ESP at HP

Hewlett-Packard has been using e-mail for about 15 years but alone it is not enough to support 15,000 HP salespeople and channel partners. “Here’s a hypothetical situation,” says Steve Baker, HP’s sales communications manager. “A sales rep brings a prospect to California. We show a couple of beautiful product slides. The customer returns to his company and wants his colleagues to see the same slides. The rep has to ask an assistant to call marketing, find the slides and get them there. We use e-mail, floppies and

faxes. It’s not very efficient.” So the first challenge was to put the slides – and a lot of other useful sales information – on a central database that the field sales force could access.

By the early 1990s, a computer system allowed HP’s sales force to retrieve documents from a centralized file of 6,000 sales or sales-related documents. This system was useful, Baker notes. It had brochures, product guides, competitive information – a pretty good database. But a lot of challenges remained, especially for busy salespeople who needed the right information fast. Outside the United States, where HP has customers in 120 countries, the system was slow.

It was also time-consuming to search for the right documents. Salespeople used keywords to search for the documents they wanted. But the system only searched for the keywords in the documents’ titles. In practice, that meant to do an efficient search, salespeople had to know what documents were on the system, by title. The difficulty of searching for useful documents troubled Mike Cohn, who manages HP’s global account program. Cohn is always worried about the effects of turnover in sales staff. He wanted new salespeople to be able to get up to speed on HP products fast, not waste a lot of time learning one more intra-office computer system.

In addition, the old system held onto old documents even when they were superseded by new information. Salespeople need “accurate, up-to-date, timely information,” Baker emphasizes. There was no system for deleting old files as they became obsolete.

Baker summarizes the general problem with this old system in simple terms. It was fed by a “push system” from HP headquarters staff. He compares this way of doing things to a marketing unit printing 30,000 new-product brochures because the unit’s budget had money enough for 30,000. Half of those brochures never left an HP office because salespeople and their customers did not need them.

“The joke around marketing was that you had a better chance of winning the California lottery than of getting a piece of sales literature to a customer,” says Baker, who wanted a “pull” system, with content and search procedures determined by salespeople’s needs. That fit HP’s overall philosophy, as described by Chairman Lew Platt: “HP has a very bottoms-up management style. We manage by objective, not directive.” About three and a half years ago, HP decided to do things differently. The timing was partly determined by changes in the overall computer environment. The Internet was appearing, along with much better search engines that could scan a large mass of material efficiently. Since HP’s sales communication system was like an intranet, Baker and his team decided to borrow from the bigger Net’s search tools. But they did not just splice a Net tool onto the old system. They built the Electronic Sales Partner (ESP) system after listening to the sales force and showing them a prototype of the new tool to prove its usefulness.

Bigger but selective

ESP now makes a much bigger set of documents available to the field force: 25,000 to 30,000 documents in May 1997, Baker estimates. These include the standard sales literature, graphic presentations, information on competitors and lists of frequently asked questions about HP products. ESP can also search relevant pages of HP’s internal Web sites for pages that relate to a sales subject.

While HP’s worldwide sales force uses ESP, it is also available to 2,000 channel partners, companies that help distribute and sell HP products. Baker says 10,000 channel partners will eventually be on esp. This highly varied group can use a much bigger library of information much more easily than they could have used the old, smaller library because of the changes Baker and his team made.

Content

The first big change: indexing each document by sales-oriented keywords according to full text, not just title. The network browser makes searching for documents faster, and searches require only common sense rather than a special knowledge of the system.

The second big change: controlling the documents put on esp. HP marketing and product staff submit documents they think will be of interest to salespeople. But whether documents end up on the system depends on ESP staff who “serve as judge and jury,” Baker says.

The key criteria in reaching a verdict is whether the document contains information salespeople need. “You don’t market to your sales force or your channel partners. They already know us.” What do salespeople need? “Information, no hype or marketing fluff,” Baker says. ESP’s emphasis is thus on content. “We may take a five-page document and reduce it to three pages of content.

” Since HP has a marketing staff of 800 energetic people this rule can lead to a lot of “negotiations,” Baker acknowledges. But it is necessary to keep ESP easy to use and useful. “We want to let salespeople search in depth, but in depth means the right one or two documents, not 500.” Put another way, “We pay the sales force to sell, not to search for information.” When marketing staff believe they have a point that field salespeople do need to hear about, Baker will set up a teleconference or audio conference to get the word out.

Another example of keeping ESP a user “pull” system is the treatment of HP’s internal Web sites. These sites often contain very valuable technical information about HP products – but each site or page may be useful only to a limited number of salespeople who deal with a particular product. “The fallacy is that a Web site is always created for a good reason. The reality is that some Web sites are created because they can be created,” Baker observes. “Yes, the Web is a wonderful thing, but thousands of Web sites to look through is not a good thing.”

Baker resisted a request to put all of HP’s internal Web sites on esp. Instead, he told Web developers to indicate the individual Web pages that are widely useful to salespeople. These are judged, indexed and incorporated into ESP like other proposed documents. Content useful to salespeople and ease of finding the right information are the key incorporation criteria.

Out with the old

“Every document on ESP has a name behind it, not a department,” Baker emphasizes. Individual marketing or product staff submit documents along with suggested keywords and a (mandatory) expiration date. Baker’s staff checks out the documents for usefulness, completeness and the ability of salespeople to retrieve and print out all documents in full format. They also review the keywords to make sure a search by a salesperson will yield a manageable number of useful documents. Each night, ESP’s indexer reviews its current set of documents by keyword and updates the items that will appear for any search term the next day.

In the past, many documents’ expiration dates were set arbitrarily at one year to make sure the system did not clog up with out-of-date material. The ESP team is now refining that one-year limit to recognize differences in documents’ useful lives. The rule is still, “keep it useful, keep it timely and keep it easy to use.” Because they know computers and stay closely in touch with salespeople, the ESP team can often improve on a suggestion for keeping the sales force well informed. Baker gives as an example a proposal to send out 2-3 floppy disks each month to thousands of salespeople. The disks contained extremely valuable information on HP’s competitors. But sending out thousands of floppies did not look like a very efficient way to get that information out.

The ESP team proposed instead that a Web site containing the competitive information be linked to esp. The sales force can now find this information with the same search terms they use for other ESP documents and save everybody a lot of floppy time. It’s one of the most commonly used items on ESP now, Baker notes. Another popular ESP offering is a list of frequently asked questions for each product supported by HP’s sales call center. The center compiled the questions and answers based on its own experience responding to calls from salespeople. Field salespeople can now get many answers electronically without spending time on a telephone call. And call center staff spend their time answering difficult questions, not routine ones.

The numbers prove the idea works. “Call volume is down 30 percent in six months,” Baker notes.

“And ESP access of the center has risen 400 percent.” Ease of using ESP is proven by the limited training it requires. Baker says each salesperson gets a half-hour familiarization with ESP as part of their overall training. After that, they are expected to find it useful enough to learn the rest on their own.

Keeping paper for a while

Baker and his staff know what ESP can do well and what it cannot. HP has long published a monthly magazine called Computer News for its field sales force. ESP now has an online version, updated two or three times per week. An advantage of the online version is brevity. “People are writing less and communicating better.”

But 40 percent of HP’s salespeople still want the printed version. Why? A magazine is mobile, easy to read at leisure or while waiting for a customer meeting, and salespeople can show it to the customer easily. So HP still prints and distributes Computer News to 7,000 internal staff and 10,000-12,000 channel partners. The basic rule, let the sales force “pull” the system where it wants, goes for ESP’s replacement of paper documents.

HP continues to distribute other “briefcase documents” to salespeople in printed form. Such items as product and pricing guides are going to be needed by 80 percent of the relevant sales force anyway, says Baker. Why force them to print out 50-page documents from the ESP system?

The future is custom push

Shaping its communications system to serve its sales force has already paid big benefits to HP. Salespeople estimate they save 1-3 hours per week getting information with esp. And ESP is just one piece of a consistent pattern at Hewlett-Packard. Using computers intelligently throughout its operations has helped slash administrative and selling costs from 30 percent of revenue in 1988 to just 17 percent in 1996. For a company as large as HP, that is nearly $6 billion in lower costs, lower prices, or higher profits. Baker wants salespeople to shape ESP and guide its future. Like many Web sites on the Internet, ESP has a “feedback button” to solicit reactions from users. For example, how useful was the information? What would you like to see more of (or less of)? Baker is considering letting salespeople “grade” each document for accuracy and usefulness.

Baker’s staff count the number of “hits” each document receives. However, he says, “We’re very cautious about using the pure number of ‘hits’ as an indicator of usefulness to the field. We want to talk to the sales force, ask them, ‘Are you using it? How valuable is the information?'”

“Before we do anything new, we ask three questions,” Baker says. “First, does the technology support it? Second, does HP’s infrastructure support it? Third, is the field sales force ready for it?” The first two questions are unavoidable technical hurdles. The third one guides ESP and other sales support at HP. “Of course we pay attention to the Web and what others are doing on it,” Baker says. “But we learn from our salespeople. They are our customers.”

Baker has a couple of ideas for making ESP serve these customers better, including a slight shift back to the “push” mode. Salespeople will be asked to profile themselves according to their product lines, interests and perhaps country. ESP will then use the profile to allow headquarters to push out only the most recent information suitable for each profile. For example, a rep in France dealing with financial firms and facing a particular competitor would get the latest documents from California that relate to French financial institutions or the competitor’s product.

That is a little like the old e-mail or voice mail systems some companies use, but with a twist. Only messages that count are sent to only the salespeople who need them. Baker puts it this way: “We want to avoid the computer version of too much paper in the inbox.”

HP calls this next step “custom push.” The idea is that salespeople will welcome unsolicited messages from marketing if they are few and exactly suited to each salesperson’s needs. “I want them to think of it as ‘my ESP,'” says Baker.