Random Ramblings

Four Ways to Guarantee An Ineffective Webinar

Steve Early — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:46:49 +0000

I just sat through my sixth webinar this month. I would give all of them at least a B+ for content, and two probably deserve an A. That said, they all kind of sucked in a way, leaving us with the obvious question: If they had such great content, how could they not be great?

In each case, there were one or more things that caused what could have been an excellent webinar to be something far less – even though the underlying content was very good.

Here are four things that made this month’s potentially great webinars substandard. Avoid these mistakes if you want to improve the impact of your webinars.

1) Don’t Have a Script

You’re a pro. You’ve done this before and know exactly what you want to say, right? So why bother having a script? Just wing it.

It was clear that at least 2 or 3 of this month’s presenters had no script. They repeated themselves and said the same thing five different ways to make their point.

Yes, I think we got it the first time you said it. Can we move on now?

In a couple of places they got a bit lost and you could almost see their eyes roll up as their brain searched for their next sentence. In the meantime they let loose with the appropriate number of “ummms” and “ahhhhs” to fill dead air space.

How nice.

One speaker started down a path and then realized she hadn’t teed the next subject up properly. “Oh wait, but first let me go back to… “.

Ouch! I get brain whiplash when you do that. Please don’t do it again (but she did).

And the last faux pas of the month occured when multiple speakers were sharing the webinar stage and there was no plan. “So Jerry – where do you want to start? Do you want to cover the customer profile or should I?”

Geez I don’t know, why don’t you guys figure all that out and call me when you know what you’re doing.

Script your webinar! It will flow. It will be crisp. If your content is good it won’t bore your audience. You will create a more favorable impression. You will appear organized (because you are) and it will be shorter.

2) Speak Forever On A Single Slide

Yes, please do put up one slide and talk at me for 12 minutes straight (as one presenter did this month — 12:20 to be exact, I timed it).

You have my undivided attention- for about 30 seconds, maybe.

The problem with speaking to one slide for a long time is that it ignores an important principle of learning:

According to research by Michigan State University and other sources, about 65% of the population learns by what they see. I am one of them. Give me graphs and pictures. Help me connect the dots with my eyes and I’ll learn. I can not learn by listening to you (only about 30% of the population can).

This means you teach about 30% of your audience about your subject matter by talking to them. To make this jump up to 95% you need to get the visual learner engaged by appealing to his or her sense of sight. Staying on the same slide for 12 minutes doesn’t do it.

Presentations that might work for you in person may not translate well to webinar use. As a visual learner I don’t have you to look at as I would in a face-to-face meeting. That might keep me engaged if you’re a good speaker, but I lose that when you go to a webinar format.

One rule of thumb I follow is: make some type of slide change every 15-30 seconds to help keep people engaged.

(Incidentally, the remaining 5% of the population are kinesthetic learners who need to touch and feel things to learn. We will be needing some massive technological breakthroughs before we can specifically address their learning needs via a webinar. I’ll let you know as soon as they arrive.)

3) Dont’ Use Any Pictures

Cram as many words as possible on a slide. Oh look! It’s almost like a script – why don’t you just read it to me? Great!

One of the presentations I saw this month did just that. It lasted a half hour, and had only 10 slides, almost all of them an eye-chart, and the speaker read them all to us.

My mind wandered so far I had trouble getting home in time for dinner. I couldn’t figure out where the speaker was, what point they were on, and then started to lose track of what they were saying and why I was there. (This “visual learner” thing can be a real curse sometimes).

In addition to the fact that pictures appeal to the visual learner, people process pictures better and faster than written words. How much faster? Humans process images about 60,000 times faster than text. Look for ways to replace text with images to increase understanding and keep your audience engaged especially when you are trying to explain complex relationships or concepts. You’ll dramatically increase your audience’s ability to “get it”.

4) Make it A Commercial

I shouldn’t even have to say this, but you couldn’t tell that from one of the webinars I sat in on last month. While there was some good content in it, way too much of it was a blatant ad.

This is fine if you’ve positioned it that way, or developed me into a prospect for what you’re selling. But PLEASE don’t tell me I’m going to “Learn How to _____” and then give me a sales pitch.

Needless to say, I ditched that one well before it was over and unsubscribed to all future communications.

In addition to avoiding these four potential mistakes, here is one additional idea for your consideration:

Pre-Produce Your Webinar

Except for the initial Q&A session, I recommend that you consider putting your webinars in the can prior to broadcast. This requires that you have a script (see #1 above). Once you’ve got the script down, record the participant(s).

Have someone edit the audio track to pull out the “umms” and dead air. Listen for areas in the audio track that are not smooth. Re-record sentences that people stumbled over and consider a rewrite of points that didn’t end up having the punch you need them to have.

Then plug the new audio back into the original presentation and observe the results.You will be amazed at how much more impressive your overall presentation is.

Using pre-production is especially important when you have guest speakers involved (like a customer) that you haven’t worked closely with before. Even if you believe your guest is an accomplished speaker why chance it? Maybe they’re great in front of a live audience but go into complete monotone mode on the phone.

Pre-production allows you a chance to find that out and fix it before things go sideways. And, trust me, it is a lot less painfull to pre-produce than looking at your boss after a live event and having them say, “Well that was kind of a disaster wasn’t it”? Oweeee.

One final reason I like pre-recorded webinars has to do with giving the best impression possible to as many people as possible. Jim Burns, CEO of Avitage (a Waltham MA firm that runs webinars as one if its many services) shared an interesting metric with me recently. As part of their services his company archives webinars for its clients and tracks subsequent views.

He tells me that on average, an archived webinar will get four to five times more views in the 12 months after its initial release date than it does on the day it was first broadcast. This means if you reached 100 people during the initial event, you will probably get another 400-500 more views once you archive it.

Given that, doesn’t it make sense to do it right? I think it does. You’ll never release a disastrous webinar if you pre-produce, and your webinars will have the maximum impact as an archived event for a long time to come.

What do you think?

Saying of the Week – if Not The Decade

Steve Early — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 16:06:47 +0000

Someone sent me this quote this week. It has nothing to do with sales or marketing, but it is probably about the most inspiring yet at the same time troubling quote I have read in a very long time. It speaks volumes about what is going on in America – and what is absolutely going wrong in America today.

The quote is attributed to Dr. Adrian Rogers, an evangelical conservative, born in West Palm Beach in 1931. Dr. Rogers passed away in 2005 of pneumonia and complications from colon cancer. Whether you are a conservative, liberterian, or liberal, I would urge you to carefully consider his words.

“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”

Dr. Adrian Rogers

Think about it!

Making Lemonade Out of Missing Bourbon

Steve Early — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:26:42 +0000

Thanks for Nothing!

I arrived home on Tuesday of this week to find the following tube package in the mailbox addressed to my oldest son (who I assure you has been of legal drinking age for at least a couple of years). It was from a premium bourbon producer, Knob Creek.

I don’t know where he acquired his taste for top-of-the-line bourbon (hahhh!) but I did know that he has used rebate certificates before from the New Hampshire State Liquor store to help minimize the cost of this particular indulgence from time to time.

Even given that, I could not imagine what the tube contained or why it was being sent. Surely it was some type of promotion, but the words “Thanks for nothing” just didn’t seem to fit a typical promotion. I could hardly wait until he got home to learn what was inside.

So what was inside?

Inside was an apologetic note from the distillers of Knob Creek, indicating that they had RUN OUT OF BOURBON!

What? Yes, boys and girls it is true. The accompanying letter read:

“For the first time ever, we’ve actually run out of Knob Creek.

Because you and your fellow Stillhouse members have done such a great job sharing your love of Knob Creek and spreading the word far and wide, consumer demand for our bourbon has finally outstripped our current supply. And we’ve got nothing left to bottle until November. So, from the bottom of our hearts, thanks for nothing.

Of course, we could bottle the next batch a little early to make up for the shortage, but we believe Knob Creek must be aged a full 9 years in order to reach its true potential. So we’re just going to wait it out. If you happen to experience a shortage where you live, just remember that everything will be back to normal this November.”

I suppose you could say that this was some kind of a stunt. But since our local liquor store only has a few small bottles as of today, I don’t think so.

What impresses me is that the company not only refused to sacrifice quality, they bothered to send the mailing tube (containing a T-shirt which said something like: “I survived the Knob Creek shortage of 2009″) to my son – who probably buys only 1 or 2 bottles of the stuff a year … I think … because he became a member of their “Stillhouse” club. Never mind that the T-shirt was a Large and he can’t fit into anything smaller than an XL Tall. He’ll give that to his younger brother who will undoubtedly think it is really cool. It was the thought that counts.

How many of us would admit to such a significant shortcoming with as much class and flair?

Inbound Marketing University – 5 Reasons I Liked It

Steve Early — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 19:01:47 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

A couple of weeks ago my TweetDeck popped up a Tweet from someone I was following, telling me there was to be an “Inbound Marketing University” offered by HubSpot, from here in the Boston area. While I have more than my fair share of free webinars to attend, the word “University” caught my eye and I decided to click in. I’m very glad I did. This is my review of the IMU event, which I am told will be held again in August. Here is what I liked about it …

What first attracted me to it was the fact that it looked like something substantive, especially when you scanned through the list of topics and presenters (some of whom I recognized and some I didn’t). There would be 2 courses per day, an hour each, for five days. It looked like it covered a lot of bases. Yeah, OK, and it was FREE!

The Inbound Marketing Topics

In my view, the team at HubSpot did a great job of selecting a good mix of subjects that covered the key elements involved in inbound marketing. At a high level, these included:

How to Get Found
Converting Traffic to Leads
Nurturing Leads to Sales
Analyzing Your Work To Focus Efforts to Improve

Embedded in these topics were many supporting subjects that ranged from the essentials of blogging to establishing your marketing persona, developing landing pages and a whole host of other topics. When you pull the lens back and look at how HubSpot orchestrated the various topics, delivered by more than ten speakers into a cohesive online marketing program … well maybe you don’t have to be impressed but I certainly was.

Flowing through most of the non-technical presentations was the all-important theme of: “Nobody wants to hear about your dumb products because it isn’t about you, your company, or your products – It’s about giving, not getting.” The presenters stuck to this theme by giving freely of their time and expertise with hardly a mention of their own products and services. And when they did talk about what they do, it was typically to add meaningful substance to a case study.

Making it Real

Speaking of case studies – they were used frequently and really served to demonstrate how various speakers plied their trade to take the otherwise theoretical parts of what they do to actual customer situations. Some of the “before and after” discussions were very impressive in terms of how far they were able to move the various measurement needles. More traffic, more clicks, more conversions to leads, and more sales were central themes in many of the examples given. It was refreshing to see how the various elements of what we were being lectured on were being applied on a daily basis in the real world and the results that could be achieved. It was stimulating to say the least.

Striking A Balance

While some of the advanced SEO stuff was just a tad out of my league (or way out in a couple of instances) a subset of the audience made it clear that this level of detail and expertise was something they had been looking for through ongoing Tweets at #imu. While I don’t have audience statistics, direct and indirect comments I received painted a picture to me that I was sitting in a class with people that had varying levels of skill and interests. It is virtually impossible to represent perfection to different experience levels, but I believe IMU must have struck a good balance for many people in different stages of their inbound marketing careers. If you need evidence of this, just look through all the positive comments in the IMU hashtag.

Making it Accessible

This is really a no-brainer for anyone that does online anything, but since I’m writing about what I liked, it doesn’t matter how simplistic the thought is. The sessions were all archived so attendees could catch up on sessions they missed, or, like me, review sessions you didn’t quite fathom the first time around. On24 deserves a few rounds of applause for donating all the hosting for the event and making sure the sessions were archived soon after the event was over … for the most part. (A full plate kept them from getting the final class and review session posted with their usual due diligence, but post it they did.)

It Created Community

I got to make connections that I probably would have never made because of my participation in IMU. Furthermore, the connections I made were with people with similar interests. Initial banter over the pre-exam study agita and study plans (yes there is a certification exam at the end) quickly grew to more meaningful electronic exchanges and resulted in a number of new Twitter and LinkedIn connections.

Thank You

This must have been quite an effort for all involved and I sincerely hope that you all get more than you gave as a result of your efforts. My personal thanks to all the Inbound Marketing University sponsors and presenters. Sponsors included:

If inbound marketing is a passion of yours, a field of study or just a passing interest, I highly recommend you keep your eyes peeled on the August horizon for the next coming of Inbound Marketing University.

Why Focus on Who is NOT a Target

Steve Early — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:15:17 +0000

While I always realized focus was important in marketing, it wasn’t until I was given an assignment one day that it really hit me between the eyes. I was working for a large technology company. Our group was responsible for producing the new product introduction kits, slide decks and messages that would go to our direct and indirect sales channels. I was asked to interview a product manager for a new product we were launching and extract some of the early launch data.

The person I would be interviewing was relatively new to our firm but came from a large and impressive competitor and was reputed to have a wealth of knowledge and experience. I can’t recall much of our conversation now but do remember that he was very knowledgeable. He went on and on about what a great product this was, and how at $70,000 it was a real steal. He was loaded with feeds and speeds and could cite several reasons why it was faster and more flexible than anything else on the market. Very impressive.

At one point he paused and I remember asking, “So who is our target for this product?”. Without hesitating he said, “If somebody can fog a mirror and sign their name, they’re a target”, at which point he broke into a broad and reassuring smile. Almost instinctively I remember saying, “Gee – my grandmother is still breathing and can sign her name but probably doesn’t have two nickels to rub together. Is she a target?” This was met with a bit of a glare that I personally translated into, “What are you – some kind of wiseass?” followed by another smile and, “Hey, you know what I mean – everybody is going to love this.”

Not seeing “everybody” as a very focused target, I made a few additional attempts to refine his definition of the market, all of which were unsuccessful as the conversation drifted back to the product. He soon grew impatient with my annoying questions, looked at his watch and made it clear that my time was up – he had a meeting to go to.

I never did figure out what “everybody” meant, nor would the hundreds of sales people that we would be asking to sell this product. I was surprised by this inability to describe who a sales person should focus on to sell the offering, and how bringing my grandmother up as a non-target didn’t seem to help him see the light. In the end, my colleagues and I put some kind of a story together and we announced the product which turned out to be mildly successful at best.

Not long after that I discovered Al Ries’s book Focus – The future of your company depends on it. I have long been a fan of the writings of Al Ries and Jack Trout and their books on Marketing Warfare, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing and other subjects. This book was an excellent lesson on how much of a role focus plays on the success of a company. The basic message was; if you try to be all things to all people, you’ll end up being nothing to everyone. Winning required that you focus as narrowly as possible and get very clear about who your taget was. While this was great from a branding perspective and definitely a step in the right direction, it didn’t solve the problem down at the sales rep level. Sales people have to deal with much more finite details than they can get out of general branding or positioning statements.

Shortly thereafter I had the pleasure of working with some colleagues who were trying to develop a better way to describe ideal customers and develop a lot of the other “selling information” a sales person needs (more on that in another blog entry). Through the delivery of a large number of internal workshops and a lot of trial and error , we finally succeeded.

While the process involved drawing out of product marketing managers the things that made a good prospect, what really started to put a sharp point on the target was the idea of making them talk about who was NOT a good target. At first they thought this was silly but quickly came around when they realized that this would keep sales people from going off the reservation and chasing the wrong deals (and dragging them into the field to present in sales situations that were a total waste of time).

Areas of focus for the non-prospects were:

Are there problems that a customer might think this offering solves but in reality would not be a good fit?

Is there a certain size of customer that is too big or too small?

What belief structures (e.g., “we don’t like distributed computing”) represent bad news for this offering?

Are there certain organizational characteristics (no Head of Security for example) that represent a red flag?

We would then have them divide the “bad news” items into two categories: Show Stoppers and Cautions. Show Stoppers where characteristics that told the rep that this was definitely not a good fit for them and, in fact, they should walk away. The Cautions were things that indicated this wasn’t the ideal customer. They did not mean the customer couldn’t be sold to, but were a warning to the rep that if they succeeded this wouldn’t be an easy sale. There could be multiple selling jobs to do, the sales cycle would probably be longer, competitive solutions might be more suited to the job, and the transaction was likely to be less profitable for the company as the cost of sales increased. We would leave it to their good judgement on whether or not to pursue.

It was amazing how much clarity these non-target charactieristics added to the puzzle of who sales should really be focused on. In fact, it sometimes put so much clarity on the ideal target, that marketing people begain to realize that their market size was getting smaller with each refinement. The body language would sometimes get tense and you could see people trying to take some of the things they came up with off the table to make sure the market didn’t get too small. The reality? The size of their market never changed. They just finally understood what the real size of their market was based on how a sales person had to look at it.

The next time you want to put some focus on your marketing efforts define who you think the ideal customer is and then put some effort into defining who is not a prospect. It could be a very eye-opening experience.

Puffy Messages Cost Customers

Steve Early — Wed, 20 May 2009 11:38:25 +0000

When working with clients one of the key elements of building out their selling content is to move them away from arming their sellers with ‘puffy cloud’ statements to very specific statements that have impact and can be remembered. This is done by pushing them to use facts and figures, images, and stories to get their key messages across to clients.

Facts & Figures

So often companies will give their sales teams broad statements about their company or product that just don’t have the ability to grab a prospect.

“XYZ is the largest provider of information security services for banks in the New England area.” Blah!

For more impact, use facts and figures to turn this statement into something more tangible such as:

“At this time 90% of the top 100 banks and 63% of all banks in New England use XYZ for their information security services.” Better. Now you can take this to the next level, by turning the numbers into an image of some type.

Images

By taking facts and figures and turning them into an image, we can improve receptivity of our message. Remember that over 80% of the population learns through the sense of sight. People remember more of what they see than what they hear, taste, touch, or smell. Imagine a presentation with our first statement in text format or this graph. The difference is clear.

Stories

Stories can make an otherwise bland statement come to life. Sales people like stories, remember them easily and will eagerly repeat them if they’re good.

One example that comes to mind is a company that was trying to emphasize the reliability of their systems by using their impressive Mean Time Between Failure data. It just wasn’t making the point with non-technical executives so they added a true story.

It seems the president of their company went to the loading dock one day, pulled out a ladder, climbed to the top of a pallet of systems ready to ship and pushed the one on top off the pile. It went crashing to the floor 15 feet below. He told the lead engineer for the product to open the box, plug the system in and boot it up – threatening to fire him if it didn’t run. It did.

Crazy as it seems this worked. The engineers in the audience had their MTBF data, and the business leaders were impressed by the story.

Look for opportunities to turn vague statements into concrete facts and figures, turn them into images and tell stories and you’ll greatly advance your messaging efforts.