While efficiency is a virtue in every company, few are able to define or measure it. Perhaps the best understanding of efficiency is achieved by identifying the bottlenecks.

Sales capacity bottleneck
To increase sales, a common bottleneck is the resources necessary to get customer attention.

As an example, compare telemarketing with personal customer visits. A telemarketer can work his way through a hundred customers in the same time, that a sales representative on the road makes a single house call. One might thus conclude that telemarketing is much more efficient? In fact, it is the other way around - the telemarketer rarely attracts any customer attention while the sales rep almost always does. It is the human interaction that builds confidence, allows the customer to display his needs, and allows the seller to listen and respond in a face-to-face environment.

Videoconferencing offers the best of both selling techniques, allowing face-to-face communication, direct presentation and collaboration between customer and seller.

Internal communications bottleneck
Videoconferencing and webcasting should improve internal communication efficiency. So why is it that some of us have less than optimal experiences from the technology?

Again, we have a bottleneck, this time in user knowledge and possibly in user interface shortcomings. This bottleneck should be eliminated through education and by encouraging your employees using the media tools. Another factor is to ensure that your equipment is easy to use and works troublefree.