How online tools can help your business go mobile

Once upon a time, your customers were your neighbors and friends—people who lived in your home town.

But it’s a global world now, even for small businesses. Your business may be based in Boston, but your customers could be in Buenos Aires or Beijing.

And a global world calls for global tools—and the ability to use them wherever you happen to be. New computer technology and wireless connectivity have changed the way we do business. Much of the world’s workforce now works on the fly, quite literally. Simply stated, we need to be able to take our tools with us.

Microsoft Office Live Small Business subscriptions include online tools and services designed to help small-business owners more efficiently manage the demands of an increasingly competitive marketplace. These services range from online contact management and opportunity tracking to providing the ability to share information with customers and employees in private online workspaces.

Taking your work with you

Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

• You're out of town meeting with a customer and you neglected to bring the latest version of your price list.
• You're on your way to a lunch meeting with a client and you have car trouble, but don't have the client's cell phone number with you.
• You're working from home on a weekend and don't have all the information you need to finish a project without making a trip into the office.

More and more often these days, it pays to literally take your office with you. Dead time in airports or hotel rooms? You can use it to your advantage with online services that help you stay in touch with your business operations, your customers, and prospective customers.

Contact Manager and workspaces are good examples of online tools you can use to take care of business and keep sales processes moving forward whether you're in your office, a hotel room, or at the airport.

Here's a quick look at what these tools offer:

Contact Manager gives you the ability to manage business relationships in an organized and effective way with easy online access. You can efficiently run your business by keeping on top of customer communications and your sales opportunities pipeline. Key elements include:

• Full-time access to customer information. Contact Manager provides access from a Web browser to valuable customer information—including accounts, contacts, and opportunities. Depending on the roles and rights that are assigned, you and your colleagues can see the latest and most up-to-date information and activities in these areas. So if you're working from home—or trying to set up a meeting on the road—all you need is an Internet connection to access customer information.
• Send notifications. You can configure Contact Manager to send activity-triggered e-mail alerts. For example, you could be notified when a lead or opportunity is assigned to you, or you could send notifications to a designated team member when unqualified opportunities arrive that they need to be aware of.
• Standardize document and templates. With Contact Manager, you can standardize internal and external documents. An example might be a Business Documents library that contains common product or service information and marketing collateral. This way you can help ensure everyone on your team is using the same, up-to-date information.

With the Quick Add feature, you can easily set up a new business account or contact in Contact Manager on the fly and then populate the account details at a more convenient time.

Workspaces offer the ability to communicate and share information via password-protected intranet and extranet sites—by invitation only. It's a bit like having a private Web site for each individual customer, and customized for the individual account and you can set permission levels for each site to help protect sensitive data.

Workspaces can contain a variety of information formats, everything from documents and lists to photos, Web pages, and discussion boards.

Office Live Small Business offers several pre-configured workspaces designed to help businesses collaborate more efficiently—with customers and partners as well as employees. These include:

• Customer Workspaces, for sharing information with customers and other contacts.
• Team Workspaces, which can be used as a central storage place for information about a workgroup or team, including guidelines, schedules, and announcements.
• Basic Meeting Workspaces, for planning and organizing a meeting, including its agenda, attendees, documents, and objectives.
• Wiki Workspaces, for creating a forum for sharing knowledge, brainstorming ideas, or collaborating on designs.

You can also create your own workspaces to meet specific business or workplace needs. For example, you might create a workspace devoted to human resources, where you could post company policies, vacation schedules, and related information.

Taking sales to the next level

Microsoft Office Live Small Business includes a set of powerful online business tools. Among them is the Sales application for storing information about your competition, customer support, and estimates. With this tool you can monitor competitors’ risk to their companies as well as share information and news about competitors’ activities and products.

The Sales application also allows you to record customer support information and to record and track quotes and orders.

For businesses large and small, mobility and the global market aren’t the next big things. They’re already here. And with Office Live Small Business applications and tools, your office—and your sales opportunities—can be there when you need them.