Most customers have a simple question or two before they are ready to buy. If they don’t want to hunt for the answer on your web site, download a digital brochure, or call the 800 number, you are in trouble.

That’s where Meebo rooms come in handy. Meebo is a free, multi-media chat application that you can embed directly in your website or blog. It lets you talk one-on-one with your customers, addressing any questions they may have and engaging them during the purchasing process. To get started, go to the Meebo site and click “create a room”. The service will prompt you to name your room, give it a description, and personalize it with basic colors and icons. Once your room is created, you can chat directly on the Meebo site or generate the embed code for your site. Surprisingly, Meebo doesn’t require a user account and will do most of the grunt work for you (hosting, managing, and moderating the rooms).

There’s no such thing as being “too available” for your customers. You can easily run a Meebo chat room in the background as you go about your normal business and address customer concerns as they crop up. The very real and very immediate connection you will have with your customers may well be worth it.

While most people start the buying process with Google or Yahoo!, these tools aren’t the right ones to use for many categories of things. Accordingly, they’re not always the right place to put your advertising, either.

Take homebuyers for example. When it comes to targeting them, you’re better off advertising with Roost. This real-estate search engine provides comprehensive listings (not yet nationally), including for-sale-by-owner listings. Search results feature photos, mapping, and summary information. In addition, users can adjust results using sliders, a handy tool for narrowing results by price, location, or even year built.

Roost makes money by hosting a directory of real-estate broker sites and delivering traffic to them. One thing for sure, Roost search users are definitely interested buyers. When it comes to going to the next level of search advertising, have you explored what vertical search tools exist for your industry?

There are so many people who buy a CRM system, like Salesforce, only to realize that it’s a real chore to complete customer profiles beyond the most rudimentary contact information.

Now, for Salesforce.com users, much of that chore has disappeared thanks to the mashup called FaceForce. With very little effort, this system lets you insert Facebook profiles directly in your Salesforce customer or prospect records. Instead of just seeing name, title and address, now you can see things like home town, birthday, and importantly, friends. FaceForce will even search for Facebook profiles that match your existing clients and compile all company contacts with a profile in your Accounts detail.

If you’re wondering how to be customer-centric, why don’t you start with gathering information that your customers have already provided in their Facebook profiles? Oh, and don’t forget this is all free (given that you’re already paying for SalesForce.com).

Almost every company has been through the well known cycle when it comes to CRM. First, expend a great deal of effort to configure a system, maybe customize a process, and of course pay for many licenses, these days mostly for a software as a service (SaaS). Then, sit back and wait, while no one uses the system because it’s too slow, dull, tedious, klunky - take your pick. Forcing people into a process can generate a lot of antibodies.

If you’re facing this challenge, try getting back to the future with Highrise. With a groovy Web 2.0 look and feel, and developed by the makers of Basecamp (discussed in Before Everest), it carves out the heart of CRM - tracking and managing prospects, contacts, and of course, customers. When do you use it? Think about what you do if a customer calls and you want to take notes on the conversation. Where do you put these notes? Once you write them, how do you share them? And, even better, how do you make sure anyone on your sales team can search and find them? Highrise solves this problem, in addition to of course creating a company-wide set of constantly updated contacts.

Even better, it lets you simply forward an email (including attachments) and have it automatically append to a specific contact. When was the last time your sales team uploaded a document to your CRM system? This capability along with a nothing short of seductive ease-of-use can have your sales team working together, without even realizing it. There’s a free plan and all for-pay plans include a 30-day free trial period. Why not give it a try?

While it’s tempting to think of your communications with your customers and prospects as a broadcast, it’s really just a conversation. What’s surprising is that one of the best tools available to facilitate online conversations, exists in most companies, if at all, as part of the customer support function. Don’t you want to engage your customers and prospects BEFORE something goes wrong?

VBulletin provides one of the best web bulletin board systems (aka “BBS”). These systems let you structure and support a conversation with your customers. What’s key here is to understand that your customers can have a perfectly fruitful conversation . . . without you. BBS’s have existed, egads, well before the advent of the web, way back in the dial-up era.

For under $200, you can have a BBS up and running on any subject imaginable (dog lice, Cooking Light, crappie fishing) carrying your brand registration (or even just using one of many low cost themes available online, perhaps a nice orange one with a science theme ), and engaging your customers. Aren’t you interested to know what your customers might say to each other?

Ask anyone who runs a call center and he/she will tell you that when your customer calls you with questions, there’s really no hotter sales lead. It is the 20th century version of showing up at the front door, asking to buy something. How easy is it for your customers or prospects to call you?

Jaduka’s Click-and-Connect service (and others like it) lets you make it unbelievably easy for a customer to initiate a call. From any web page (or HTML email), a user clicks on a button, and then enters a phone number. The system then places a call to each person and connects the call. Think about it - there are valid reasons why someone would prefer an inbound call from your company, instead of picking up the phone and calling. It may be too hard to find the correct number; they may decide to buy on a page without a phone number. Or, even more important these days, they’re on the cell phone and dialing is inconvenient.

It doesn’t really matter why they use it; studies show that customers tend to prefer these inbound calls. It may just drive incremental responses to your email marketing and search marketing efforts. The bottom line - better response rates translate into real dollars. With the first 60 minutes free and simple setup (afterwards, an hour of connect time is 5 bucks), why not give it (or the alternative eStara) a try?

Sales discipline may be simple. It’s just not easy. Are you using digital tools to create and manage your sales pipeline effectively?

Google Adwords and Salesforce.com have just announced a partnership to connect text ads to lead generation and sales pipeline management. The joint offering can help you understand which Google keywords get clicked on (as ads) and convert into sales leads. From there, you can then access Salesforce.com’s CRM suite. A $600 commitment will buy 5 people access to the base level of SalesForce.com service for a year. 

If you need the entrepreneur’s solution, consider using a shared Google Apps online spreadsheet. It can always be up to date and accessible to anyone with a Google email (Gmail) account. Customize your spreadsheet with the details of your sales pipeline, e.g. client name, opportunity, rating, opportunity size, likelihood of close, contact information. Presto! You have a free CRM system.

For less than an hour of your time, you can keep your sales force on the same page (literally and figuratively) and apply sales process discipline to grow your company.