Case Study Archives: IBM Profiler

IBM has a diverse line of products, services and customers, and its vast portfolio of offerings reflects its customers' varying levels of technology adoption. To fully leverage its considerable knowledge base about customer needs, IBM needed an automated customer assessment-marketing tool that its sales force could distribute via the Web, run as a standalone application and update easily.

Constructed by BrandLogic using Java, XML, DB2 and Websphere, the portal gathers industry information from sales people in the field, and is a document and collateral reference system and a dynamic report/presentation generator. It enables the IBM sales team and Business Partners to provide customers with a comprehensive assessment of the level of integration of e-business into their operations. "I was blown away by how BrandLogic was able to understand IBM's business needs," says IBM's Manager, On Demand Business Marketing Programs.

The application analyzes the information and generates a graphically rich report that shows customers where they stand relative to industry competitors' technology adoption.
    Because the sales team can now identify business opportunities and corresponding IT solutions within minutes instead of the days it took previously, the Profiler has become one of IBM's most popular sales-enablement tools.

The Profiler-generated report also includes drivers and barriers to improving customers' technology environments and links to all available collateral, in print and on the Web. The tool, also available to IBM Business Partners, helps shorten sales cycles by enabling rapid qualification of leads, driving additional On Demand Business revenue by identifying new business opportunities. The ROI results of this tool are impressive. It effectively created a new method of value-added selling, leading to bigger sales and streamlining the proposal process.