-of-both-worlds situation, where you’ve got not only great relevance on the results, but also great relevance on the targeted ads, and now that’s starting to happen in the verticals as well.

So, you’re starting out with some of the business-directory sites or the business paid-listing sites, because those are easy to do. As the technology gets more sophisticated and you can provide more relevant results for the business information seeker, you are delivering the value that the information seeker is looking for. Plus, you can target the ads better and provide an overall better experience.

Gardner: Let's go back to Gord on that. The survey found a larger percentage of people looked at the organic results on the left, but they were pretty much limited to the top four. A smaller percentage, about 12 or 13 percent, said that they look over to the right-hand side for the ads. That 13 percent might sound small, but compared to a click-through rate in a Web advertising model of usually less than 1 or 2 percent, 13 percent is still a pretty large chunk of people. What’s your impression of the impact of the advertising model in search for B2B activities?

Hotchkiss: Those percentages, by the way, aren’t that different from what we've seen in consumer-based research. Those breaks between organic and sponsored tend to remain fairly consistent across a number of different channels. One thing that’s just golden about search is it will connect a motivated and engaged user with the content they are looking for.

If that content is provided by a relevant ad, then they're open to that. In fact depending on where they are in the buying cycle, they may even be biased toward that, because they are ready to get information from somebody who is trying to provide them what they need to decide whether this is the thing they need to buy.

There's a totally different interaction when you're on a search engine actively engaged in a task and actively looking for information. You're far more receptive to messaging at that point. You're actively looking for it. And this seems to be slowly breaking into the consciousness of most advertisers. They're getting it, but they're getting it slowly. Anyone who moves into the search space, if they do search in a smart way and they capitalize on the potential of it, is just amazed by the return they get on this.

Gardner: Let’s beg a little more from these results than was intended. I started to see in the findings some patterns about typical processes, about how people would go about this activity -- the awareness, the research, the purchasing, and so forth. It seemed to me that there was, on one hand, a pattern of word of mouth that led to a search, that led to a Website, that then led to a refined search based on what they found, which then led to a hand-off to a purchasing activity by maybe a different department or individual.

There also seem to be offline influences, perhaps trades shows, perhaps traditional sales calls and activities, but that also took into consideration word of mouth that then identified what to search on, and so on. Am I reading too much into this, Gord, or were there patterns of process around the use of search in the purchasing activity?

Hotchkiss: It goes back to what I said before. Search tends to be the thing that connects you, as you move through the buying process, and it’s used in different ways and places as you progress through that. As far as identifiable patterns and usage behavior, if you did an end-up study of a large enough dataset, patterns would emerge. They always do emerge, but I'm not sure we would be confident enough diving into this particular dataset to try to tease that out of it.

What we did see is that B2B buying decisions are tremendously complex when they are compared to an individual consumer buying decision, where you have one person going through all the phases. You have multiple individuals influenced by different factors going back and forth.

What is consistent in that is whatever is influencing you -- whether it’s online or offline, a discussion with a colleague or a recommendation by a paid consultant -- there tends to be a mirror activity, in which whatever happens offline generates some kind of online activity that typically is initiated through a search engine. Then, you pull that information back, and it dances back and forth between the online and the offline world.

Gardner: So, there’s a barrier here in some senses. I'm sure most companies, especially the larger ones, have a standard operating procedure about how purchases will happen. It will be form x, y, z, and it will go through process review a, b, c, and then we’ll have to get signatures from individual g, b, h. How can we bridge this value that people see in search, and somehow bake that into a procedural process inside of an enterprise. Or are we asking too much here?

Hotchkiss: One of the interesting things, being both a researcher and a vendor, is we get to see both sides of it. We have access to more information than ever before, and buyers out there are armed with better information before they ever initiate contact with a vendor. They are gathering a lot of information and then they are trying to cram it into an existing buying process, whether that’s an RFP process or whatever.

So, like most things with the Internet, the traditional systems are being challenged by this new access to information that we never had before.

Over the next two to three years, what we're going to see is organizational buying processes being streamlined and being able to incorporate the fact that you have better informed buyers than you may have had before. The whole RFP process was to eliminate risk. The reason was make sure that you are considering alternatives and to make sure that you are almost forced to gather the information you need to make a dispassionate judgment about what was the best choice.

Now, in a lot of cases, the decision is already 80 percent made before the RFP process ever begins. Somebody has researched a vendor, has a very strong feeling about the vendor but now has to try to fit that into the established procedure, and they say, "Okay, now we've got to go out and find two or three more alternatives."

Heaven help the other two or three alternatives that are getting involved in that process. They have to go through the whole dance, but usually the preferred vendor on the front end gets the business on the back end. The other two or three players are just used as negotiating chips to try to get the price down. It’s interesting to watch how information from the Internet is changing virtually everything out there. This is no exception.

Gardner: This might be a little bit out in the future, but the role of search could morph into the role of auction and brokering activities. Does that make sense?

Hotchkiss: Yes, and for players in the space -- I suppose ZoomInfo as well -- if we can streamline the marketplace, if we can take this access to the information and make the buyer’s job easier, that’s a tremendous saving. I would hate to think of the number of man-hours that are invested internally in an organization for a fairly major purchase decision. How much more efficient you can make that process by simply empowering them with the information that they are going out to look for anyway?

Gardner: Bryan, you said that the Enquiro survey in 2004 made an impact on ZoomInfo in terms of its direction. Have the findings from 2007 had a similar influence? What new directions might you be heading in?

Burdick: As Gord had said earlier, the findings in 2007 reinforced what they had already learned three years ago. So, in one sense, it confirmed our own strategic direction as well. We re-launched the ZoomInfo.com site back on April 1, and moved into more of a traditional search-engine model, where all of the content, all of the search capabilities on ZoomInfo.com are free and subsidized by advertising.

We’ve seen that piece of our business take off like crazy in the last couple of months. Search traffic has grown dramatically. We’re up to close to 5 million unique visitors a month doing about 16 or 17 million searches a month on our site. All that is really driven by this need, this desire, among B2B buyers to find a more efficient process to get at this type of buying information.

Gardner: What advice would you have for those folks that are on the selling side of this? What should they do to position themselves in order to take better advantage of what’s occurring on the buyer side, particularly, in their use of search?

Burdick: There are a couple of landmines or traps to avoid. The first is to try to avoid competing with the consumer brands, either on the traditional engines or with the same types of keywords. If you are buying the same keyword as a consumer brand is buying on one of the traditional engines, you are typically going to get drowned out by the noise.

The other thing is to make sure that your own search marketing is coordinated with channel partners. I’ve seen lots of examples where the manufacturer is buying a set of key words and their value-added resellers are buying the same keywords. They end up bidding up the same keywords just to attract the same eyeballs. At the end of the day, the manufacturer is going to direct them to one of the resellers anyway.

Gardner: So that leads to confusion, rather than streamlining that particular process.

Burdick: Exactly. The other key thing, which we already touched on, is leveraging not only on the marketing side, but the search-engine optimization of your site in general, and optimizing the search-for-information experience that the buyer has once they get to your site.

Hotchkiss: One thing I would add on a more fundamental note is to make sure that the perspective you are using to evaluate your search strategy is the customer’s perspective and not your internal one. One of the common pitfalls we see is companies get into a bad case of "internal think." They look at everything from their internal perspective, and they are not shifting the looking glass 180 degrees and looking at it from their prospect’s perspective.

It’s amazing how enlightening it can be, when you start looking at what types of sites they are going to. You need to catch their attention, and know what kind of messaging you have to present and what kind of onsite experience you have to present, once you are successful in capturing the click. If you can force yourself to see from that perspective, you're going to do more to improve the effectiveness of your campaign.

Gardner: Well, thanks very much. We’ve been discussing the recent survey by Enquiro Search Solutions. It was Enquiro’s 2007 B2B search survey, and to help understand it better we’ve been joined by Gord Hotchkiss, the president and CEO of Enquiro. Thanks, Gord. Is there anything meaningful in the survey that we didn’t cover and that you think we should?

Hotchkiss: The original release covers the high-level findings. What we're working on now are three follow-up white papers that will be available on the site through the next three to four months. We're going to take each of the three buying roles that a lot of people within the survey fell within -- the economic buyer, the technical buyer, and the user buyer.

We're going to do insight from that particular buyer on how to search more effectively, plod through the process a little bit more, and how those hand-offs happen from role to role. I imagine there are going to be new insights out of that. We're taking different slices of the data. So, for those of you who are interested in that, keep checking out on Enquiro.com and we’ll ping you as those white papers become available.

Gardner: Terrific. And we’ve also been joined by Bryan Burdick, the chief operating officer at ZoomInfo. Is there anything that you’d like to cap the discussion with, Bryan?

Burdick: Only that I think from a vertical business information search perspective, that we’re really in the first inning here. A lot of interesting trends and enhancements are going to be coming down the road. One in particular that may have an influence in the next year or two is the community aspect within the search.

Gord, talked earlier about how there are multiple people that influence the B2B buying decision. I think that you’ll start to see a marriage of, not only B2B search, but also online community and a factoring into that whole process. Then, who knows where we’ll go from there? But I appreciate you having us on.

Gardner: I suppose that this notion of word of mouth being so important in shaping people’s direction that you might use search to find the word of mouth.

Burdick: Right, the word of community.

Gardner: There it is. Okay, well thank you, Bryan. This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for joining.

Listen to the podcast here. Watch the video here. Sponsor: ZoomInfo.

Transcript of Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect podcast on B2B search usage, trends and future direction. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2007. All rights reserved.