20 Journal of Selling & Major Account Management
The Portal Promise: Community and Value for
Salespeople
By Mary E. Shoemaker
In recent years, many companies have adopted portals to support their sales activities, often as an important part of
their Customer Relationship Management strategy. Little information is available in academic journals about the use
and success of portals in sales applications. This paper defines and describes the various types of portals. The Von
Campenhausen and Lubben (2002) framework for developing a virtual community is applied to examples of how
companies actually use portals to support their salespeople, and their key accounts. Some of the Knowledge
Management challenges in the sales organization are discussed, focusing on how the Portals enable salespeople to build
a community that permits them to use information more effectively and be more customer oriented.
Businesses continue to apply the newest
electronic technology available to boost the
competitive advantage of their salespeople
(Leigh and Marshall 2001). Currently, Enterprise
Information Portals (EIP) or specific Sales
Portals are being developed to support, inform,
and empower salespeople.
Portals are
considered the “killer app” for businesses facing
Knowledge Management (KM) challenges,
where the company has difficulty distributing its
tremendous information resources to the right
people, including its salespeople (Brizz 2001).
Several trends are driving companies to deploy
portals.
First, customers demand the
salesperson add value to the sale.
The
salesperson is expected to be knowledgeable
about their own company’s products and
capabilities, the customer’s organization and
needs, and increasingly the customer’s markets.
Smaller sales organizations are often also
expected to meet escalating customer demands
(Piercy and Lane 2005). “Sales reps must now
be able to dive deep, answering specific technical
questions, and fly high, providing purchase
justification arguments, solid business cases, and
assessments of overall performance
impact.” (Trailer and Dickie 2006 p.51)
Second, escalating customer demands force
salespeople to seek expertise throughout their
Northern Illinois University
company and partner companies. Team based
sales, using intracompany connections, and
alliance based sales, using partner contacts,
require knowledge of and access to a larger
community and efficient networks (Ustuner and
Godes 2006). Strengthening social alliances
among employees and between partners has
significant benefits for a firm (Berger et al 2006).
Coordinating and informing the community is
stage one in creating a customer focused
organization (Gulati and Oldroyd 2005).
Third, the conventional sales organization is
being transformed. The emergence of Internet
sales channels has encouraged companies to reexamine strategic decisions and choices in how
to manage sales and account management
resources to best serve the customer. The sales
organization strategy is re-focusing on building
long term relationships with a selected portfolio
of customers. Resources are shifting to key
accounts, requiring more tightly integrated
information sharing (Piercy and Lane 2005).
For these reasons, companies are increasing
deploying sales portals.
Very little information exists in the academic
sales literature about these powerful resources
for salespeople. This paper will introduce a
discussion, by defining portals and by listing the
functions of EIP or Sales portals that impact
Summer 2006
21
sales professionals. This paper will also explain
and provide examples of the Knowledge
Management challenges faced by salespeople.
Finally, the value of community participation,
and how portals can support the four pillars of
community is developed with company
examples.
portals when the information and application
needs of the sales force are significantly greater
or more complex than that of other employees
(Olim 2003). Three features, relevant to the
sales force, that distinguish an EIP or Sales
Portal, are single point of entry, personalization,
and integration.
What is a portal?
Single Point of Entry
A portal is a web based gateway that allows
access to electronic information. Most familiar
are Internet or public portals, such as Yahoo or
Google, which provide salespeople or anyone
else the ability to tap into the immense resources
of the World Wide Web. Companies employ
several additional types of portals in order to
control access to company resources. An ebusiness or extranet portal extends the company
information and services to customers (B2C) and
business partners (B2B). These portals can allow
e-commerce services such as ordering, billing,
and customer service as well as more
sophisticated supply chain management
capabilities. Some types of extranets are 1)
marketplaces, like Covisint, where buyers and
sellers of automotive equipment and services can
connect,
2) Application Service Providers
(ASPs), such as salesforce.com, where
applications can be rented, or 3) personal portals
including those found in cellular phones and
O n S t a r
i n
a u t o m o b i l e s
(www.portalscommunity.com 2004). Intranet
portals, internal to the company, with access
usually limited to the employees of a company
(B2E) are now being brought together on a
desktop. Most salespeople employ multiple
types of portals daily.
An EIP can provide a single point of entry to an
employee that accesses and possibly integrates
the many disparate intranets, databases,
applications, and information sources needed to
perform that individual’s job. The single sign-on
includes access to Internet and extranet sites as
well. Salespeople no longer need to create or
recall dozens of passwords, nor navigate through
multiple layers of security in front of a customer.
What is an Enterprise Information Portal
(EIP) or a Sales Portal?
EIP’s are usually accessible to all employees,
while a Sales portal is accessible primarily to
salespeople. Many companies are including the
sales force’s needs in the corporate wide EIP
while others are building a specific Sales Portal.
Companies are choosing to deploy separate sales
Personalization
Another distinguishing feature of EIP portals is
the level of personalization (Plumtree 2003).
Some content is available to all employees such
as company newsletters, employee policies, or
job postings. At Henkels Consumer Adhesives,
everyone in the company sees the financial data
every morning (Barlas 2003a). Some content can
be role based or pertaining specifically to the
individual’s job position. Sales managers would
be able to view their sales teams’ reports, and
connect with other managers on task forces.
Salespeople would be able to view new product
training or connect with other salespeople who
faced similar challenges.
Both could access
inventory and pricing information. While a
market researcher might be able to look at the
individual data of a study, the sales person might
only be able to read the overall findings report.
Finally, some content is only for the individual.
This content could range from e-mail, personal
and human resources files, news about current
customers to individual order status reports. An
EIP can support personalization at the employer,
department, position, and/or individual level.
Vol. 6, No. 3
22 Journal of Selling & Major Account Management
Integration
Portal vendors can provide some pre-packaged
integration solutions (Gruden and Strannegard
2003), allowing data to be used easily in multiple
applications without additional programming.
This is similar to importing Excel graphs into
Word documents. The integration between
disparate applications enhances salesperson
flexibility and speed.
A salesperson can
“contextualize” data by pulling customer data
from the ERP system and transferring that data
into a campaign manager or a data mining
application. Large global companies often have
multiple ERP and/or CRM implementations
where all the data is not available on all of the
implementations and must be imported. A sales
manager may wish to run analysis on data from
another division with a separate ERP
implementation (Rose 2003).
This ability to consolidate and integrate the
information, applications, and services needed in
one personalized access point is the promise of
the EIP. By 2001, relatively few companies had
deployed an EIP (KM Editors 2001). Currently,
employee portals are one of the highest priorities
for IT investment. It is estimated that by 2004,
85% of the global 2000 had embarked on a
portal project (Roth 2004) and employee portals
will be a $7.3 billion market by 2010 (Phifer
2006). Companies are looking to these portals to
enhance the competitive advantage of their sales
force and drive revenue growth.
Why Portals? The Knowledge Management
Challenge in Sales
EIPs are emerging as a response to the
increasing complexity and the dramatic
proliferation of information and information
technology in the workplace. Sales organizations
deal with the challenges of widely dispersed
information, isolated employees, huge numbers
of employees to reach, and the difficulty of
identifying the crucial information for
individuals.
The following describes some
examples of these challenges. Jeff Immelt, as the
Northern Illinois University
new chairman of General Electric Co., was
dismayed to find that the GE Power sales team
in 1991 spent far more time in front of their
computers than in front of their customers. It
seemed that the information required to sell
multi-million dollar turbines, and turbine parts
and services was scattered in many unconnected
applications and databases. Salespeople spent
much of their time pulling the information
together to quote and service their customers
(Anthes 2003).
Honeywell determined that employee knowledge
was not being widely shared across the
corporation. Business networks were often
small, informal, local and based on personal
relation shi ps.
These “islands o f
communication” left the vast reservoir of
employee knowledge untapped( Kaneshige
2003).
At Sun Microsystems, the global sales
organization consists of 10,000 people in sales,
pre-sales, and field marketing.
The sales
organization’s challenge was to disseminate and
share information, expertise, and applications
with these 10, 000 people around the globe,
across departments, markets, and product
offerings (Intraspect 2003).
In 2001, Siemens, the German manufacturer of
mobile phones, computers and electronic
equipment, faced an information nightmare.
With 430,000 employees in 190 countries using
3500 intranets and 2500 Web servers, there was
a lot of information. A Siemens IT executive
described it as “too much information in too
many places”. Managing that much information
was expensive, ineffective, and insecure
(Westervelt 2004).
Watson et al (2002) suggest that conscience
attention may be a scare resource. As more
information is made available, there is a greater
need to supply attention freeing interactions.
These authors are referring to consumer
attention, but the same scarcity may apply to the
salesperson’s attention. Salespeople can be
Summer 2006
23
Table 1. Examples of Knowledge Management Challenges
General Electric – Information in unconnected
applications and databases
Honeywell – Knowledge not shared beyond
local, personal, relationships
overwhelmed by the resources available and
need consolidation and single point access to
maximize their selling potential.
Virtual Community
A Portal can be valuable in building the
interconnections, experiences, and trust that
create a sales community. In the past, most sales
people were geographically disconnected and
functioned fairly independently from their peers.
However, not only has the sales position become
increasing collaborative in nature, but even
salespeople who are not officially part of a sales
team need to interact with other salespeople and
other business functions
to serve their
customers well. Salespeople are finding that
customer expectations, partnership relationships,
and business complexity are forcing participation
with a sales community. The strong companywide sales community may help a company deal
with an important strategic issue -- ensuring that
the culture and behaviors of the sales force is
consistent with the organization’s marketing
orientation and strategy (Leigh and Marshall
2001). A stronger sales community provides
more resources and support for a salesperson
than a group whose members are disconnected
and isolated. The early value of a virtual
community is its ability to address the needs of
its members.
Casciaro and Lobo (2005)
uncovered that people will choose who they
work with for two reasons: competence and
likability. Liking can be influenced by familiarity
and cooperative experiences. As salespeople
participate in the virtual community,
opportunities for familiarity and cooperative
experiences expand. As more members use the
portal, the more valuable is becomes. More
usage begets more content, more sharing, and
more interconnections.
Leveraging the
Sun Microsystems – 10,000 salespeople across
the globe need access to information
Siemens – Huge amount of information, very
widely dispersed.
interactions with customers, sales forces will be
able to refocus from selling to managing and
serving their accounts (Armstrong and Hagel
1997). Ustuner and Godes (2006) indicate that
salespeople can create significant value by using
organizational networks effectively, particularly
by being able to access the right network at each
stage of the selling process.
A sales portal has the ability to facilitate
collaboration by supporting a virtual community.
Von Campenhausen and Lubben (2002) indicate
that a virtual community is formed and
connected by four components:
content,
communication, context, and commerce. A well
built sales portal strengthens these four pillars.
The following describes how companies are
using these four pillars to create a successful
virtual sales community.
Content
Content refers to the information available
through the portal. Company data bases, training
materials, company news, reports, and
documents, as well as access to external news
feeds, and data bases, are all examples of
content. The portal includes the tools the
salesperson needs to manage the content: to
search, filter, index, and archive the information
(Watson and Fenner 2000). As content is the
first pillar in building community, early portals
(circa 1998) primarily provided content (KM
Editors 2001). Many companies have found
portal provided content has increased sales
productivity. Dow Corning manages 2 million
active materials-based sheets available to
salespeople and customers through its portal.
Faster access to and delivery of these sheets
speeds a number of company processes
(Ericson 2003b).
Wells Fargo was able to
Vol. 6, No. 3
24 Journal of Selling & Major Account Management
Figure 1. Impact of a Portal on Knowledge Management, the Sales Community and
Competitive Advantage.
Content
Knowledge
Management
Communication
Context
P
o
Competitive
r
Advantage
t
Sales
Community
Commerce
reduce 10,000 pages of content to 2000 by
lowering duplication within their portal (Ulfelder
2004).
G.E Power provided their 2500
salespeople with access to details about every
installed G.E. turbine and customer master files
for 65,000 customers. Previously unconnected
databases, from parts pricing to dates of planned
customer outages, feed into G.E.’s sales portal.
Feedback from the salespeople about the
information available was obtained by making
access to the prototype portal available at the
company’s annual sales conference.
G.E.
wanted to emphasize the power of getting the
portal into the hands of salespeople. Sales
productivity has risen 25%, attributed to faster
information searches (Anthes 2003).
Communication
Content alone does not build community.
Communication or collaboration tools increase
the value of the content. These applications
range from familiar e-mail, calendar and
discussion tools such as Instant Messenger and
Northern Illinois University
Lotus Notes (Raol et al 2002) to net meetings,
on-demand presentations, and indexed expertise
that allows salespeople to identify the company’s
internal experts easily. The use of the more
sophisticated collaboration tools is in its infancy.
Getting salespeople to embrace the new
technologies is still a challenge (Speier and
Venkatesh 2002)). However, those companies
that pioneered the use of these tools are pleased
with the results.
Frito-lay, an $8.5 billion division of Pepsi-Co,
developed a portal, known as the Customer
Community Portal, to share information among
its geographically dispersed sales teams.
Expertise profiles were created on the portal so
that field sales staff could easily identify who in
headquarters had expertise in areas such as
promotional planning, pricing or particular
products. This was especially valuable for new
salespeople. The portal fostered a sense of
community by including birthdays and sales
presentations developed by individual
salespeople. Frito-Lay salespeople are expected
Summer 2006
to analyze retail sales and behavioral data for the
retail category managers to persuade them of the
value of additional shelf space for Frito-Lay
products. Salespeople who share the same client
in different cities can share documents
concurrently, and develop best practices for all
customer sites. Client information could be
easily shared within a team while password
protection allowed only team members dealing
with a particular client to view confidential
information.
Not only did the portal spur sales and
profitability growth, but an unexpected benefit
appears to have been reduced sales personnel
turnover. Before the portal was introduced,
salespeople had complained about feeling
disconnected from the team. The first group of
salespeople to use the portal, which had been
experiencing high turnover, had no turnover the
first year after the portal was deployed (Shein
2001).
Rock-Tenn, a $1.4 billion packaging solutions
firm, had been mailing printed reports with sales
and other data to their business units. Often the
information was stale and obsolete by the time it
was received.
After they began sharing
information via a sales portal, one sales team
discovered that while their division that had
been attempting to sell to a potential customer
for years, another division was already doing
business with that customer. The relationship
quickly moved forward (Microsoft 2002).
Sun Microsystem’s sales portal allows sales and
marketing to work together easily on sales
proposals and presentations. Salespeople build
on each others work and less time is wasted
developing projects from the beginning. The
MySales Portal allows the formation of
collaborative communities organized around
vertical markets, geography, product family, or
individual account. Sun is able to replicate the
best practices of their sales teams across
geographies and industries (Intraspect 2003).
Reynolds and Reynolds, a $1 billion provider of
25
documents to car dealerships, developed a sales
presentation portal that allows account
executives to prepare presentations for proposals
that can include dealer specific competitive
factors, pain points, and deal size. By sharing
sales collateral across the company, Reynolds
was able to create a more uniform sales process
and ensure that proposals focused on areas
where the company could provide the best
solutions. Proposal creation time dropped by
more than 30%, while proposal quality improved
(Compton 2005).
Concerned about the tendency of their
employees to only share information with the
people in their local network, Honeywell also
developed a searchable directory of experts,
which is currently being deployed to a few
thousand employees. The goal was to capitalize
on Honeywell’s strong knowledge-sharing
culture and expand employees’ “tribal network”
of trusted associates across divisions and
geography. Despite concerns that salespeople
may unintentionally reveal confidential client
information, participants indicate the directory
has expanded their network and anticipate some
real returns (Kaneshige 2003).
Context
Context refers to the ability of the portal to be
personalized either to an individual’s needs or to
their role-based needs. Personalizing the portal
to an individual’s needs, for example, occurs
when the portal displays the latest news about a
salesperson’s own accounts.
Ideally, the
corporate portal opens to resources and
applications that are frequently accessed by the
individual user.
If the salesperson checks
CNN.com everyday, that site would be available
on the portal page, reducing the salesperson’s
need to check multiple sites with multiple wait
times and sign-ons. The portal will not display
resources the salesperson does not have
authorization to access (Bannon 2002).
An
example of role based personalization is
providing all salespeople the ability to check
current pricing, inventory and delivery schedules,
Vol. 6, No. 3
26 Journal of Selling & Major Account Management
or to download sales presentations. This
information would not be available to everyone
in the company.
At Northwestern Mutual Life, each of the 7800
independent agents has a customized portal as
part of Northwestern’s customer portal. Each
agent is able to modify their portal to provide
personalized and one-to-one services to their
clients, while being able to include research,
tools, and calculators from Northwestern in their
own portals. Content varies as the market
served varies. For example, one agent’s clients
might be families interested in college planning
tools, another agent’s clients may be primarily
interested in retirement calculators. Each agent
decides which information is displayed on their
own portal.
A key advantage of the
Northwestern umbrella portal is the ability to
maintain compliance on the individual portals.
All content changes are checked for compliance
issues before it appears on the agent’s portal
(Ericson 2003a).
This customization is still a work in progress at
most companies. However, the future holds
some interesting possibilities. An executive from
IDC posits that portals will someday include a
“process manager”. This process manager will
learn and manage business/sales processes. The
process manager would understand what needs
to happen to a new sales lead and would provide
each person involved in the lead management
process with the current information needed to
correctly handle the lead. The portal would
change daily based on the new information
provided each individual (KM Editors 2001).
on-line, primarily to either free up salesperson
time or to reduce process time. Reynolds and
Reynolds found that their salespeople worked
with their clients more efficiently when they
were freed up from order entry tasks (Barlas
2003b).
Toyota Motor Sales USA has
implemented a portal called Dealer Daily that
allows all 1200 of U.S based Toyota and Lexus
dealers to manage vehicle deliveries, order parts,
process warranty claims, and even swap
inventories with other dealers before the cars are
shipped from the factory. Dealer employees
reported saving an average of 1.8 hours a day
(Yamada 2004).
After attempting and having problems with
selling directly on-line to their customers,
Northwestern Mutual Life uses their sales portal
to drive web surfers to its distribution network,
to bring leads directly to its independent
salespeople. While some account transactions
can occur through the Northwestern sales portal,
its primary function is to increase the
effectiveness of the live sales transaction
(Ericson 2003a). Office Depot serves their B2B
customers by selling them an extranet
connection that allows individuals at a company
to purchase authorized materials through the
portal from a pre-negotiated contract.
Salespeople sell the extranet contract, not the
individual office supplies (Roberts-Witt 2003).
The synergy between the portal and the
salespeople in these examples suggests that many
sales situations may be enhanced by having both
a salesperson and an on-line commerce
capability.
Commerce
Managerial Implications
Commerce is the ability to complete a buying or
selling transaction through the portal. This
extends the community to the channel or
customer through an extranet, a business to
business (B2B) portal. While most B2B sales
transactions still require the services of a
salesperson, some of the lower level and tedious
order entry processes have been made available
At most firms today, employees endure an
avalanche of new IT initiatives. When the portal
initiative is announced, sales managers may be
tempted to regard the portal as not relevant to
their objectives. A key pitfall in creating portals
that increase productivity is lack of executive
support (Rudnick 2004). The sales manager
needs to be aware of the potential value of a well
Northern Illinois University
Summer 2006
27
designed EIP or Sales Portal.
The sales
organization should be able to provide input into
the objectives and specifications of the portal
design.
Some knowledge of how other
companies have met sales and knowledge
management challenges with a portal would
enable the sales managers to lobby for a portal
of value to salespeople. As a portal is a
complement or an enhancement to existing
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and
Sales Force Automation (SFA) systems, sales
managers need to understand the portal’s
functions and features as well, to maximize the
value of the existing applications. Managers
need to identify the most valuable applications to
include from both the salesperson’s and the
customer’s viewpoint. Enabling salespeople to
maximize the effectiveness of the use of the
portal is a new management challenge that
requires a basic understanding of portals.
a faster response allow a salesperson to meet
these demands. Deploying a portal is a major
investment for a company. A portal may need
to be viewed as a crucial sales support resource,
rather than a revenue source. Being able to solve
customer problems more effectively and
efficiently than the competition is a key
advantage.
Managers should also be aware of how a portal
can build community within an organization. As
networks become increasingly necessary to
successful selling, salespeople should be
encouraged to participate in the portal-supported
community. Not only is training in accessing the
content useful to salespeople, but also some
training and encouragement in using the
communication tools. Sales managers could
model the portal tools to communicate with
their salespeople.
The connections of the
salesperson with the company may be
strengthened as well as the relationships with the
customer.
Some discussion of how portal
communities supported sales efforts might
increase participation. Managers should solicit
feedback from salespeople as to what the
salespeople would value. Salespeople frequently
perceive more technology as allowing less faceto-face selling time. Portal interactions need to
provide salespeople with real value.
As
participation rises, the usefulness of the portal
rises.
The second stream involves connecting portals
with the network, community,
and social
alliance literature. What do the sales people
value? What do the customers value? How
much and which information should be available
to whom? How connected is too connected?
Does a portal-based connection reduce or
increase the need for face-to-face connections?
Does a portal accelerate the trend towards
salespeople building stronger relationships with
fewer customers?
A portal can enable a salesperson to deal with
the ever increasing demands of the sales role.
More information, more access to expertise, and
Research Implications
There are several streams of research that
improve sales-oriented knowledge of portals.
The first involves a better understanding of the
effect of the technology.
Will use of this
technology result in more time face-to face with
the customer, or more time in front of the
computer?
How will the impact of this
investment on productivity be measured? Which
applications build community most effectively?
Which applications are most widely used?
The third stream would examine how portals
affect existing sales structures and processes.
What is the effect on the sales process, the
buying process? How will the sales organization
be affected? Would increased portal usage allow
a flattened sales organization or a decentralized
organization?
Will current sales activities
change? For example, would a library of
presentations available reduce the time a
salesperson spends preparing presentations?
The potential for research questions is wide
open. Portals are a very new and powerful tool
for salespeople. How much and in what
directions this tool will change the sales
environment is mostly unexamined.
Vol. 6, No. 3
28 Journal of Selling & Major Account Management
Conclusion
Well designed portals have the potential to meet
the knowledge management challenges facing
salespeople. The virtual community supported
by a portal allows a salesperson to connect with
and utilize needed resources, both database and
human, in a timely fashion. The portal provides
easy access, suitable guideposts, and filters for
the overwhelming supply of information
available to salespeople. The portal promise is
that the salesperson that uses a well designed
portal effectively is participating in a community
that enhances their ability to create value for
their customers. Portals are still fairly new, but
early evidence suggests they may fulfill their
promise.
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and Success”, META Group white paper,
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29
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Mary E. Shoemaker is an Associate Professor of
marketing at Widener University.
E-mail: meshoemaker@Widener.edu
Vol. 6, No. 3