I keep getting questions from people trying to understand just what it is I DO for a living. So I thought you might enjoy looking at the kind of client tasks I get involved with.
My business philosophy when I started this company was to offer personal attention and services to companies delivering business webinars. I thought that 90% of my business would come from presenter coaching and training. It turned out that people wanted a lot more help with the basics of putting on an event, and that became a major part of my business as well.
My goal was and is to offer niche specialization and a la carte services that exactly meet each client’s unique needs. I know of several end-to-end webinar production and general marketing services companies, but the economies of running a big business with dozens of employees mean they have to concentrate on larger-sized engagements with enterprise clients, pushing for all-inclusive packages of production services.
I wanted to offer an alternative for companies needing a “hit man” to come in, solve a specific need, and get the heck out – without long-term service contracts or commission-hungry salesmen. I decided to keep my business purely self-contained. My customers deal directly with me. They get my personal expertise and attention. If I’m too busy to take on the work and do a quality job, I turn it down or postpone it. That loses me some potential business, but it’s the only way I know of to keep my personal integrity intact.
So much for business transparency. On to the juicy stuff. These projects should give you an idea of what the job is like:
Presenter training (team): I’ll be offline on Monday while I deliver a full-day presenter training course for a company’s sales team. I’ll present best practices and tips, run them through practice and feedback sessions, and work with them on redesign of their slides. This particular company asked me to fly in and deliver the training in person. That’s unusual… I typically do the entire training remotely. Presenter training (individual): I just finished another one-on-one coaching session with a presenter. I took him through specific presentation skills and helped identify habits he wasn’t aware of. We practiced narration to slides and software demonstration skills. Recorded presentation production: I just finished a project where I recorded a series of speakers narrating their presentation slides. I managed the production process, edited the audio, synched it to the slides, and produced the recording as a hosted on-demand presentation. (I also provided the Brainshark technology for this client so they didn’t have to get involved with another technology vendor license.) Live webinar production: I have been managing a series of live webinars for a client, where I schedule them in the conferencing software, upload slides and other presentation materials, run rehearsals and technical familiarization sessions with the presenters, moderate the event, record it, and deliver reports. Webinar recording post-production: I am in the middle of editing a client’s webinar recording. I’m using digital editing software to clean up the sound, balance volumes between speakers, cut out breaths and other distractions. I re-synch the audio and video, add section markers for easy navigation, and produce it to a standard audio-video format such as WMV, Flash, or QuickTime. One of my clients has me produce multiple formats and build a web page to let viewers select their preferred version. Vendor selection: I recently helped a company prioritize their web conferencing needs, surveyed available vendors to make sure I was familiar with the latest versions, and recommended best options to match their requirements. I won’t tell them to go buy a specific technology… I don’t want even a suspicion of kickbacks or vendor-sponsored influence in my recommendations. But I will sort vendors into high and low suitability groupings, listing the pros and cons of each, with the tradeoffs that selecting each one would entail. Presentation redesign: I just finished a complete rewrite of a client’s outbound marketing presentation. I wrote a script, designed a flow, and created slides with all new custom-chosen graphics. Not my favorite activity, because it is immensely time-consuming and I have a hard time bringing myself to charge as much as I should for the overall project. I can’t fit in much other client work when I’m doing this. But if the market demands it… White paper creation: I’m just finishing up a white paper for a client. Every so often I get asked to write a white paper that goes along with a webinar presentation. I won’t do them as a primary business… I don’t want to be a tech writer anymore. But I have the ability to create them as part of an overall presentation design package. Podcast authoring: I wrote a series of podcast scripts for a client recently. That involved lots of interviews with various subject matter experts and a review of all their collateral and web information. I then synthesized it into a conversational panel format. Webinar/podcast delivery: It looks like a client is about to have me back for a repeat performance from last year, where I acted as their spokesperson and delivered the webinar I designed for them. Some people like my voice and delivery style, which is gratifying. I’ve worked hard to make it as engaging and professional as possible. I’ve done both live and recorded voice-over work for various clients. Full webinar production and promotion: I don’t have any of these coming up right now, which is probably a good thing given the amount of other work on my plate. I was not only doing the full webinar production and moderating work for my client, but also building HTML email invitations, landing pages, banner ads, and search ads to promote the event. Oh yes… Writing the press release about it as well. Then I helped them select appropriate rental email lists, supervised all testing and reporting on the emails, and so on. Phew!
And now you know what a webinar consultant does.
