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-- Link Into Sales interview of Zak Pines, COO of Avitage

Miles Austin:
Welcome to Linked Into Sales Radio on Tuesday, June 22nd. I'm your host, Miles Austin, and today's topic is something that's near and dear to the heart of sales and marketing professional webinars. The question that I'm going to ask for all of you is to consider, because webinars have become so prevalent, they've been so easy to create, they're accessible to so many of us, have webinars become the next PowerPoint? Have they become overused? Are they misused and really, are they an effective medium for communication of messages for lead generation and many other purposes, that originally they might not have even been intended to be used for?

To talk about that topic with me today is a gentleman that I've come across through activities on LinkedIn and over the web, who is something that I found has a very fresh, intriguing perspective on webinars and tools and techniques and tips on how to take advantage of this powerful medium, and be able to really get the leverage and the power, not only for you as a producer of the event but more importantly, for those that are participants with you. So I'm looking forward to have all of you get to meet and spend some time today, with an expert that I've really come to appreciate his opinion and his expertise on, Zak Pines.

Zak Pines:
Miles, thanks so much, it's fantastic to be here. It's been great interacting with you as you said, through social media, how we met and then our other interactions. I really appreciate the analogy you just made about webinars as perhaps the new PowerPoint. They need to be used correctly, not abused, and that's what we're here to discuss.

Miles Austin:
Fantastic, I'm looking forward to it. For our listeners, Zak is the Chief Operating Officer at Avitage, based out of the greater Boston area, and they've got a great organization that Zak is a part of. Zak specifically brings a really unique blend of marketing and technology and management experience, that's always centered around delivering value to customers for growth companies. Zak really brings, as I said, a very fresh, unique perspective to this topic, that I have learned a lot from. He's really helped guide me and he's helped me change some core basic approaches to webinars.

So again, to really take advantage of our time with Zak today, Zak let me ask you the question that really probably is on most of our listeners' minds. Are webinars still even relevant in today's business environment?

Zak Pines:
Miles, I think the answer is a resounding yes, they are relevant, with the big disclaimer, if they are done purposefully and well produced. I think your point is very appropriate, especially the trend that we see as recently as the 2010 calendar year; webinars as a medium, more and more misuse. A term that we use, that we see a lot out there, is the show up and throw up technique where we call it a webinar, we send out a blast to our mailing list, we're there, and it really has turned into a way for people to get on the phone but it ends up potentially being hurtful and actually counter to what should be the objective of the webinar. If done correctly, webinars are powerful for their original intention, which is a lead management and a way to broadcast your message. What we've been working with our clients on, is how to take your webinars to the next level.

Miles Austin:
Zak, I am always puzzled by that. Is it just because the tools that people have available to now produce a webinar have become so easily accessible, they seem relatively easy to use on the surface, but there's still a lot of complexity and I found at least, there's a lot of planning that you should do way before you ever go live on the air.

Zak Pines:
Well here's what I think it is Miles. Every organization out there has a tremendous need for content. What we've seen is content for lead generation and now what many companies are getting into is lead nurturing, meaning content for different stages of the buying cycle. So if you're a company out there, the attraction of the webinar is hey, this is a way for me to do something to either generate leads or create something that we can use to engage our prospects. What's important though is the traditional webinar, which is maybe the 60-minute online exercise, a specific point in time. There's a lot of barriers to make it a success. A couple that stand out are first of all the time duration. How many of us truly have 60 minutes of engaging content? How many of us can make that engaging content relevant to an audience of dozens or even hundreds of people? So that's some of the challenges that we found, and the ways that we advise our clients are if you think about it differently, you can really plus-up the advantage and the return that you get from your webinars.

Miles Austin:
You mentioned the time duration. Is there such a thing as a standard length that we should be focused on?

Zak Pines:
Well here's the way we think about it Miles. What has become kind of the standard webinar for folks, is really a seminar. The 60-minute, 50-minute presentation, PowerPoint slides, some Q&A at the end, that's really an effective seminar, a learning exercise if there's truly a deep dive on a topic that folks have expressed specific interest in and they can block out time in their schedule. That probably isn't something that should be step one of a lead generation exercise, where you're trying to attract in a new audience. That's going to be much more of a deeper dive. What we've found is the real sweet spot isn't even really a webinar, it's what we're calling a web briefing. The sweet spot is probably somewhere between 12 and 20 minutes of content that's pre-produced, that's presented as if it's live, but in an engaging manner, and then allowing time for the audience to interact and ask questions. That would be the first step, is really hone in on that as your sweet spot time.

The word that I used, pre-produce but present as if it's live, webinars are really a combination of audio and visuals, and they can be pre-produced and deployed in different ways, amongst that being in an on demand fashion. So whenever we create a webinar for a customer, we always accompany that with a micro site, and that micro site allows the webinar to be accessed on demand, to promote the webinar before, to drive greater return from the webinar afterwards. To take that to the next level, the content on that micro site can be chopped up into different choices, different options. So there might be something that's a really useful piece of content to someone who is just learning about XYZ topic. There might be some deeper dive material, there might be some industry specific material. So now you're really allowing your audience to consume and engage, and you as the producer of the webinar, can track all that activity. So all this ties in really well to companies that are looking to nurture leads and create content for different stages of the buying cycle, different industries, which is very hot these days.

Miles Austin:
Well I'll tell you, just the thought of attending a 12-minute, what we have called traditionally webinars, which you are calling web briefing, and I love it, I'm going to use that Zak. But to think about it is a completely different mindset. If I think I'm going in to a 12 or 15 minute web briefing, versus that mental state of a webinar or a seminar online, completely changes my thought process just going in, by changing the words we've used to set it up.

Zak Pines:
Exactly. I mean, even I can hear it in your voice, the word webinar, it has actually a negative connotation these days. It implies big time investment, probably pretty boring, probably something that you're not going to pay full attention to, you're going to multitask. And the reason for this, to your point Miles, is it's been abused, it's been misused. But just because of that, doesn't mean that we should ignore the power of interactive media and the ability to produce and deliver content. So when done correctly, this can be even more powerful, and that's really the key.

Miles Austin:
You know I'll tell you, and you mentioned early on Zak, I came across Zak and his work and his thoughts on webinars, because of the magic of the web and social media. I've been subscribing to his blog feed now through my RSS Feed Reader, for some time, and I've got to tell you that the content there has been so helpful, because it's -- as I mentioned earlier it's fresh, but it's also very specific, step-by-step points. I remember the blog that first triggered you to my attention, was the blog you wrote a while back that was called seven ways to take your webinars to the next level. Could you share some of those, if not all of those seven ways, and kind of step our listeners through, because for me that was the impact that made the light bulb go off to think, I'm failing in how I'm using this tool now.

Zak Pines:
Absolutely Miles. Our company, Avitage, we are a company that helps our clients improve their sales and marketing effectiveness, and the way that we do that is we really teach and train around a publishing mentality, to marketing. We take that mentality towards webinars and we say OK, webinars are a good idea but there's a whole bunch of things that you can and should be doing to maximize the return from webinars. The best thing about a webinar for a business is, it's a way to acquire content, meaning, the reason that you're doing a webinar is you've got something to say, you've got a subject matter expert. Maybe it's a partner company, maybe it's a customer, maybe it's a subject matter technical expert within your organization. That's incredibly valuable. That's content that people are interested in and you should take advantage of. So the fact that you're doing a webinar is a great step in the right direction.

The first thing that we recommend is pre-produced segments of the webinar. It doesn't have to be the entire thing, but for customers that we're literally doing dozens of webinars a quarter, what we'll do is we'll pre-produce certain segments meaning, the only difference for that person is, instead of the show up and throw up approach, maybe just a couple days before, they'll be presenting the webinar as if it's live. It allows them to still be natural, still be fresh, but we can do retakes, we can allow it to be edited, and on the day of the webinar, some of those key segments will be played out over audio. They're still there for live Q&A, but the actual webinar itself is pre-produced. By pre-producing a webinar, it creates other opportunities. By getting that content done just a couple days earlier, we'll do things like we'll create a trailer for the webinar. It will be a preview of the webinar that we can put out in social media, put out in links, put out in newsletters, to help draw in an audience. If we believe in our webinar, we should be promoting it. We should be drawing in the audience to it.

We also end up creating different edited versions of the webinar. We create an executive summary version, that's something we always recommend to our customers. And the reason for that is, if you're targeting a CEO or a CMO or a CTO, again, are they going to be able to invest 45 to 60 minutes to participate in your webinar? What we find is, what typically happens is, the executive may say to the person that works for them hey, go check out this webinar and let me know what you think. So the folks that you're getting to attend your webinars may be a notch or two below your target buyer or your target prospect. So, the goal should be for the webinar is you engage that person, send them a follow-up email after the event. Now what's the next thing that you want them to do? Well, wouldn't it be great if they could click a button that says, forward a five minute executive summary of this to their boss and oh by the way, this is all trackable, so you know what's happening, who's doing what. So, edit down the executive summary.

We'll do other things that help make the webinar more accessible for viewers. Like I mentioned, we'll break it up into chapters, we'll break it up into different pieces, we'll create the micro site. We'll create transcripts of the webinar. Transcripts can be a beautiful thing. It's another medium, another way for people to engage content. That's another one of our principles as publishers, is we want to be creating content in different formats, different ways for our audience to be able to consume it, and transcripts are text and as we all know, text is the single best way to attract search engines and key words in Google. So putting that transcript up on that micro site is a great way to further attract, draw in the audience, and extend the value that we get from that webinar greatly.

Miles Austin:
Excellent tips. I'm writing notes still, even though I've read a lot of what you do and we've talked many times before. I'm still taking some notes. We're going to take a quick break for a commercial message from one of my favorite web tools, and when we come back, I'm going to be asking Zak to dive into a little bit more detail about some of the tools, some of the web tools that he recommends when you're producing and creating this content and creating these webinars, or my new favorite term, web briefings.

Zak, when you're working with preparation for this web event, this web briefing, this webinar, what are some of the tools that you found are the most effective and the most capable of handling the kinds of things that you're talking about, the pre-recordings and the ability to produce them in a certain way?

Zak Pines:
The tools Miles, are really quite standard, there's no true magic there. Most folks again, we find, that are coming into a webinar, they have some visuals that are in PowerPoint, and then the one little trick that we'll add on to that is you know, we'll use a standard phone line to do a pre-recording, an editing. What I find is more than the tools, is it's about just that added preparation step. So you know, what we recommend to the speakers is don't write out a word for word script. No one wants to show up to a webinar and hear someone read from a script in a mundane voice. Prepare yourself an outline. We'll do a quick talk to the speaker before they get on, kind of get them mentally prepared. Say hey, you're out there, picture yourself in front of an auditorium of 10,000 of your biggest fans and deliver your message. So we really want to make sure that the presentation is as engaging as possible.

Miles Austin:
So Zak, one of the things that I came across a couple of years ago now, actually back in 2008 I think it was, a company that I follow closely as well, by the name of MarketingSherpa, had done a study and a survey about what causes webinar attendees to bail. And I always go back to that slide that I took a screen capture of, because it reminds me, when I'm going to do one of these events, things I need to be careful of. It was interesting for me, the top -- there were six items identified and the top causes that webinar attendees bailed, the number one reason was content was not as advertised. The presenter read directly from the slides, was number two, and the third one, which I always smile about because I see it broken all the time, is the webinar began with company/sales information and pitch. What's your guidance there? Do you find those common as well or do you have some others that cause people to say, I'm out of here, I don't have time for this?

Zak Pines:
I mean, those are all really good and I guess the only thing I would add to that Miles is it's really difficult to be relevant to a large audience for 60 minutes in the first place. So I would just counsel folks that that is a really difficult task, so start thinking about webinars in a more micro, a more targeted fashion. Make them shorter, make them more targeted. Do more webinars, do them better, make them shorter, and use a micro site or micro sites, to accompany it, and you'll get a lot more effectiveness. That drop-off factor will go away and your entire webinar program will deliver a lot more results.

Miles Austin:
Zak, one of the comments you made was about repackaging your content. Once you've had the ability, you've recorded this event now, or the audio anyway; you can obviously capture the entire thing from a recording standpoint visually. When you say repackaging, are you saying to take the content and maybe break it down into segments and put it on YouTube? Maybe give us some other examples of how you could actually repackage this.

Zak Pines:
Great question. We'll take a webinar and another term that we use in our business is a vignette. A vignette, think of it as a flash module, which could be a segment of a webinar. It could be the 30 best seconds from that webinar, that for sure, someone out there as a prospect would be interested in hearing. So we'll edit that down into a vignette, and that becomes something that we can use for marketing purposes. Like you said, we can put it on the website, we can put it on YouTube, we can put out through social media and, probably even more importantly, that becomes a piece of content that we can use to enable our salespeople or our customer salespeople. So there's a whole sales enablement angle where now that's something engaging that sales people can be using to share with their prospects. It also becomes something that's kind of the bridge to marketing and sales, where that becomes a piece of content that can also be used to enable a lead nurturing program. Every company that you've ever worked with, has always been looking for more content. Webinars offer a great source of content if done properly.

Miles Austin:
Zak, one of the things that you've provided is a specific list of tips to help a webinar producer to deliver that compelling, multiuse content. Could you share some of those little tips and extra things that we just don't even think about, that with your experience you do on a regular basis. So Zak, when a presenter is getting ready, they're working now on this concept, they've got the content they want to provide to their listeners and their viewers for the webinar. Are there some key basic things, a checklist if you will, that everyone should go through to make sure they check them off one after the other, to insure that they've got everything they need to present an effective event.

Zak Pines:
Absolutely Miles and it's funny you use the word checklist, because that's exactly how we do it in our company. We have checklists both for our producers as well as our customers. From a presenter standpoint, there's a few things. It's a medium that's being delivered as audio, so you'll want to make sure you're on a nice clear phone line. We tell our customers, don't use speaker phone, don't use a cell phone, you want to be in a quiet environment, no background noise when you deliver the message. A couple of things that we spoke about early, certainly the not having scripted every single word but utilizing an outline so that you're presenting and delivering naturally. And aside from that, we don't want to overcomplicate it. It's a way to communicate and it should be delivered just like maybe another presentation or just like you're talking over the phone.

Miles Austin:
Zak, what about voice? What about Voiceover IP? I get that question a lot. What's your experience, what's your best practice recommendation for that?

Zak Pines:
I mean, voice is certainly a good thing, but what we do find is that voice can impede audio quality. So delivery mechanisms like GoToMeeting, will offer a voice option for the listeners and the viewers, and there's benefit there from a cost perspective, but in terms of a speaker delivering audio for maximum quality we would say don't use voice, use a standard phone line. It's worth the cost of the call for the quality that you're getting from your audio.

Miles Austin:
So as a presenter, use a standard phone line. It's OK to use it and you get reasonable results if you're a listener or participant.

Zak Pines:
Correct.

Miles Austin:
Zak, this is tremendous information for all of us. What's the best way to get a hold of you and to learn more about you and your services at Avitage?

Zak Pines:
The blog URL is blog.avitage.com. My email address is zpines@avitage.com, and I'm also on Twitter at the handle zpines.

strong>Miles Austin:
That's great and folks, for all of you listeners that haven't yet joined Linked Into Sales group on Linked In, we'll post all of this information on the Lined Into Sales group on Linked In. We also might play with this a little bit and take some of Zak's advice and start to reposition and repackage some of this information, and see if we might be able to do our first shot at maybe a little vignette if you will. And so we'll play with this a little bit. So between the Linked In group of Linked Into Sales, between the linkedintosales.com site, we'll make sure all this information on how you can get a hold of Zak is available.

I've opened our phone lines folks, so if you'd like to ask Zak a question or maybe add a comment to his thoughts, click the number one on your phone, to let me know you have a question. By the way, you could get a busy signal. The lines have been lit up for quite some time already this morning, so if you get a busy signal, either just try back again in a few minutes or you can also call our direct line, which is 347-850-1103. I've gotten a couple of messages that the lines have been busy for some of you on the toll free number. We only have six incoming toll free lines. We've got 50 on the 347-850-1103, so you can give us a call on the other line or you can just hold on for a moment.

So again, if you have a question for Zak, we will ask you just to hit number one on your phone and that will give me a little indication that you have a question to ask. Zak, are you ready to take some calls?

Zak Pines:
Yes Miles, I'm ready to go.

Miles Austin:
Fantastic. As I wait here now, we've got people clicking number one and clicking it again and take their hand down. So let's watch here. Let me go to the next caller, with a 720 area code. Thank you for calling Linked Into Sales, what is your question for Zak?

Rob Hayes:
Hi, this is Rob Hayes. I wanted to ask Zak, what's the most interactive webinar technology he's seen and is he using it today.

Zak Pines:
By interactive Rob, in your mind -- I mean, I'll kind of throw the question back to you. How do you define interaction as it relates to webinars, I guess to what degree are you defining that interactivity?

Rob Hayes:
Well, everybody claims oh, we're interactive. Everybody seems to say, we have interactivity and it just seems to be different with everybody. And so, I'm trying to find the most interactive capabilities that I can find, like being able to deliver live web pages to someone or showing them a video that also plays the audio back as well. I've seen problems with that.

Zak Pines:
No, I think you've hit the nail on the head. None of these tools out there are truly interactive, so what we've rather really focused on as the top priority is not interactivity but relevancy. That is to say, the investment that you need to make to be relevant is actually a much bigger payoff than interactivity. So what we're recommending to clients and what we're implementing is more targeted webinars, shorter webinars, the micro site. A micro site can actually be quite interactive in terms of personalizing the experience for your audience based on their industry, based on their situation, based on their issues. So that's a big chunk of where we've spent time.

Now, we also, we at Avitage, have a technology that we use called Avitage Presenter. Now, we tend to use that more in kind of one-on-one or more individualized web briefings, but that's a technology, I can take you though that is nice in terms of using webcams and other chat features. It also is something that we find is very popular for virtual shows, where people are looking to heighten the interactivity in those situations.

Rob Hayes:
I see, OK. That answers my question, I appreciate it.

Miles Austin:
Thank you for calling Rob, we appreciate it. Zak, one of the questions that comes up a lot is expectations as far as attendance on a webinar. What do you find? I've heard people say if you get 20 percent you're doing good. I've heard people say it's 50 percent. What do you find, and I know it's a broad brush stroke, but is there an expectation that if you want 100 people on your web briefing or your webinar, you need to have X number or X percentage over that in order to fill what you hope is capacity.

Zak Pines:
Yeah, I mean certainly Miles, the stats I can share with you are based on you know, our company's been producing webinars for the past ten years or so. It's really the standard webinar and again, what we're trying to advise and work away from in many situations and part of the reason I think these stats have really proven to be pretty indicative, which is you're going to be doing pretty well, quite honestly, if you're getting 50 percent of your registrants to actually attend live. Then you have to consider that from those attending live, you're going to probably get about 50 percent that are actually engaging and paying attention and not multitasking. So you've got kind of the 50 percent/50 percent factor. Now, those numbers we see go up substantially as you make the webinars more targeted and more relevant.

Miles Austin:
Thank you, appreciate that. We'll give it another minute or so and see if anyone's going to be bold today and raise their hand as we go forward. Zak, maybe give us your contact information again. How do we get a hold of you and how do we learn more about you and the service that you provide at Avitage.

Zak Pines:
Sure. Probably the most direct way to get a hold of me, certainly via email, is zpines@avitage.com. I'll spell that quickly, Z-P-I-N-E-S @ Avitage, A-V-I-T-A-G-E .com. Our company's website is www.avitage.com. We've got some great micro sites and landing pages that link off of there and on Twitter, I'm at zpines.

Miles Austin:
Folks, that brings us to the end of another show in Linked Into Sales Radio. A special thanks today to Zak for sharing his knowledge and his experience, to help us all improve our web briefings or our webinars, and the performance when we give those to our customers and to our clients. As soon as I was ready to wrap this one up Zak, we just had someone bold who wants to ask you a question, so I'm going to go to that person, who is a 206 area code. Caller thank you and what is your question for Zak?

Question:
Well Miles, hello Zak, yes. Here in the rainy pacific northwest, we would appreciate a lot of the sunshine here. Zak, one of the things that you talked about was the PowerPoint presentations definitely, definitely have been well overdone. I've attended quite a few webinars. I appreciate your comment about relevance, because that certainly goes to the heart of the reason why I look at a webinar and decide whether or not I want to attend it, to see whether it pertains to what I'm doing. What would you suggest in terms of preparation for a webinar, to make it successful? Aside from being relevant, maybe some of the mechanics that get overlooked in putting one together.

Zak Pines:
Sure, yeah. I don't know if you listened to the entire discussion here, but we've talked a lot about the idea of pre-production and pre-producing, pre-recording. It's not going to dramatically change the process that you follow. Oftentimes, we'll be doing pre-recordings with customers even just a couple days ahead, but it allows us to really make the audio presentation of that webinar that much tighter, that much more concise, that much more effective. So that's really key.

Aside from that, Miles had mentioned that you have a checklist. There's actually a lot of things that you can do with webinars, that you should consider and think through before, which is how are you going to get people to the webinar in terms of communicating them, promoting the webinar through email, through social media and other mediums, even a press release. We talked about creating a trailer for the webinar. Then in terms of the day of the webinar, is there going to be survey questions involved, are there any messages that you want to post to an audience? Are you going to open up the phones lines like we do here? Are you going rely on the chat panel for Q&A? What are going to be calls to action after the webinar? Is there a micro site? What are your overall goals for the webinar?

So, I guess the real key, and just by asking the question, you're definitely along the right step, is don't just think to yourself oh, we're doing a webinar and this is great. Treat the webinar like an entire marketing campaign. What are the goals? What are you trying to achieve? What are the steps that you want to follow in order to do that?

Question:
I appreciate that. I apologize, I did miss the first part of it. But yeah, the preparation seems to be a real key, because I've been on some of these and it's pretty obvious that the presenter hadn't given much thought to what they were going to talk about.

Zak Pines:
Yeah. I'm sure this broadcast will be available. We spent quite a bit of time talking about how we pre-produce webinars and what that amounts to is the speaker will be presenting as if it's live and we will record those segments of the webinar, and then we'll end up playing those out as if they're live. The speaker will still be there for a live introduction, for a live Q&A, but it's really kind of the broadcasting parts of the webinar that we can make much more effective, much tighter, by having gone through that pre-production process, where the presenter can do multiple takes. He can experiment with different things and if he ends up going off on a tangent or if there's any technical issues, which you'll find on a lot of these webinars, those can all be edited out.

Question:
Right, right, yeah. Bad connections and things like that.