January 26, 1998 Ringing up online sales at PhoneZone.Com There's no teacher like experience. So when reader Dave Krupinski wrote to tell me how his Web store, PhoneZone.Com, is boosting its business through a variety of creative Web-based partnerships and marketing strategies, I listened. I recently wrote a column on the importance of marketing to Web ventures (see "Marketing, online partnerships are keys to Web site success," January 12, 1998), and I was happy to hear that many of the strategies I discussed there have been validated in Krupinski's experience. But he had some other things to teach me as well. Krupinski is director of marketing at Pacific Telephony Design, the company that owns the PhoneZone store. (The company's name is being changed to PhoneZone.Com at the end of next month, to emphasize their Web address, which is http://www.phonezone.com.) He gave me the skinny on how -- in about a year and a half -- they've grown their telephone supply business from zero to half a million dollars in revenue each quarter. Recruiting resellers PhoneZone.Com is an Internet-only retailer of telephones, telephony equipment, and computer-telephony integration products for small, medium-size, and large businesses. Since it doesn't have any physical retail outlets, the business lives or dies on the strength of its Web site. One of PhoneZone.Com's key strategies has been to recruit online partners through its "WebSeller" program. Designed to help move one of the company's top products (the Internet PhoneJack, an internet telephony expansion card), this program effectively makes PhoneZone.Com's partners into Web-based resellers. These partners promote the Internet PhoneJack on their sites, and include links for customers to order the product. They collect a commission on every sale they make. This kind of online partnership is a great way to boost sales, and it can even translate into a lucrative business for your reselling partners, so it's easy to sell them on the idea. Krupinski says the program has worked "really, really well for us." Customer services Krupinski and his cohorts at PhoneZone.Com seem to have an admirable grasp of what it means to serve their customers. Other features of their site include a page of links to telephony industry sites (Krupinski says this page is heavily used), a Job Mart where anyone can post or browse through help-wanted ads, and a Swap Meet where customers can advertise used telephony equipment for sale. There's even a series of plain-English tutorials on a variety of telephony topics, from setting up a small-business telephone system on a shoestring to a guide for designing fault-tolerant corporate phone systems. The site also includes a text-based chat tool. The latter is useful not only for customer-to-customer interactions and special events, but also for real-time customer service from PhoneZone.Com's service representatives. Overall, the site is well-organized, with an easy-to-use toolbar that appears on the left side of each page, making it exceptionally easy to find what you're looking for. There's lots of informational content right on the front page, and the site is not overly reliant on slow-to-download graphics. What's great about these features is that although they don't make any money -- at least directly -- for PhoneZone.Com, they do turn the site into a valuable resource for telephony professionals. That means they'll spend time there, bookmark the site, and tell their friends -- and that, in turn, should lead to increased sales. Sage advice "The biggest piece of advice that I can offer to any Internet based business," says Krupinski, "is that on-line marketing is a continuous effort. The Web landscape is constantly changing. It takes more than a full-time effort to make sure you are taking advantage of all of the available opportunities and partnerships." Krupinski also pointed out to me that the importance of forming partnerships isn't unique to Web-based businesses. "Partnerships are important in every business," he said. "The interesting thing about Web-based partnerships is that you can do so much with them." For example, PhoneZone.Com's WebSeller program makes it considerably easier to recruit reselling partners than would be possible with a comparable program in the real world, where resellers would have to worry about stocking inventory, processing orders, and managing the flow of money. The Internet also makes a particularly intimate form of corporate partnership possible, where one company shares business data with another in real time. For example, Federal Express and DHL Express both make their shipping data available to customers on the Web. PhoneZone.Com uses an automated system to check these systems regularly, and updates customers by email whenever the shipping status of their order changes. PhoneZone.Com's growth is especially impressive given that the company entirely self-funded. Most of the strategies Krupinski let me in on don't cost that much to implement. "The investment has been in time more than anything else," he told me. But the payoffs are in real, American dollars. What is your company doing to promote itself online? Write to me at dylan@infoworld.com. Missed a column? It's easy to catch up -- just click here.