Alternatives to Business Travel.

• Author: Boutelle, Marsha
• Position: Brief Article

The good news is your small business is booming. Your numbers are up. You recently hired a couple of great new people. And your customer base is expanding. Because of that growing customer list, you now do business outside the city and have even added a few out-of-state clients.

The bad news? Your travel budget is negligible. Every extra dollar you've earned is plowed back into employee salaries, computer network upgrades, and other requisites. But these out-of-town clients need nurturing and service, or they won't remain clients for long. What do you do?

Not to worry. There are excellent alternatives to costly business travel, and they're getting better all the time, thanks to advancing technology and the Internet. The Web is a great tool for small businesses that lack a travel budget. You can make presentations, collaborate on documents, and conduct meetings via telephone lines and/or cable modems and the Internet. Following are three ways to get down to business without ever leaving your office.

Call a Conference

"Conference calling is the most cost-effective option," says Jed Kassing of Glyphics Communications. When you don't need to see the other parties, but you do need to carry on a discussion with three or more people in different locations, this is your best option. Teleconferencing is great for "effectively communicating real-time information to groups of people," says Dam Rohead of Gentner Communications.

A Wide Net

"Webconferencing is like a meeting in a boardroom with documents, charts and graphs," Kassing says. You need an audio conference (obtained by teleconferencing) and access to the Internet. You log on to a website that has been predetermined by the company and Web hosting service, and whoever is hosting the meeting puts documents, charts or graphs on the site.

"Clients are given an access number and pass code to the site," says Doug Murray, president of NoWalls Inc. "The site might contain project information -- updates, project status or collaborative work, for instance." And not everyone has to be at the site at the same time.

"With discussion threads, one person posts a question or makes a comment on the site, and later, someone else might post a response," Murray says. "People can state their issues or concerns, add their own notes, and the site becomes a running dialogue. Users don't have to be...