The Webinar Blog

What's Holding Back Remote Sales?

Emile wrote to tell me that after eight years in the Army Special Forces, he is now on a new career path in the web conferencing and video conferencing industry. He shared some thoughts about why he thought web conferencing was on an inevitable growth curve. He focused on sales at first, saying that inconvenience and cost in travel is making it increasingly inefficient to have company sales reps traveling to close deals. As he puts it: "The future may bring the liberated worker, where she/he will be able to choose where they want to work, allowing companies to save vast amounts of capital and payroll expenses. This notion of course is a few years off, but I believe it will come very soon. We will soon see the paperless and travel-less work environment, not because of choice, but because of company survivability in a global economy."

Emile's view is certainly not a new one. Pundits have been talking about telecommuting replacing office work for many years. But the idea of trusting sales activities to remote communications is still scary for most companies. I have a client right now that is bucking the industry inertia. They conduct all their software sales activities via web conferencing. No salesman ever visits the customer.

As I thought about this, I realized that we're following a classic example of technology being applied ahead of a necessary change in attitudes and skill sets. I started thinking back to the 1980's as telephone answering machines became available to the general public. My first answering machine had a cassette tape for incoming messages and another tape on which I recorded my outgoing messages to callers. I had to record a separate message for each call... it didn't even rewind the outgoing message between calls! I was a holy terror with this thing. I recorded long "funny" messages. I did bad impersonations. I played music in the background. And by and large my callers would leave me an angry message saying that they didn't call me just to talk to a danged machine!

Now it's twenty years later and nobody buys novelty answering machine recordings anymore ("Sounds just like Don Rickles insulting your caller! Amuse your friends!"). We know to record a short outgoing message and callers expect to be able to leave a recording. Skill sets evolved, as did societal acceptance and expectations.

The technology for conducting serious business, such as sales presentations, is here now. But skill sets and expectations have not yet caught up. Most salespeople still make poor presentations, filled with bullet points that they read out loud to their prospects. Most prospects still expect a salesperson to show up at their office and shake hands, even though it uses up more time and resources for both parties.

As a result, the web conferencing sales process may result in poor returns. The traditional salesperson says, "See? I told you this is no good! I have to fly to their city, rent a car, go to their office, and see them in order to make the sale. It just doesn't work any other way!" What may not be working is the modern equivalent of those bad outgoing answering machine messages. We need to learn how to adjust our style to fit the new communications methods. That takes new training that most salespeople don't get.

Of course, those traditional salespeople are correct in many cases... Their prospects DO want to see a live human being. But that's changing as well. Today's college graduates entering the workforce have been communicating remotely with their friends (and often their teachers) for years. They find it completely natural. Why should they dress up to greet a visitor at the office? As the technology gets used more and becomes a natural part of everyday life, resistance to it will drop to near-zero.

This is a process, not an overnight change in global behavior. I don't know how long it will take before most business is conducted remotely. But I agree with Emile... That day is coming. You might just want to give your sales teams some training in how to deliver a presentation or a demo effectively over the web. Learning by trial and error is costly and painful.

In the meantime, it's never too late to start reading Garr Reynold's blog on Presentation Zen. You'll pick up many crucial tips, guidelines and lessons on the art of presenting.

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Technorati Tags: business meetings, collaboration, demo, Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen, presentations, presenter training, sales, web collaboration, web conferencing, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, webinar

Your On-Air Host Is Important

Web Worker Daily ran a column yesterday profiling the duties of a webinar host. It is an interesting look at a real business case study. They quoted Kanoe Namahoe (an event organizer who produces webinars for her companies) as saying that hosts need "the ability to speak clearly. They need to articulate. They need to have charisma... and the ability to speak with authority, not from a script."

Amen and hallelujah.

I do events with many different technology companies, audio conferencing companies, and third party participants. There are many times when I am not in charge of the on-air production and I'm either a guest speaker or working behind the scenes. I often cringe at the quality of the introductory voices that set the stage for the audience. They may sound bored, they may stumble over an event title in a script they obviously haven't read or practiced, or they may have poor diction and vocal delivery skills. When this is the first thing your participants hear, you create a negative "halo effect" that casts your entire event in a poor light. The first speaker now has to work doubly hard just to get the audience back in a receptive mood before they are ready to be swayed by the content.

If you are interested in this subject and more specifics about the role of an event moderator, you should check out the column I wrote in February entitled "Why Use A Web Conference Moderator?"

Thanks for calling attention to the subject, WWD!

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Technorati Tags: moderating, moderator, Kanoe Namahoe, web conference, web conferencing, web event, web meeting, Web Worker Daily, webcast, webcasting, webinar

A New XML Proposal For Web Events

A couple of weeks ago in my entry on structured listings for webinar recordings, I pointed out the usefulness of a standardized XML schema for webcast information. I came up with a starter kit that I had used on WebEventSearch.com and said I would help promote efforts to create event listing pages that used XML-based data.

Aperio Networks put out a press release this morning on Business Wire, along with a corresponding blog entry saying how much they hated using Business Wire (Ouch! A hefty nip at the hand that feeds...). They have proposed a much more comprehensive XML schema for web event listings in association with their yet-to-go-live EventSpan search and listing service.

They are soliciting public comments and feedback on their XML representation and I encourage you to take a look and let them know what you think. Some sections are still under development... For instance, event categories are still to be determined. I have some opinions and suggestions (of course), but a public blog isn't the place for them. I'll be sending them my feedback in an email.

A standardized representation of webcast information benefits everyone. Vendors can produce value-add services for their customers, large enterprises can ensure that their many events can be found and sorted easily, and small companies just trying out webinars can get their events in front of the public on larger portals.

Get involved! Let's all help make web-based events become an accepted and standardized form of business communication and outreach.

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Technorati Tags: Aperio Networks, EventSpan, Virtual Event, web collaboration, web conference, web conferencing, web event, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, WebEventSearch, webinar, XML standards

Webinars Go To The Dogs

When I saw a press release announcing availability of dog training via webinar, I knew I had to write about it in my blog. I contacted Cheryl Asmus, owner of E-training for Dogs, and she filled me in on the details.

Cheryl started up her online training business when people started calling her and asking how they could get their dogs to behave. Of course there is an established and thriving industry devoted to canine training via books, magazines, instructor-led courses, and weekend seminars/workshops. But Cheryl wondered if it would be possible to teach dog owners proper techniques via the web.

As a college professor with experience in developing formal educational programs, Cheryl decided to approach dog training in the same academic fashion. She reached out to instructors with expertise and credentials in different canine training specialties and asked them to develop class materials that would work when delivered over the web. She provided templates and agenda formats to keep a basic consistency in her "university" courses. As an indicator of her insistence on a quality offering, Cheryl said that developing a new course takes anywhere from six months to a year.

In addition to worrying about course content, Cheryl had to teach herself and her instructors the technical side of setting up online learning programs. After evaluating several technology vendors, Cheryl chose WebEx for her web conferencing platform. She liked the breadth of features available in their product, including the specialized classroom management features in WebEx Training Center. She makes use of online testing and the ability to hand control of the presentation space to a student when necessary. She also makes use of integrated payment processing to charge for her classes.

The technical side was all new to Cheryl when she started. She says that support from WebEx was critical as her needs for assistance progressed from "How do I log in?" to "What video codec is supported for UCF playback on a Macintosh?" She was able to change account managers to get one she felt completely comfortable working with and she has high praise for the technical support she has received from the company. WebEx uses a combination of headquarters support teams and outsourced support lines, and Cheryl said the outsourced support representatives have been just as productive and helpful as the in-house team.

Her enthusiasm for WebEx is tempered by some practical limitations as well. She points out that Training Center does not work well with Macintosh platforms and when an instructor or student uses a Mac, they run the class on the more basic Meeting Center product from WebEx. Keeping video compatibility current with new releases of the Macintosh operating system has also been problematic for WebEx.

Cheryl told me that she has learned several lessons from her early experiences with online teaching. One is that it is always a good idea to record a live session and make it available for student review or for offering as an on-demand video class. Another is that working with videos requires strong, high-speed Internet connections and a lot of testing. She has gone to a technique where online students download class videos rather than trying to watch them stream in real-time. That way everybody finishes watching at the same time and the instructor can take over secure in the knowledge that there are no students still trying to catch up with slow buffer rates.

While the instructors have had varying degrees of comfort with the technical ramp-up and the requirements for online course creation, response from students has been overwhelmingly positive. Cheryl says that she has received numerous comments from attendees who were apprehensive about taking a training course online, but found it to be the best learning experience that they had ever encountered. Many have rated the courses superior to live workshops with dog training professionals.

It's nice to see innovative and unusual applications of web conferencing technology that go beyond corporate communications and lead generation. E-training for Dogs is a fascinating example of how newer technology can be applied to traditional areas of business to create a unique competitive niche in a crowded marketplace.

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Technorati Tags: Cheryl Asmus, dog training, e-Learning, e-Training, web collaboration, web conference, web conferencing, webcast, webcasting, WebEx, webinar

The Downside Of SaaS

Yesterday I hosted a client event using WebEx Event Center. We had multiple presenters and I made sure that everyone was ready to login and call in 30 minutes ahead of the scheduled start time, per standard best practices. I clicked through on the link to get to the client's branded event site and received an error message. I tried entering the URL manually. No luck. The browser reported errors as if there was no such web page.

I called WebEx tech support and spent more than ten minutes on hold, being repeatedly told that my call was very important. The tech support guy at first said that he wasn't aware of any problems, but then went off and did another check. More time went by while I had one phone line with a panicked client on one ear and tech support hold music on the other ear.

My tech support guy came back and verified that there was indeed a server problem with both primary and backup servers. The only workaround he could suggest was to have him start an ad hoc meeting in a working demo account on another server and then to try to contact all our meeting participants and tell them how to access the new meeting. I didn't think that was practical, given the short time remaining before our scheduled session.

We hung around on our meeting call-in line and told the participants as they arrived that there were technical problems and we were waiting till the last minute before canceling the session. Amazingly, our server came back online at one minute before the hour and I was able to upload the presentation and start up the event properly. We didn't suffer any lost productivity.

I talked to Colin Smith, the Director of Corporate Communications at WebEx, to get their statement on what had happened. He sent me a note saying that "3 of the 40 event session clusters switched to backup sites. The switch happened instantly and in-process sessions were not impacted. In some cases, the switch could have delayed people joining scheduled sessions or looking at event reports for 10 to 20 minutes. Refreshing the browser would have solved the problem. The MediaTone Network's automatic routing systems worked according to design and limited the impact of the cluster failover."

That didn't satisfy me, so I asked for more info. My clients were out of commission for 30 minutes and refreshing the browser did nothing to alleviate the problem. The site was unavailable to any access. Colin got some more information from his engineering team and told me that when their network switches to a Global Site Backup and back to Primary, there are DNS changes involved. It takes time for all databases to resolve their network addressing properly, which affects people trying to browse a WebEx site during the switchover. Again, he pointed out that customers who were in meetings at the time were switched over without losing their connections or having to reenter the meeting.

Despite the tone of things so far, I am not writing a diatribe against WebEx (aside from their tech support hold recordings!) They acted quickly to automatically recover from a catastrophic failure somewhere in their network. The majority of their customers in active meetings were able to continue business without interruption. Our interrupted access to the site was for a total of 30 minutes, which is a short time in the world of network failure recovery. It is doubtful that most corporate IT sites would have been able to do backup failover and recovery any faster.

And yet. There is a psychological helplessness that sets in when your hosted service provider suddenly stops working. You can't get an insider's view of what has gone wrong, who and how many people are working to fix it, whether it is truly a priority to them, and what the current status is in terms of repair operations. You just sit around and cross your fingers, no matter how powerful or connected you might be within your own organization.

This is one of the things that makes some enterprise organizations leery about relying on Software as a Service (SaaS) for key business operations. Your IT team might not be able to fix things any faster than a third party provider, but at least you know who to call up and yell at. Or plead with. Or fire. There is a sense that you might be more comfortable with the problems you can identify yourself and are in charge of fixing than with the potential for resolution that happens outside your control.

There is an inescapable tradeoff in deciding on your preferred application infrastructure. Nobody is immune from technical failures. If there is a service provider out there that has never had a customer-perceptible failure, I want to meet them! And Mr. Murphy is just as ubiquitous in corporate environments with his list of things that can go wrong - and will. You either decide to take on the burden of managing everything yourself for the added control and information that gives you, or you cede that control to a provider for the reductions in your own overhead.

In WebEx's case, I'll say one thing for them... There is a serious incentive to get problems fixed quickly that comes from the top down. Colin told me that the executive team has bonuses directly tied to service uptime on their system. When something goes wrong, you can bet that it gets attention across the organization. It looks like a few people will be getting a slightly smaller bonus check this quarter!  :)

Perfect Communications - Circa 1995?

A press release/article from Inter-Tel today is titled "Inter-Tel Reveals Formula For Perfect Business Communication." It proudly states that Inter-Tel "has discovered a formula to help employers establish the most productive levels of business communication in the workplace."

I'm not sure where they "discovered" this formula, but the only variables they include are:

• Phone calls made by the business
• Calls Received
• Missed Calls
• Email Traffic
• Hours Worked

Apparently the following channels have no effect on productive business communication:

• Instant messaging
• Text messaging
• Web meetings
• In-person meetings
• Written communications

Okay, this is all obvious nonsense and is meant to be taken as tongue-in-cheek to gain some publicity and awareness. The formula divides numbers of phone calls by "email traffic" (whatever units that number is in) and multiplies by hours worked to come up with a number that Inter-Tel says should ideally be a "perfect ten" - anything less is unproductive; anything more indicates email overkill.

Providers of telephone services are facing tougher and tougher business markets. But it does no good to hide your head in the sand and pretend that people aren't communicating via a dizzying array of technical and social options.

If your company is reviewing the productivity of its business communications, make sure you consider the impact of web conferencing and webinars (as well as good old fashioned hallway chats and auditorium gatherings). And then make sure to divide by the reciprocal of average worker enthusiasm. You can work out the units conversion yourself.

It should come out to 10.

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Technorati Tags: business meetings, collaboration, Inter-Tel, communication, web collaboration, web conferencing, web meeting, webcasting, webinar

Where Are Your Webinar Recordings?

Lisa McGuire heads up the new Insight24 offering from ON24. We are friends, dating back from our time as coworkers in the marketing trenches at a software company. Today she sent me a note saying that I should propose a standard for how companies catalog and post their webinar recordings.

I'm flattered by the power and influence over the industry that she thinks I must have! I'm guessing that she is running into the same problem I ran into when I started up WebEventSearch.com. As the provider of a portal service with links to people's webinars, we want to find companies with content that would benefit from being listed on our sites.

It turns out that finding information about webinars is tedious work when you start trolling through various enterprise websites. Some companies have dedicated pages set up that list upcoming events and other pages that list archived recordings. Some companies split their event listings onto subordinate pages organized by subject matter, so you only see an event listing when you stumble across it while looking for a particular topic. Still others have recordings scattered around on their system, but don't maintain any public access to them... The links were sent out in follow-up emails to registrants and attendees of that event only.

Imagine how wonderful it would be if every enterprise website added a directory of /webcasts to its primary domain. The index page for the directory would list all upcoming webcasts and all available recorded webcasts. Business customers would quickly learn that they could go directly to coca-cola.com/webcasts or ibm.com/webcasts or even on24.com/webcasts and get more information in a "rich media" format (that being the new buzzword flying around the web conferencing industry).

Once you have a standardized structure for where events can be found, you can move on to the infinitely more challenging question of what information should be listed for each event. Upcoming events obviously need the date and time (including time zone) when it will take place. I think that recorded events should tell people what language the presentation is in and the length of the recording. Throw in a title and a text description, and you have the basics you need.

I'm practical enough to realize that this will probably never happen. The beauty of the web is that companies can create any structure they want, with arbitrary names, organization, and content. But that same arbitrary nature can reduce the effectiveness of your material, simply because your audience doesn't know ahead of time where they can find it.

This whole problem emphasizes the benefits of using a public compendium service such as Insight24 or WebEventSearch.com. It gives you a fighting chance of letting people find the content you have worked so hard to create.

And as a final note to people who really want to get into this subject, I actually did create a proposed standard for event listing information that contains just about all the common details likely to be associated with an event and of interest to potential viewers. It exists as an XML data schema and you can read all about it at www.webeventsearch.com/bulk_upload.asp. I use this as the underlying structure for the information I carry on WebEventSearch.com. As far as I can tell, nobody has ever shown the slightest interest in the concept.

I can conceive of a world where businesses would simply enter an XML data node associated with a new event and it would just show up on their site pages automatically, as well as being available to external portal listing services. You would never have to manually enter text onto an HTML page to list times and descriptions and link information. If somebody runs with this and creates an event listings page format that reads the information out of this kind of an XML file, I'd be delighted to help you promote it in this blog!

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Technorati Tags: content management, Insight24, Lisa McGuire, ON24, rich media, web conference, web event, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, WebEventSearch, webinar

Following Up On My Following Up Article

The Conferencing News blog was kind enough to reference my last entry about following up with meeting attendees (and registrants). Because the two instances I mentioned were both cases where I was called by conferencing technology providers, CN assumed that I was sanctioning conferencing vendors contacting registrants of their clients' events. I appreciate their concern and hasten to fully support their position.

In NO INSTANCE is it appropriate for a web conferencing provider to steal leads from a client event and use those leads for their own promotional activities. In both the cases I mentioned, the events I signed up for concerned the technology and the services offered by the providers. Therefore the companies had a right to expect me to be interested in their information.

Rapid follow up with your audience is appropriate if you are offering additional information related to the subject matter that they have already expressed an interest in by registering. You should be offering value, not trying to extract value from your audience. Sure, we all know that the goal is to make sales and improve your revenues. But if you want people to give you money, you'd better put something on the table first that is seen as worthwhile!

If you are a metal fabrication company and you offer a webinar on the benefits of cold rolling sheet fabrication techniques, it is entirely appropriate and beneficial to write or call your webinar registrants with an offer of a white paper on the subject, or a copy of the slide set that was used in the presentation, or a link to a recording of the event, or just a simple offer to answer any questions they might have had on the subject. It is not appropriate for your conferencing vendor to call and ask them whether they would like to buy the underlying technology that was used to deliver the webinar.

The gray area is when you get to events that are specifically sponsored by and clearly identified as being delivered as part of a webinar vendor's promotional and educational series. I have participated in events with several vendors where they front the costs of using the technology, promoting the event, and managing the production aspects. The events are free for registrants and are labeled as a corporate offering from the vendor. In this case, attendees would be naive to think that the sponsoring company would not use the opportunity to reach out to people who came to their events. Next week I'm giving a presentation on speaking skills for online presenters. iLinc is sponsoring and hosting the event. I can tell you that my content is real information and education - not a sales pitch for my services or iLinc's. But I would be surprised if iLinc didn't leverage the interest in their own series by asking their registrants if they'd like more information on the technology.

We live in a commercial society. Businesses are expected to grow their client base and their revenues. There's nothing wrong with pursuing this goal if you offer value for money. If you just go around annoying and pestering your potential customers, you'll find that the results will be self defeating quickly enough.

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Technorati Tags: Conferencing News, marketing, web conference, web conferencing, web event, webcast, webcasting, webinar

Following Up With Meeting Attendees

Yesterday I was doing some work with Brainshark, building a recorded presentation. I went to their website to watch one of their own recorded marketing presentations to get some ideas and see how a feature worked. A short time later I got a call from an inside sales guy at Brainshark saying that he noticed I had viewed the presentation and offering to help answer any questions or give me pricing if I had a need for their product. I explained that even though I was watching a marketing presentation I was a current user rather than a sales prospect. We both had a quick laugh, he thanked me for using the product and signed off.

Today I was working on some other activities when I got a phone call from an inside sales guy at Microsoft. He said he was following up on a Live Meeting presentation I attended and wanted to see if he could answer any questions. I was puzzled, as I couldn't remember attending a presentation of theirs. Then he said, "Yes, it was a March 28th event." Whoa... March 28th? I glanced over at my desk calendar to make sure I hadn't missed anything. Nope, it was May 1.

I told the guy that I honestly didn't remember anything about the event. Maybe I showed up and left early for some reason. Maybe I watched the whole thing and it just didn't stick in my mind. But the bottom line is that his window of opportunity had long ago closed. I asked whether he didn't think that was kind of a long time ago to be asking for feedback and next steps. He said, "Hey, I just call 'em as I get 'em."

Aside from the sterling attitude and personal commitment evidenced by his answer, it put me in mind of a best practices tenet for conducting web seminars. Followup with attendees (and registrants) is like raw fish in the refrigerator. It rapidly transforms from something with value to something distasteful. Your attendees are more willing to accept a contact from you and give you their information or their time when they have a clear memory of having recently received something from you... The information in your webinar. Once the memory fades, you are back to joining a million other one-sided demands for their attention.

There is a reason that old chestnuts stick around as common sayings. "Strike while the iron is hot" is a good one to remember when driving your post-event actions.

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Technorati Tags: Brainshark, Live Meeting, marketing, Microsoft, web conference, web conferencing, web event, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, webinar