2009 proved to be a challenging year for even the most astute business people. As we look back on a year that many people would like to forget, it’s time to start planning for the future, a big part of which for most business owners and managers involves leveraging the Internet to increase sales or reduce operating costs. While some have taken tentative steps in this direction, many still view the Internet as it was five years ago: a sea of mediocre websites with little reason for investment. A lot has changed in five years, and the cost savings and sales potential of using the Internet are now all but impossible to deny.

2010 may go down in history as a pivotal year for business and the Internet, a time when economics motivated businesses to turn over every stone in search of better ways to do more with less. From marketing and sales, to customer service and putting internal business processes online, many companies are upping their online investments to reduce costs and increase sales. Since most business people are now connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week, through their computers or smartphones, they now rely on the Internet to get some level of service and satisfaction from their suppliers.

Business owners and managers need to take a holistic approach to their online presence moving forward, and they need to realize a static website is no longer going to make the grade for the company or its clients. This means looking to the Internet from a variety of viewpoints and then investing in the areas with the highest potential return. Each area of the company’s operations should be examined to see if it could benefit from an investment in Internet technology.

Sales and marketing

The first and most obvious choice for investment is sales and marketing. While many companies have websites, few have developed and follow a strategic plan to reach defined online sales and marketing goals. Areas under consideration should be company image, online marketing, customer service and satisfaction, lead generation, direct sales and ordering, and business intelligence. Benefits include an increase in sales, a reduction of sales and marketing costs, improved reporting, valuable business intelligence, and improved customer satisfaction.
Production and operations

The next and often over-looked area is internal operations. Are there internal processes that could be done less expensively and more efficiently if they were available online? Internal ordering, sharing internal documents, scheduling, time tracking, sales and project management, recruiting, and other services can all be viable online. These services are often custom-built to your specifications and sometimes can result in reducing software licensing and maintenance fees or non-compliance, as well as improving efficiency and reducing costs for the company.

Many business owners and managers get bogged down trying to understand all the different technologies or simply cannot understand how they can afford the time and money to do what they know they need to online. What we are seeing now among many of our clients is a re-allocation of time and resources away from the old way of doing things and toward a new, more efficient, and lower cost way on the Internet. A prime example would be moving from a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, which has an upfront cost and licensing as well as the need to be installed maintained throughout the year, to a web-based solution that is simply billed at a low monthly cost per user. No matter where a company finds the time and resources required to get business processes online, through re-allocating or the addition of new resources, it has to have the same return on investment or better, or it isn’t worth doing.

As we are now halfway through 2010, I urge every business owner or manager to take a long, hard look at what they are doing online to make sure they are meeting the needs of the company and its clients. Even if you don’t think 2010 is going to be a stellar year for your company, it looks as though it will be a stellar year for businesses on the Internet.

Joe Perraton is the founder and president of Point One Media Inc. and can be reached at 877.755.2762 or by email jperraton@pointonemedia.com