Promise to Fulfillment

If you're a typical netpreneur, you can spell your biggest worry out in one word: traffic. That's what you scheme about, spend money on, hold meetings about. And you're right - building and keeping traffic on your site is important, whether you're an IBM or a tiny new site on the block.

But there's another piece to the puzzle - fulfillment. Getting the products or services your customers want in the way they want is extremely important. Especially on the web - where what you're selling is virtual. The customer can't touch or look at your product. That in and of itself is a drawback to web businesses. It can be counteracted, however, with great fulfillment. If a customer overcomes their initial reluctance to buy from you, they're taking a risk on trusting you. If you don't deliver their order correctly and on time, they won't be back - they'll be shopping at a brick and mortar location or finding another website to patronize. Take some advice from a guy with a truly complicated fulfillment challenge: Mark Lorimer. Have you ever bought a new car and had a difficult experience? Then you can relate to Lorimer. His company, Autobytel, has to communicate with scores of nationwide dealers and get customers the promised price on a very negotiable product. How does Autobytel do it? Well enough to sell $1.6 million worth of cars every hour! Learn from Lorimer.

Build Fulfillment Before Branding

Many companies focus mainly on branding and let fulfillment lag, Lorimer says. But that's the wrong way to go about it. "Our theory on how to build the business out was that we needed to have the fulfillment structure first," Lorimer says. "This is not a situation where we actually make the cars or we actually sell the cars. Therefore, we have to have a very strong grip on the promise keepers, our fulfillment partners. We can go out and market and build brand, which we do very successfully, but the money doesn't create a brand experience with the consumer unless you close that promise expectation." That means you have to deliver what you've promised, no matter what. "If I promise Karen that I will help her get a car at a fair, low price together with the best process she's ever had; Karen doesn't become enamored of our brand unless we deliver that. So we concentrated first on the fulfillment structure, and that's knowing a great deal about your vertical," Lorimer says.

Only after that fulfillment structure was put into place did Autobytel put capital into branding. "We started investing bigger dollars in the brand so the people we send through the system would be able to spread the word. Everybody's a walking billboard for his or her car purchase. But that's not just in the car business. If you're selling fasteners, then the fastener community is so tiny that if they have a bad experience with your fastener purchase process, everybody in the fastener community's going to know that," Lorimer says. Hype can only create so much buzz - your business has to be ready to stand and deliver.

"We built the brand, but we did that only because we knew we could fulfill the promises that our commercials made. Then you can deepen the customer relationship," Lorimer says. "We told the fulfillment partners that if they treated customers well, we would spend the money to bring more customers in. That's the way it has worked."

Train Your Partners Well

If you handle all levels of your business, you can keep a watchful eye on fulfillment. But when you have partners, it's not as easy. That's why Autobytel pours a lot of training into its Autobytel University. They install needed technology with their auto dealer partners and make sure their dealers are up to speed on using the technology with an interactive training program. They also do in- person training at dealerships and they sometimes even help hire employees who will be working with the Autobytel program. After that they conduct semi-monthly events around the country to beef up training and refresh dealers on new technology. It's a big job. But Autobytel isn't willing to take the chance that partners will let the company down. "What we find is that while we can give them the technology, a lot of people view the Internet as, 'We do business the same way we used to. We just do it faster now because of the Internet.' That's dead wrong. The consumers are completely different. The people who direct the consumers have to be trained to realize that," Lorimer says.

If they still don't get the message, they won't be with Autobytel long - dealers that don't sell enough are kicked off the Autobytel program. And Autobytel keeps an eye on customer service in other ways too. Every customer gets a survey on their Autobytel buying experience and they're encouraged to e-mail the site with any complaints or concerns. "We work with the dealers to make sure that they treat our customers like the gold they're supposed to be treated like," Lorimer says. Does your business have such control over fulfillment? Do you really know if your partners are delivering? Do you have a recovery plan for each part of the chain that can fail? If not, you have some work to do. And you'd better start soon - or all that traffic won't lead to a lasting business.