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•134 The 100 Greatest Business Ideas of All Time

More and more consultants and trainers are seeking to make their training courses
use new technology, but it is not until they could use such a platform as this that
they have been able to do it quickly and at sensible cost.

The global availability of the experience of all the people in an organisation to
each other will have many companies making money out of the Internet. Let’s finish
this idea with a simple example.

A sales force was trained in a new process for writing proposals. They went into a
classroom for half a day and were introduced to the concepts of the new process. In
the next two weeks they were asked to write one of their real-life proposals to the new
standard. The expert who was teaching the process had access to their work and could
prompt those who had not completed the exercise, first by e-mail and then by tel-
ephone. The number who completed the work was far higher than normal.

By the end of a series of training events there were some 50 real-life proposals
on the company’s intranet accessible through the iPSS. At around the same time, a
salesperson found himself writing a proposal at 2 o’clock in the morning as it was
due in by 10 o’clock that day (this is not an unusual scenario). He got to the point in
the proposal process when he needed to describe the competitive edge that he be-
lieved his product had over the competition and wondered if any of his colleagues
had produced a pithy and perhaps witty way of expressing this. By searching on the
keyword of the product he was selling he found a number of previously written
proposals on the iPSS and this gave him what he wanted. The sales director in this
example is able to look at what people are proposing to write in their executive
summaries in time, now, to be able to make suggestions for improvement.

Guess what? They are actually following through!

Idea 74 – Never mind high tech, there’s still money in
books (Amazon.com)

It is hard to argue with the quotation from a satisfied customer carried on the com-
pany’s Web page, ‘Amazon.com is an extraordinary company’. Martin Tanner, an