Selling to the Whole Business

Mark Indermaur's education is in computers and engineering. Much of his work experience is in sales and marketing. His job with Air2Web requires him to draw on both.

Some jobs cover so much ground that they force people to combine their experience from vastly different areas into a single set of responsibilities. Mark Indermaur has that kind of job.

As vice president of sales engineering for Air2Web, Indermaur's work straddles both disciplines contained in his title. Air2Web sells and hosts a multidevice wireless data platform that provides workers in the field with pared-down versions of a company's main applications.

In helping to convince potential customers to sign on with Air2Web, Indermaur pitches his company's software and services and runs product demonstrations for upper-level executives, answers high-end technical questions from IT organizations and helps define the specs for potential wireless data applications.

Indermaur's background makes him well-suited for the task. On leave from the Computer Science doctoral program at North Carolina State University, he held numerous sales and marketing positions with IBM before he joined Air2Web. His transition from technical worker to sales & marketing professional came because of a desire to see his work put into action.

“Early on, I spent a fair amount of time building things,” Indermaur said. “I wanted to see firsthand how people actually used what we built. I got into sales engineering, I really enjoyed it, did well and moved up the ranks.”

Air2Web's specialty is using the wireless Internet for field force automation — making proprietary information and applications available to business customers (and in some cases, their clients) through wireless devices. The platform goes beyond simple screen-scraping and allows for the creation of wireless versions of the company's main applications that can interact with these systems.

Though there are a host of wireless data platforms available, Air2Web touts as its biggest selling point the sheer number of devices its platform can reach: handsets with one- and two-way short message service, WAP-enabled phones, PDAs, pagers, i-mode, J-phones, Blackberries — any digital wireless device.

According to George Peabody, vice president of communications infrastructure and services for The Aberdeen Group, such functionality will be critical for wireless platforms as the number of end-user devices continues to increase.

“I don't see how you could be competitive without it, particularly if you are trying to appeal to a business or an enterprise,” Peabody said. “Anything that can talk to all those devices, provided it does it well, should have an advantage.”

Air2Web's platform can be used in two different forms: In the enterprise model, a company licenses Air2Web's wireless Internet software for about $50,000 with 20% in annual maintenance fees, much of which goes toward new versions of the platform. In the product's hosted version — Air2Web's initial offering — the company acts as an application service provider, hosting the platform and a client's specific applications in its own facilities for a cost that starts at about $20,000 per year. According to Indermaur, Air2Web has connections with every carrier that offers digital service in North America and uses leased lines, frame relay or a secure Internet connection back to the client.

Indermaur is usually brought in around the third visit to a potential client. One of his main responsibilities is to conduct more technical, in-depth wireless education, helping to determine how the Air2Web platform can be applied to a particular business' operations.

A big part of this work, then, is brainstorming with a company to figure out how Air2Web's wireless Internet platform can be applied that organization's business practices.

“You try to uncover what are a client's critical objectives and what are the challenges to achieving those objectives,” he said. “What wireless can do is give you more timely access to information to make decisions and be more responsive to customers.”

And since Air2Web works with businesses, what makes an application the right type is quantifiable: It must provide a demonstrable return on investment in a reasonable amount of time. In the case of a tool like wireless data, it needs to increase employee productivity by saving them time or improve customer service by giving them remote access to information.

Once the right type of application is determined, Indermaur's technical background comes into play. Working with a potential client, he helps determine the process of exactly how these applications should work, covering topics such as how information is drawn out of a company's files, how it is presented to the end user and how any information sent back to the company is processed.

When it comes time to actually write these applications, Indermaur steps aside and Air2Web's client services team steps in. That group can write all the apps a company requests or simply train the client's own people in creating the wireless applications that are compatible with the Air2Web platform.

Indermaur's mix of technical know-how and client interaction plays into other areas besides sales. Because he works closely with clients, he knows what they are asking for from the next application and has a feel for what they want from the next big thing — knowledge he passes on to Air2Web's development team, which then uses the information when designing future products.

For the wireless Web, said Indermaur, 2.5 and 3G phones will open up a whole new set of business applications. GPS-enabled mobile devices will allow for easy deployment of field personnel, for example, while some devices will allow for multimedia messaging services like downloadable maps or radar images of weather systems. More intelligent systems and applications will be able to push information out to end users rather than having them pull it from the system.

That vision of what's next has helped Air2Web win clients. UPS, which allows its customers to track packages wirelessly via Air2Web's hosted service, chose Air2Web in part because of its vision for the wireless Web.

“They had a portfolio of technology, and they were pretty visionary in terms of where they wanted the solutions to grow,” said David Ladner, director of electronic commerce for interactive marketing at UPS. “They were looking at the marketplace and, as they say, moving where the puck is going.”

And moving where the puck is going is made easier by the hybrid nature of his job, Indermaur said. Working closely with actual customers helps him and Air2Web better prepare for future demands on technology. “When you get to spend some time directly with customers, it gives you a much better idea of what to build in the first place.”