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Although most of the businesses have used some form of electronic & internet applications, the small home based businesses have limited themselves to only a few of them. Having an email address or a website is just the tip of the iceberg. The technical developments have presented numerous ways to engage the customers without moving a step away from your home or office.

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While this article is specifically about the growing trend in using online meetings & preferring online presentations to demonstrate products & services, Cisco has worked extensively in TelePresence. These are gigantic HD screens that that are set up along with good acoustic set up to give you the feeling that you are in a real meeting with a real person in front of you. The large HD screens & the sound systems are set up so as to create a real life image of your participants right across from you. That world of TelePresence is extremely costly (setting up 1 screen that virtually represents 2 participants could cost as much as US $ 200,000).

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One of the tools that is just beginning to pick up is the internet presentation tool. Before I go into what the tools are, let me share a small survey that was done by BizTechReports.com. The survey was carried out amongst small and growing organizations and intended to find out how online presentations have helped them grow.

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As you can see, the survey was done primarily with small & home business in mind (Figure 2), and 50% either agreed or strongly agreed (Figure 1) that Online Presentations have helped build increasing sales & customer relationships. The survey also focussed on businesses that had a strong need for product or service demonstration to their customers.

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The transformation is slow, but steady. Small savings in office cost, travel and lodging costs are the hard benefits of an online interaction. The more long term is a continuous relation building exercise that is independent of location. Not to ignore the traditional issue of culture, these online presence faces a tough battle with issues like “comfort factor” when it comes to physically present with your customer.

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The ability to organize white board discussions across multiple locations is the main benefit that the small & home businesses realized from online presentations. Since the formalities of a traditional demo is eliminated, people are more participative & the collaboration across different functional groups is high. This saves time in repeat demos to the various departments within the customer’s organization (like Support, Service, Procurement, Production etc). The easy of use & ability to track are the other important benefits acknowledged during the survey.

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Close to 30% respondents agreed with the immediate cost saving. If you look deeper, it is not only the travel & the hosting costs, but the savings on printed material that has a long term effect of going the internet route. Almost 60% felt that they could reach more customers through online meetings & presentations. That meant more prospects, more leads and more sales in the long run.

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Let us look at what sort of programs, softwares or computer applications are being used for online presentations.

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The most popular is PowerPoint. This is a natural trend since all in-person meetings & presentations use Power Point as the common tool to create fancy decks and charts. Irrespective of what is used, the online meetings & presentation tools allow you to share any computer program or internet application. It is just like having someone look into your computer screen with you.

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The last take from this survey was an understanding of how small & medium sized businesses plan to grow their practice of more online meetings & online presentations. The survey showed that about 52% of the small & medium business surveyed are going to increase such online meetings with customers. 22% discarded the option right away while 26% are still not sure which way to go.

The survey was done across 213 middle & senior executives in North America leading small & medium sized business. The graphs are obtained from the reports published by BizTechReports.com.
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The tool that you could use right away are the WebEx PCNow , which has been in the market & is excellently meets even the very complicated needs to a presentation. They have 14 day free trial to help more small & medium business experience the benefit first hand.

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The other one is Central Desktop. This tool allows you to Organize team projects, share files and meet online with Central Desktop – You can Try it FREE..

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Both these tools, WebEx PCNow & Central Desktop are excellent ones. They offer you a trial period where you could use it across your organization. A suggestion here though - if you are running a trial, do try it out with teams that are spread across the country. That would help you understand the impact of internet connection speed, acoustics and even PC requirements.
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Find more Blogging & Internet Money Making Tips posts in: Central Desktop, Small Business, Tools, WebEx

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