The Conference Coach™

The recent hike in gas prices isn’t new to anyone.  It’s impossible to open a newspaper, switch on the television or surf the internet without some reference to the high price of gas and the effect that it’s having — not to mention the hit to your bottom line.

As the cost of travel continues to increase, you need to find ways to keep productivity up while keeping costs down.  Whether you’re commuting to work or on the road visiting customers, every mile you drive costs you time and money.  For example, if you drive 20 miles one way to visit a client for an hour in a car that averages 20 mpg, your total trip commitment is 40 miles and at least two hours of your time.  After returning to the office, not only have you spent over $8.00 in gas, based on the high national average price per gallon of $4.10 in 2008, but you’ve also spent an hour on the road.  For that same $8.20, you could have saved an hour of your time and still had your meeting — if you had only used conferencing.

An hour on the road may seem like nothing if you’ve got to travel across the country or to another state for a meeting.  As the hassles of travel increase with higher airline ticket prices and longer security lines, consider an alternative – conferencing.

Conferencing can turn the road-weary road warrior into a more productive, savvy business person who:

• Has more time to spend on personal pursuits
• Has more time to spend on productive work instead of hours of driving and time spent in airports
• Saves the company money
• Saves the environment one less trip at a time
• Enjoys the flexibility of meeting with multiple clients in different geographic locations in the same day without ever leaving the office

Ask yourself “Can I be successful with a conference for this meeting?” Smart businesses are using conferencing on a daily basis.  In a recent national survey, Wainhouse Research found that more than 60 percent of all meetings today are done virtually.  That figure may seem high but when you consider the prevalent use of audio conferencing and the ease of web conferencing, 60 percent seems a bit low.

In May 2008, Roger Dow, president and CEO of the Travel Industry Association was quoted in a Cox News story that “more than 100,000 travelers each day are voting with their wallets by choosing to avoid trips.”  The interview was conducted via a conference call.

But it’s not just executives that benefit from using conferencing as an everyday business tool.  A wide range of functions within a business can benefit from using conferencing.  Consider the ease with which a corporate trainer can conduct training by using the tools found within web conferencing solutions.  They can easily share a presentation, run a demo or poll the participants.  A project manager can share a timeline and participants can make real-time changes via the web so that collaboration is easy and efficient.  Technical support staff can use web conferencing to trouble shoot a customer’s problem visually so that the frustrations of a client are addressed quickly.  Really, anyone in business today can use conferencing as a cost effective way to do business.

When you consider that the cost of a conference call can be less than the cost of the gas mentioned above and that your travel time is most certainly worth much more, there is no time like the present to get over the road and on the way to a more productive day by using conferencing for your next meeting.