PAGING A NEW MARKETING STRATEGY
WHETHER TOP SECRET OR NOT, government agents who use high-tech communications devices that bounce off satellites are now getting the chance to procure them in an equally space age manner. Electronic pager developer SkyTel has allied itself with Digital Commerce Corp. to market its entire line of wireless pagers and other systems to the $10 million government market via the Web.
One reason SkyTel’s taking to the site (www.skytel/fedcenter.com) is the average cost-per-transaction of traditional selling to the government is estimated to be $180 to $280-versus $4.50 through electronic commerce, says Richard Graveley, executive VP at Digital Commerce. That’s largely because the Web can help hasten the process by cutting back on field sales calls and other cumbersome and time-consuming activities involved with selling to the government.
Jackson, MS-based SkyTel’s maiden voyage in cyberspace will be an offering of pagers and other devices as a subcontractor to a larger GTE wireless communications contract to the U.S. government’s General Services Administration, which became public in late August. Thanks to this contract with the government’s chief procurement agency, SkyTel can reach everybody it wants to through the site, to which it pays Digital Commerce a $25,000 fee to ride on.
Government officials can order pagers with special credit cards, via contract sales electronic data interchange arrangements, or by printing out order forms and faxing them in.
Through the site, government procurement officers can make orders as low as a few hundred dollars up to “mission critical” orders in the ballpark of $250,000 or more, says SkyTel president George Spohn, who notes SkyTel’s government sales have grown between 70% and 100% over the past four years.
For the moment, SkyTel plans to use the site as a tool for its salespeople across the country, says Spohn. Later, it plans to run banners and other ads on the FedCenter site.
From all this, Spohn says that he’s looking for a 50% jump in pager and related equipment sales to the government by the end of September 1999.
