When your key customers call, who picks up the phone? When you think about it, for many businesses, there are really only a handful of people who are “make or break” for the business. The big question is . . . how do you make sure that their calls get answered?

Consider using services like Grand Central or Virtual PBX. Grand Central gives you one phone number that rings all of your phone numbers. No matter where you are, your office line, your home line, and your cell phone (or any others) all ring at the same time. In addition, users can route calls, record messages, and set distinctive ring tones. This can be a great way to guarantee that your customers reach your sales team (the system is currently transitioning to Google’s systems, so it’s temporarily unavailable). Virtual PBX is an online system that replicates the office systems that we all know (press 1 for sales, press 2 for customer service) for any size company. It can help your customers find your sales team by integrating their cell phones into the office PBX, instead of assuming that everyone is sitting at a desk.

Grand Central is free (for now), and Virtual PBX starts at $9.99 a month. Are you satisfied with your sales team’s ability to identify and respond to important customer calls?

While online retail sales continue to grow, not many people are forecasting the death of shopping in the physical world. One of the things standing in the way for most online retailers? Terrible merchandising. There’s no passion, no romance. Over and over again, it’s the same story. Here’s a picture. Click if you want to buy it.

No thanks. Etsy is an online retailer of handmade items (merchandise categories) from around the world that puts some sizzle into its online merchandising. Trying to find a matching pillow for your couch, then you can search by color by simply clicking on a color. Or, maybe you would like to see what’s being sold from Iceland – or anywhere around the world. Just click on the map. You might find this lovely snowflake needlepoint pattern that would be perfect.

Modern web design and web application tools put this kind of merchandising within just about anyone’s grasp. By investing in merchandising, online merchants can capture the serendipity, and dare we say joy, of finding that perfect item.

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?

Advertising on the web seems more and more like advertising out in the physical world. There’s a little bit of everything. While ad networks might make it easy to place ads, they’re not all created equal. We’ll be providing examples of the different types of ad networks that you might consider in the days ahead. Of course, only a morsel at a time.

We’ll start with the Representation Networks (also known as Rep Firms). Companies like AdBrite focus on selling advertising inventory from a pre-screened set of websites. In AdBrite’s case, they can deliver 700 million impressions across 31,885 sites. When placing your ad, you can choose where it is shown by 1) the content category (e.g., Finance, Parenting), 2) the geographic location of the site 3) the income or ethnic demographics of the site’s viewers, or 4) specific keywords on the site (as we discussed in The Key to Your Heart).

Peruse the AdBrite site directory and you can learn more about what certain ad placements cost. For example, it costs $1,500 / day to place that simple text ad that appears at the top of the home page on LinkedIn – the social network for professionals with more than 11 million members (see What’s a Degree Between Friends).

As with nearly all online ads, the two most important questions are who’s going to see it and where? Rep Firms tend to have a better sense of the web sites that they represent and therefore present less of a risk that your ad and brand will show up . . . where you don’t want it (e.g., porn sites, hate groups, you name it). Are you confident that your online ads are showing up in the right place?

It’s hard to overestimate the power of an image to make your sale. It seems that so many people would consider buying anything from furniture to landscaping services if they could just see what the outcome might be . . . before buying. Unfortunately, you can’t really “try on” a couch or landscaping services. Or . . . can you?

Google’s Sketchup 3D modeling tool might be able to help you close the deal. It lets you build and modify 3D models quickly and easily, certainly such things as homes (a nice loft) or offices (the Campanile building in Atlanta). So, if you want to help your customers see how that new couch looks in the living room, it’s not out of the question. Sketchup democratizes 3D modeling so that it can be put to work selling just about anything – see this gallery of modeling examples.

In addition, you can also search the Google 3D Warehouse to get a sense of the types of things that people are designing, using this tool. As you might have already noted with gaming advertising, 3D modeling has arrived. It’s only natural that it should be put to work in selling materials.