High gas prices got you down?
They shouldn’t. At least, not if you’ve got a website for your business and the gumption to take some lemons and make lemonade out of them.
Start with your business model. How is the web currently helping you to travel less, or causing your customers to travel less? If you’re an online retailer, the benefits are obvious. Less obvious is how this is can help your sales people in the B2B market. Are you pushing whitepapers, online demos, and webcasts to your prospects, rather than sending out print materials, or visiting them for on-site demonstrations?
The web allows you to massively pre-qualify prospects before they ever ring you up. Through search engines, they qualify themselves by looking for a particular keyword. They find your site, read your relevant offerings, and then, if they’re the right fit (and you’ve got the right user conversion methodology set up!) they give you a buzz.
If you’re website isn’t working for you, well, that’s a different discussion (not to mention something we’ll be covering in on webinar topic, “Turning Traffic Into Dollars: User Conversion Explained” later today).
Pre-qualification obviously saves you time, too, but in terms of your bottom line, think about how often you’re not sending salespeople out in the field to talk to people who are just kicking tires!
About how about those webcasts? By creating webinars that you market online, and fulfill online, you are able to reach a theoretically infinite number of prospects anywhere in the world, all without leaving your office.
Sure, airfare may be up, and your employees can barely afford to commute, but there’s a silver lining in all this, and that is that your customers are going to be more likely to search the web than ever before, and if you’ve positioned yourself properly, you’re all set up to enjoy the rewards.
Note: This topic was sparked by an interesting article in the New York Times about businesses moving to more virtual meetings to offset rising travel costs.
