Piecing together client information on the Web

April, 1998

This is an excerpt from a longer article originally published in Sales and Field Force Automation magazine. The full text is available on the Society Web (membership required).

Knowing where to look for company information on the Web can save a lot of time, but knowing how to organize downloaded Web pages can be just as important to personal productivity.

Organizing information into a "virtual library"
It doesn’t take long for your list of bookmarks to become unwieldy. You can make the list more manageable by grouping links by topic and moving them into "folders." But it’s preferable to store them in a database, such as Microsoft Access or Claris Filemaker. Instead of using your Web browser’s "add bookmark" command to save a Web address, use the "copy" and "paste" commands to place the address in your database. You can also add a description (copy a paragraph or two from the Web site itself), subject headings and citation information for news articles (i.e. author, title, date of publication). The database becomes the "card catalog" of your "virtual library."

Once you set up a database to store link information, adding new addresses is relatively painless and has three major benefits:

• it will be easier to select the right sources for your next research project;

• it’s much easier to search, sort, and print;

• it’s easier to link Web documents (e.g. home page, list of press releases, annual report) to internal information (e.g. meeting notes, contact name and address, orders, and invoices) for a comprehensive dossier on each company (see Figure 1).

The most recent versions of both Access and Filemaker allow you to retrieve a Web page directly from a database record. Clicking on the Web address will automatically open your Web browser and retrieve the page.

Each record in the "virtual library" database represents a single Web site, article, or contact. A single click on the URL or Local File field will retrieve the document, whether it's on the Web or stored on your hard disk.

Organizing documents
In addition to saving Web addresses for later use, you can also create a personal library of Web documents on your hard disk with the "save as file" command of your Web browser. These documents represent the "stacks" or bookshelves of your virtual library. Then install a full text keyword search program such as AltaVista Private eXtension on your hard disk. Like its public namesake, Private eXtension returns a list of matching documents with links and brief descriptions. In addition to Web documents, it can also find other formats, such as Microsoft Word and Powerpoint.

Role of sales support staff
Knowing how to find basic company information on the Internet can give sales people a critical edge, particularly late at night in a hotel room when other corporate resources are unavailable. But it’s impractical to expect them to do all their own research. Therefore, many companies are creating a two-tiered system with outside sales staff trained to do basic research and inside sales support staff trained to broker tough questions, create database templates to link internal and external information, provide training, and negotiate with information providers.

Company research on the Internet is more than knowing where to look. It’s also knowing how to look and how to leverage the information retrieved.