Billionaire Warren Buffett has just made a huge investment in railroads.

Railroads?

No, this isn’t 1870, or 1925, or even 1960.

Buffett invested more than $30 billion because he likes the freight hauling capacity of rails, which are presently underutilized because of the limp economy.

I like telephones, especially their ability to transport information and persuasion, instantaneously, across the city, the country and around the globe.

Buffett has been known for savvy investing in “boring” industries, having made a ton of dough, for example in GEICO insurance. Apart from the fact that they have become multi-media devices, telephones are a mundane, rather boring technology, as well. They’ve been in service longer than a century.

Yet, like railroads, they are underutilized in today’s businesses. Just as airfreight became the nemesis of rails, in the last decade, especially, the Internet has trumped the telephone as a medium of choice for attracting business and communicating with customers.

I predict this is about to change.

But let’s take a cursory glance at what the Internet has accomplished in the last 15 years. Email has displaced snail mail for correspondence. Web sites have become the brochures of today’s businesses. Catalogue companies, especially, that depended on mailed circulars have put their offerings online, and instead of taking most orders by phone, this is done with clicks. Online banking, entertainment, newspapers, education, and many industries are radically different. Information is everywhere, and it seems to be getting cheaper all the time.

Customer service and a substantial amount of sales and marketing activity migrated to the Internet, as well. Yet this game-changing medium hasn’t improved the capabilities of most companies to aggressively earn new business. Few firms have been able to resist seeming like commodities, and it is increasingly difficult to find the high competitive ground when we seem to be simply a single droplet floating in an ocean of competition.

Like neon signs beckoning people into casinos, web sites entreat us to step inside for a moment, to try us before everyone else. But there isn’t a personal touch to the experience.

The Internet has been a great cost-cutter, but a less effective business builder, unless of course you work for Google, Amazon, or Ebay. Apart from a low, low price, why should people choose to trade with you, versus someone else?

A real-time, interactive, rich conversation might give them good reasons, customizing a message to them in the process. But an electronic billboard, the fanciest web site, offering dialogue boxes, can’t compete with a well-designed and properly conducted phone conversation.

Conversations are personal, real-time, interactive, rich in relationship values, and capable of being customized and individualized, on the fly. Moreover, they’re inexpensive, and they save time and money by providing us with feedback that reveals where we stand with a given prospect or customer.

Essentially, they do what the Internet does not do, and at this stage of development, what it cannot do.

American business will find it increasingly difficult to shrink its way to profitability. Cost cutting, in the short run, fortifies the bottom line, but it doesn’t produce growth.

For that, we need to invest in an engine that can convey it.

It’s time to Reach Out & Sell Someone!

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Dr. Gary S. Goodman is a top speaker, sales, service, and negotiation consultant, TV and radio commentator and the best-selling author of 12 books, including REACH OUT & SELL SOMEONE and YOU CAN SELL ANYTHING BY TELEPHONE! He conducts seminars and speaks at convention programs around the world. His new audio program is Nightingale-Conant’s “Crystal Clear Communication: How to Explain Anything Clearly in Speech & Writing.” His web site is: www.customersatisfaction.com and he can be contacted at gary@customersatisfaction.com.

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Billionaire Warren Buffett Likes Rails-I Prefer the Telephone!