How to Turn Your Cell Phone and Computer into a
Complete Virtual Office.
Everything you need to succeed without the rent.SM
You’ve make the decision to go into business. Good for you. Maybe you’ve decided that you’re done making money for someone else. Or you’ve retired and you want to make some extra money. Or you think you can turn your hobby into a money making business.
What ever your motivation, you’ve got some hard realities to face. To be successful you’re going to have to compete against all of the other companies that are already selling what you want to sell. That means that you’ve got to take their customers away from them and convince new customers that they should buy from you instead of your competition. And then there are the costs, starting with the overhead costs of maintaining an office – your work environment.
Today, a growing number of entrepreneurs are choosing to work “Virtually”, usually from a home office. The good news is that there are now more services and tools than ever, available to make the home office as complete an office as any physical office.
Every workplace starts with a telephone number. That may seem obvious, but you still have to think it through and make some choices. If you do business in a local area, then get a local telephone number. Customers will recognize you as a local business and may feel more comfortable doing business with someone across town instead of across the country.
If you do business in a large geographic area, or nationally, you need a toll free number. Even though the cost of making a long distance call is now very little, most people will avoid making a long distance call. An out-of-town phone number also identifies you as an out-of-town business, and most people prefer to do business locally.
Finally, if you do business internationally, you should find a virtual office provider that can give you a phone number in the country where you do business. An international telephone number provider will be able to route that phone number right to you, like any other phone number, and for only pennies a minute.
Once you’ve chosen your phone number, you’re in business…barely. Customers and prospects can call your business telephone number and leave a message. But, customers don’t call a business to leave a message. They call to speak with someone, now.
“Find Me – Follow Me” will keep you connected to your home office by connecting callers to live, whether you’re in or out of the office, at your desk or on your cell. Some “Find Me – Follow Me” services come with Call Screening, which allows you to take some calls and send others to voice mail.
By talking to your customers whenever they call, you’ll start doing business in “real time”. That means, no more telephone tag. Customers will have more confidence in you and they will refer their friends to you.
Your Virtual Phone System may also have an Auto Attendant. Callers might hear “Thank you for calling [your company]. If you know the extension number of the person you’re calling, you may enter it at any time. For Sales press 1, Technical Support press 2, Billing press 3, etc. or Press 9 for the Dial by Name Directory”, even though all calls are transferred to you! Nobody knows that your name is the only name in the Dial by Name Directory, so you’ll sound like a much larger business.
Good virtual office systems are actually built as a phone system, with private phone system features such as station to station transfer. That way, when you do receive a call that is better handled by someone else in your company, you can transfer the call to them, wherever they are, the same as if you were transferring a call within the same office.
When you don’t take calls live, callers can leave a voice mail message. Each person and department can have their own private voice mailbox. Your Virtual Office can then call you and deliver the message to you and send the message to your email, so you can hear it over your computer, or any Internet devise. Your should also be able to be notified of a message waiting by text message or pager.
That’s great, but you’re still not done. Every business needs to be able to receive Faxes. You may be able to receive faxes on your Virtual Office phone number, or you may want to have a separate number for faxes only. Faxes are delivered to your email, where they can be viewed, printed, forwarded, saved or discarded.
Desktop faxing may also be part of your virtual workplace package. This will allow you to send faxes to any telephone fax number directly from your computer.
So you see, today’s Virtual Office services are a complete solution to doing business from home. For as little as 50 cents to a dollar a day, Virtual Office providers can give you a phone and fax number that transfers callers to you, takes voicemail messages, delivers voicemail and fax messages to your email and allows you to fax directly from your computer. In other words, you’ve turned your cell phone and computer into a computer Virtual Office that allows you to conduct business from anywhere.
Mark Gordon is the President of American Voice Mail, which has the largest local telephone number Virtual Office network in the world and has provided over 1 Million subscribers with virtual office telephone numbers in thousands of cities throughout 40 countries worldwide.
Copyright 2007 Mark Gordon