Hi, welcome to the show. I'm Anita Campbell, your host of Small Business Trends radio, and I am so glad you could join us today. This radio program is a companion to the Small Business Trends website where we explore the trends that drive small business. And you can find us at smallbiztrends.com. Small b-i-z trends.com. We have a fabulous guest and I'll be introducing him in just a moment to talk with us, Warren Greshes. But before we talk with Warren, who's going to walk us through today how to develop sales and activity plans in order to meet your goals for the year. I want to talk about the Today's Trend segment. And as you know, if you're a regular listener, Today's Trend is a segment that we do in each show where I give you one trend that impacts the small business market that I'm seeing out in the marketplace. And today's trend is the trend toward using email in our business communications and particularly in the sales cycle. First, a brief history lesson.

The majority of small businesses actually took to the web rather late. Until recently, fewer than half of small businesses had a web presence. Fast-forward to 2005, which is the year all of that started to change. During 2005 we stopped asking, "do I need to be on the web?" and started asking instead, "how do I get on the web?" Even more, "how do I do better on the web?" Now being on the web means more than just having a website. It also means leveraging the web for communications. And our main electronic communication today is of course email.

In a recent guest column over at the Small Business Trends site, Ramon Rey, who is the editor of Small Biz Technology.com, gave his prediction of the top ten trends in small business technology for 2006. And guess what was his number one trend! E-mail usage. I want to quote a couple sentences from Ramon's column because I think it's right on. He says, "although the telephone is a great tool, businesses are increasingly using email. Email lets you keep track of communication much easier, is legally binding...
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