Recently, I talked with someone I’ll call “Artie.” Artie works for a mass-market retailer, a brand everyone’s familiar with. He told me his company uses two sets of product names and descriptions. Thus, a product in both the on- and offline stores can have two different names.

Need I describe the chaos that erupts when an online visitor comes into the brick-and-mortar store and requests a specific product she saw online?

Another company’s offline sales forces carries so much clout in the organization, it sabotaged aspects of the Web site’s online selling process to funnel more leads to the offline sales team.

How many online sales opportunities has it wasted?

The age of multichannel marketing and sales efforts has created many new opportunities, but it’s also created new problems:<

• Missed sales opportunities
• Inconsistent customer experience across channels
• Consistent irrelevance across channels

Missed Opportunities

Whether a company fears channel cannibalization, struggles with channel integration, or is just asleep at the wheel, results are the same: missed sales.

Read the rest of my column at ClickZ…