Premier Pages

Dell began putting its marketing and technical information on the Web in 1994. By 1996, customers could come to the Dell Web site, configure the computer they wanted, and place an order. However, the orders came to Dell as emails. Dell had to retype them into its ordering system! In 1998 the company introduced Premier Pages, which let business customers tailor what their employees could see and order. Today, the Dell system is all electronic. Seventy percent of Dell’s sales are business to business.

In many cases, Dell negotiated volume prices for its best customers. The way it works is this: A deal is worked out between Dell and the purchasing officer at the target company. Dell agrees to provide the Web page and a volume-pricing deal. The purchasing officer agrees to give the special address of this Dell Web page to all employees who want to buy computer products. It takes Dell only 30 minutes to create a new Premier Page for a new business customer.

When an employee comes to the site, he registers as being an employee and purchases whatever he needs, providing the Dell site with the purchase order number. Every month the purchasing officer gets a report from Dell showing which of her employees have made purchases and what they have bought. She has complete information about what her firm is buying from Dell, who is buying it, and what each employee bought. These reports are very useful for a purchasing department. They also show the savings that the company has made through its volume deal with Dell. Dell has set up tens of thousands of these business-to-business pages. They give Dell a tremendous advantage in business sales. Today, all of Dell’s competitors are copying the system and are trying to catch up.

The Dell system gives the business customer a lot of information. Dell has put 54,000 pages of service information on the Web, and this can be accessed by any customer at any time. The Premier Page lets the customer know where any given system is in the production process. Dell prepares for the order’s arrival by sending shipment information automatically by email. Once the system arrives, the customer can trouble-shoot and upgrade it online.

Getting companies to use the Dell Premier Page system is not always easy. When Dell tried to get Eastman Chemical to use a Dell Premier Page for ordering, Eastman at first refused, saying it was too much work. The company had its own internal ordering system and preferred to send Dell a fax of the order. In response, Dell revised the site for Eastman to make it conform to Eastman’s system. Eastman now uses the Dell site for its computer orders.

There are many advantages to Dell from its Web ordering system. Dell’s statistics show that without a Premier Page it takes five phone calls from prospects before the company gets an actual order. The first phone calls are for information and prices. But if the prospects use the Web site first, Dell finds that it can sell products on the first phone call. As a result, Dell’s profits on Web sales are 30 percent higher than its profits on other sales.

Once the site is established, Dell uses the tracking information to increase sales. At one point, an IS director checked networking equipment on his Dell site. He did not buy. The next week, a Dell salesperson called this IS director (based on the Web statistics) to see if she could help the IS director with his networking purchases. The basis of satisfactory customer relationships is knowledge, and the use of that knowledge for helpful communications. Without the Web visit, how would the salesperson have known that she should call on the IS director to discuss networking equipment? This is effective use of the Web.