ASI Launches ESP Online

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February 18, 2004, Trevose, PA – The Advertising Specialty Institute, the largest member organization in the promotional products industry, today released ESP Online, a dramatically improved version of ESP, the industry’s leading product marketing and research tool.

ESP Online offers a complete redesign of the user interface, eliminates the need for a DVD and associated hardware, and introduces a new pricing structure so distributors can subscribe to the service for every member of their sales team.

“The response that followed our preliminary announcement of ESP Online was phenomenal, partly because we were able to preserve the key features subscribers love in ESP,” says ASI President Timothy M. Andrews. “We’re working full-throttle to quickly fill the more than 1,800 upgrade requests we’ve received in the past month.”

ESP Online, a new version of the classic ESP, is an online research and selling tool, allowing users to find products that meet any of thousands of possible search criteria combinations, then immediately create a presentation ready for emailing or faxing to clients. The ESP database, the most reliable in the industry, contains confirmed data and high-quality images of more than 650,000 promotional products from the nation’s 3,000 leading industry suppliers.

Subscribers to ESP Online can use the vast product database from virtually any Windows-compatible personal computer with Internet access. Formerly, subscribers needed to have a DVD player and the ESP DVD, which will continue to be provided to subscribers who also want access when they aren’t connected to the Internet.

With ESP Online, the product database will be refreshed continuously, ensuring subscribers have the latest product, pricing and descriptive information on the entire 650,000-product library.

Not only is ESP Online easy to access, it’s also more affordable. ASI has revised its pricing, so every distributorship, large or small, can reap the benefits of ESP Online.

“Our desire is to make ESP affordable for each and every distributor salesperson who is a member of ASI,” says Andrews. “In today’s competitive environment, distributors simply can’t afford to have second-class information – because their clients want more, they want it faster, and they want it at the best price. At many ASI distributorships, a few people have ESP and they do the searching for everyone else. We want to change that, so everyone can have access, and ESP Online is a giant step in that direction.”

In addition to pricing for typical distributorships with a few sales people, ASI is introducing enterprise-wide pricing that will give firms with 75 or more sales professionals the incentive to provide ESP Online to everyone in their organization.

ASI’s product testing with clients and potential clients indicated that users can professionally use ESP Online in less than 30 minutes, far quicker than with the former product and faster than any competing products. “If you’re selling, you want to be selling, not struggling to learn a software program,” Andrews said. “Everyone has been astounded by the speed, the product detail, and all the special features built into ESP Online.”

Among ESP Online‘s new features are:

• an easy-to-use, standard interface
• first-ever, exclusive, side-by-side product comparisons
• ability to view detailed supplier information and ratings
• contents of verified catalogs from 3,000 leading industry suppliers
• more customizing features than any other research tool in the industry
• continuous product database updates, including pricing, descriptions and
  availability
• access through any Internet-connected Windows PC