Dot-coms: keep it simple, please
The techno babble coming from many vendors doesn't help anyone
By -- Industrial Distribution, 6/1/2000
Talk about information overload!
Distributors who attend trade shows like the recent ASMMA/I.D.A. convention in Dallas face a barrage of sales pitches from the dot-com vendors. It's hard enough to confront change without being sent into a fog by a full-jargon assault.
There's an overload of dot-com players with similar messages, for starters. By their count, Pembroke Consulting found 65 e-businesses in the construction industry alone.
For whatever it's worth, I have a suggestion for the dot-com and software vendors: How about trimming your pitch to three sentences or a few bullet points?
If you're unable to sum up what you do, your business model, and why you're different than the crowd in straightforward English, perhaps you should be selling to the electronics industry, not the MRO crowd.
Consider the audience here: few of us live in, or care about, Silicon Valley. Without a doubt, many companies-and not just the big players-have savvy techno-experts or self-taught managers who devote considerable time to understanding the e-commerce world. But I bet most distributors, and even some of the people making pitches to them, really struggle with what this all means.
I recently experienced some of this information paralysis myself.
About 10:30 p.m. during a dessert party that ID hosted at the Dallas convention, following a day of making mini-presentations, listening to and interviewing principals of some e-exchange vendors, I ran out of gas. Just at that moment a wannabee hotshot dot-com expert arrived in my face, laying on the long-and-winding road version of why his solution was the ultimate in superiority and how come I didn't know that yet?
Next time, try giving it to me in three sentences. Once you've got my ear, and your business model is expressed simply for my simple mind, I'll probably ask a lot more questions.
Laying on the jargon doesn't help differentiate your company.
Ken Brack is the Web Manager of ID Online. Your comments are welcome at kbrack@cahners.com
Like millions of computer users, the "love bug" virus that struck e-mail systems the first week in May limited my work for a couple of days. It wasn't an end-all crisis, but it needlessly disrupted many people and reignited concerns about cyber attacks.
Calls quickly went out for more vigilance in policing the Internet. It appears both Congress and the Justice Department will try ramping up to cyber-enforcement speed.
Depending on your viewpoint, that doesn't necessarily bode well. Peering into online trading exchanges, perhaps even Internet marketplaces for MRO goods, would be among the new surveillance tools proposed. In other words, federal Internet enforcers want to track communications and B2B transactions, domestic and international, hoping to monitor any would-be Internet vandals.
Observers such as Electronic Commerce World suggest that part of what the government really wants is for online merchants to help strip the anonymity of suspected Internet hackers.
That's not to suggest anyone will be hacking any time soon into the sales of end mills or safety goggles. But whether we want Uncle Sam eyeing all sorts of Internet transactions is a pressing question.
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