The power of the internet

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) worldwide, and particularly in India, face a number of problems—high cost of growing sales into new geographies and customer segments, weak record-keeping of sales and support activities and inadequate creation and maintenance of electronic marketing materials.

While the internet holds out great promise to address these problems to some extent, most isolated efforts simply end up in failure. For example, a businessman may decide to take advantage of the internet by soliciting more global customers using email. Within a few days, his email account will likely be blacklisted by spam control sites on the internet. Similarly, efforts to organise sales records by keeping them in an internet based “cloud folder” simply invite a myriad of security risks and data theft possibilities which the average businessman cannot resolve. Finally, attempts to organise marketing materials on a common file share in the organisation inevitably run into disorder caused by lack of integration with databases of record. How many files must be changed if the business’s phone number changes?

Despite all these roadblocks, interest in using the internet among SMEs in India remains high. According to the Google Survey, 2010, SMEs using internet for demand generation is about 57% of the total registered numbers. With the total numbers of registered SMEs

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