“If all competitors can reach a given constituency easily, then the situation is accessible. When the situation is accessible, try to establish a strong position first. This gives you an advantageous position.”

Donald G. Krause, The Art of War For Executives

When Mr. Krause translated Sun Tzu’s Art of War into business language he really defined why we need to analyze our relationships with our customers and prospects.

For several years, those of us who do business on the net have been told that we need to acquire a web analytics package. At first there were only a few to consider. Now there are more than 100! They are all pretty good at giving us “data”. The problem is what to do with that data. It is not enough to just know where our visitors came from, how they got to our site, how long they stayed and where they went. We need to know WHY they came and how to establish a conversation with them. I recently visited a site because I was looking for a special gift for someone. I gave much more information than I was comfortable giving and received a canned response that said that they would get in touch with me within 24 hours. I have still not heard from them. I went to another site and expressed my intentions the same way. Within three minutes a “real” person called me. Guess who got the business.

I am not saying that you must call everyone that visits your site. I am saying that you need to acknowledge their visit with some kind of almost personalized response.  Getting to the prospect first can make all the difference in the world.