As the deals rushed in, Ask Jeeves management made a series of critical errors. Eager to launch sites quickly, Jeeves went on a hiring binge. In what became a waste of resources, the company set up a separate customized service, composed of a team of editors who built a specialized database of questions and answers for each corporate client. "You might have one team of editors generating questions for Ford and another generating questions for Chrysler, [but] a lot of those questions were pretty much the same," says Battle. Meanwhile, the losses mounted. Ask Jeeves reported a net loss of $52.9 million on revenues of just $22 million for 1999.
The tech market crash provided the do-or-die incentive for the company to mend its ways. With its stock price diving from its November 1999 high of $186 to $3 in December 2000, Ask Jeeves' long overdue b-to-b plan began to emerge. That's when CEO Wrubel stepped aside in favor of Battle, an industry veteran who was formerly chief strategy officer for Andersen Consulting. (Wrubel, now VP of marketing, has been informally dubbed "chief evangelizer.") At the same time, more than 250 employees lost their jobs in the restructuring.
In January Jeeves split into two divisions: the Web properties group, which handles Ask.com and other consumer-oriented search sites; and the business solutions group, which serves corporate clients. Each unit occupies a separate floor of a brick-walled warehouse in Emeryville, Calif., just north of Oakland. Editors reorganized into teams to generate databases of questions central to each industry. New clients can buy an industry-specific packet of content that can then be customized based to their needs.
Jeeves also lost some of its youthful dot-com spirit: Original staffers - many of whom boasted tattoos, blue hair and graduate degrees in English and history - were replaced by managers with experience at places like PeopleSoft and Microsoft. "In the early days we were selling to the Webmaster," says Battle. "Then we realized we needed people who could sell to people who understood buying enterprise software."
Having the right staff and structure doesn't mean much if your products don't sell. That's Battle's current challenge. A dig-into-the-details kind of leader, he works off whiteboards hung in every office and conference room, covering them with scribbles and charts for products, strategies and sales tactics. After signing a slew of corporate clients in late 1999, Jeeves has added only 25 companies since. "Right now our product is too expensive to compete against a Plymouth," says Battle, "but doesn't have enough functions and features to compete against a Mercedes."
His answer: Answers 5.0, a new search product Ask Jeeves unveiled in mid-February. In a darkened conference room on its business solutions floor, two dozen employees watch Dan Easterlin go through a demo of Answers 5.0. "What we can tell corporate customers is, 'We can make you smarter,'" says Easterlin, the company's director of product management.
