Conference calling services provide a way to release information to your sales force, train your employees and link your scattered workgroups. The conference call eliminates the need for costly airline tickets, lost productivity due to travel time and expensive meeting costs. Training cycles can be quicker with conference calling.

A friend of mine in Dallas used to work for IBM. One day he was complaining about the amount of business travel that he had to do. His most recent trip involved travel to New York, probably at a cost of hundreds of dollars and certainly at a cost of lost time and productivity. Do you want to know what the subject of the meeting was? It was all about the need to reduce unnecessary business travel!

Large companies always been willing to spend millions of dollars for business travel and company meetings. But travel costs have risen so much that the days of the road warrior may be coming to an end. And what's the replacement? The conference call. Conference calling services are changing the way companies large and small are conducting their business.

Personal contact and networking have been the basis for business since business began. Conference calling makes it possible to conduct business without the need for physically traveling to one location or the other. An audio conference call can bring together almost any number of people, from two to hundreds. Although today's audio conference calls provide the same basic services of the old-fashioned three-way conference call, they are much more powerful and easier to arrange.

So how could conference calling services save your business time and money? The possibilities are limited only by your imagination and ingenuity. Let's say that your business relies on large sales force. Your sales force may be scattered from one end of the country to the other. How do you train them on the benefits of a new product? In the past, you would probably fly your sales force into the home office for a meeting. Not only did you incur travel costs, hotel costs and meeting costs, think of how much business you that was lost in the days that your salesmen weren't in the field.

Conference calling services, especially if you add a video or web component, would allow you to educate your sales force about your new product immediately. Not only will everyone learn about the features and benefits of the product, but conference calling could allow real-time brainstorming on sales pitches. All of your salespeople would have the same information at the same time, and could collaborate on the best way to present the product to the customer.

What if your business has a large customer support division, and you just decided to install new software for their workstations? The software part is easy, it's distributed through the network. But what about training? Again, you can bring everyone in for a training meeting. But who's going to do your customer support while your representatives are traveling? You could send trainers to all of your customer support locations. But how much will that cost, and how long will it take? Conference calling services make it possible for you to train your personnel at their own workstations. There's no travel involved and very little downtime. They will get hands-on training in their own familiar environment. You can schedule a conference call as soon as the application is ready for use.

Imagine your business has expanded to the global level. Your product development team is in California, marketing and advertising is in New York, your programmers are in India and the product is assembled in Mexico. What's the best way to link all of these workgroups? Does anybody in your company really have time to spend 22 hours on a plane flying to Asia? And how productive is someone living with 12-hour jet leg? A strategically scheduled conference call would allow all of your company's workgroups to meet in real time and collaborate on the project. Documents and presentations could be developed, miscommunication could be avoided and everybody gets to sleep at home.

Now if you really like to travel and you actually enjoy putting your shoes into an x-ray tray, then you may want to avoid the use of conference calling services. An effective conference call is easier to set up than a plane reservation. And it will certainly be less expensive than the cost of even one airline ticket. The conference call may very well bring a day when all business travel is unnecessary.