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The Escalating Challenges Facing Growing Businesses
The opportunities the Internet provides for growing businesses have never been greater. Businesses of any size can now sell and deliver goods and services to a broader array of customers spread across a far greater geographic footprint. Plus, Web advertising and eCommerce level the playing field, permitting growing businesses to compete with much larger enterprises.
However, these same innovations are being used by others as well. This is creating greater competition for growing businesses. As more companies compete for customers and potential partners within a local geography, growing businesses must expand their target market in order to succeed and survive.
In an increasingly global marketplace, growing businesses can no longer rely on traditional methods to engage new customers and partners, or retain existing ones. With global competition come a number of global business challenges.
These global business challenges include:
- Escalating fuel costs are driving up travel costs, both by car and air.
- Intensifying price competition and budgetary constraints preclude businesses from sending their sales and training personnel to meet with customers or employees in person unless it is absolutely necessary.
- Remote employees need a way to collaborate with their colleagues instantly to share knowledge and drive projects to completion on time and on budget.
- Cost constraints make it difficult to afford even traditional on-site customer or employee training programs.
- All workers are being required to do more with less to accelerate sales and marketing cycles and increase revenue.
- Global businesses need metrics-driven programs and tools to maximize their return on investment (ROI) as they expand their operations.
Not only does airline travel cost more, but consolidated flight schedules and tighter security requirements make air travel more time-consuming and a less productive way to do business. Yet, simple phone conversations are no longer sufficient to win new customers or support existing ones.
The same holds true for trying to get the most out of a geographically dispersed workforce. Growing businesses are increasingly dependent on mobile or home-based employees. But, traditional phone calls, email and faxes all fall short of meeting the collaboration and training needs of remote and even on-site workers.
Figure 1 illustrates the reasons why growing businesses are demanding better, real-time communications tools.
In the past, most organizations communicated in a 'linear' fashion in which individuals made calls in a sequential manner. A business owner would call a prospective customer then talk with an employee about the prospect's needs, possibly make another call to a partner to fill in a gap, and then call the customer back to respond to their request. This sequence of calls may be repeated multiple times and might still lead to a face-to-face meeting to close a deal.
This approach is no longer effective in today's increasingly competitive climate. Instead, growing businesses must adopt a new, more dynamic method of engaging customers, partners and co-workers one-on-one or simultaneously in order to reduce cycle-time and increase the productivity of everyone involved. Some business consultants refer to this streamlining process as reducing the friction in the workflow.
Fortunately, there are proven Web conferencing services that permit this type of dynamic, real-time collaboration. The Internet has enabled these web-based solutions to emerge to address today's challenges. The beauty of these web conferencing services is that they can be leveraged by growing businesses to compete on equal terms against larger companies with far greater resources at their disposal.
In fact, web conferencing can fundamentally change the way growing businesses operate internally and communicate with their customers and partners externally. We'll examine these services in the next section of this whitepaper.
How Web Conferencing Addresses Today's Business Challenges
Web conferencing is an increasingly common method of leveraging the Internet to conduct meetings or make live presentations to customers, partners or co-workers at different locations. In a Web conference, participants sit at their own computers connected together via the Internet. The most basic component of a Web conference is screen sharing, whereby the Web conference participants can see whatever is on the presenter’s computer screen. The visual presentation is accompanied by voice communication, either through a traditional telephone line or a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) connection.
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