Small Business Solutions - Marketing with Webinars

Small Business Solutions - Marketing with Webinars

Susan Solovic: Hello and welcome to SBTV.com. I’m Susan Wilson Solovic and joining me as my guest today is Jaclyn Kostner. She is the President of Bridge the Distance. She’s also the best selling author of two books “Knights of the Tele-Round Table” and “Virtual Leadership” plus her client list reads like the Who’s Who of the Fortune 500. Jaclyn, thank you very much for joining us today.

Jaclyn Kostner: It’s a pleasure to be with you, Susan.

Susan Solovic: Now you say that webinars are the most powerful tool on the planet to leverage the internet to market your business. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Jaclyn Kostner: Yes, we’ve been doing webinars for about 10 years now and credibly when I look at all the way that we market our business webinars are without question, the most powerful. Any small business that really wants to grow their leads, increased their sales and deliver significantly higher value to clients should really look in to webinars.

Susan Solovic: What about an example, can you give me an example how you use a webinar?

Jaclyn Kostner: Yes, we use interactive webinars in a lot of different ways and one of them is marketing. Now many small businesses know that you’re life blood are all the leads that you come in contact with. And we put a lot of time and going to local events to get cards and find ways that we can find people to hopefully sometimes buy our services.

Now let me tell you how we do it with webinars. About once a month, once every other month we have a free webinar that we sponsor for just the general public around the world and we tailor that webinar to a specific topic that’s of interest to them. My specialty is virtual teams so we have one webinar where I was doing a presentation on the best practices of record setting virtual teams.

Now we had 950 people logged on to this webinar and most of them stay to the end. The webinar was very interactive, very dynamic. I gave them a lot of powerful information. I just published a new book and I’ve done some research so they were really eager to find out what to do to be successful.

Now here’s the part that’s remarkable. At the end of that webinar we asked the people would you like to opt-in to our email list, would you like to know about some of our training programs or even would you like to have one of our sales people contact you, 741 people opted in to be on our email list.

So when I talked about the power of the webinars to grow your business and to market just think about this. If you go face to face you might get a dozen cards, maybe 24 if you’ve really worked the room but with this one hour webinar, 741 people that wanted to know more about out business. Now, that’s the marketing success in my deal.

Susan Solovic: I often get pushed back from some of my sales people who insist on face-to-face, how do webinars compare to face-to-face meetings?

Jaclyn Kostner: I would say that face-to-face is pretty wonderful and if they’re still selling that way face-to-face they need to continue but let’s face it. With the internet, our customers aren’t going to be local. Our customers are going to be all over the world. In fact we’re finding it increasingly difficult when we deal with large companies finding all the decision makers in one location. They’re all spread out all over the world. We’re working from homes, some cars and hotels. Who knows where the people might be but webinars make it convenient for all of us to link up interactively for an hour to have some kind of a meeting on a thing that helps us grow our business.

Susan Solovic: I probably should have asked you this earlier but what exactly is a webinar?

Jaclyn Kostner: Oh, yes. Well, a webinar is an interactive seminar or presentation or a meeting that’s held on the web. Now, many of us are used to getting on our cars or getting on an airplane to travel to go to training or maybe to listen to a speaker at a conference or maybe to attend a meeting with people that are somewhere else. Like those sales people that you might have. But, with the webinars we can do all of this online when we choose and we can be very interactive.

Susan Solovic: A lot of small business has resist using technology because they think it’s too impersonal or they might be a little scared of it. How do you respond to that?

Jaclyn Kostner: Well, I can really understand that. I think that when I started my business 17 years ago. Now in those days email and voicemail were considered very high tech and of course they are still around today. But I remember going to a networking event this woman came over to me and she said, “Well, tell me what you do it breaks the distance?” And I said, “Well, we provide training and consulting services. It helped people communicate effectively when they’re not face-to-face.”

Well, you would think that in a middle of that sense inside suddenly started speaking a different language because your eyes glazed over and she looks back at me and says, “Who would ever want to work that way?”

Well, now as you well know just about all of us worked that way. We’re very used to using technology and in business relationships are critical for our success. So I would say that, that small business person. If that personal touch is important to you email and voice mail are not enough but, you really need a web conference technology which is the technology on which you can have a webinar because it lets you interact wonderfully with people that can be anywhere in the world. So add more technology but second of all then is when you’re in that meeting you got really interact, interact a lot.

Susan Solovic: You talk about using these webinars as a right way to communicate, how can you warm up the communication and make it more personal?

Jaclyn Kostner: Well, yes, it’s all about warming it up. When you think about being face-to-face like I’m here with you now, what a wonderful place to communicate. I mean we have all kinds of communication use go back and forth. It’s really very, very interactive. That’s how we create trust, that’s how we create relationships, rapport, synergy, motivation. All those great things that are what human beings are about.

So in the virtual space when we need on a webinar, it is the interaction that is going to make that warm up. When I’m doing the presentation with the group like even that 950, believe me I have a lot of interaction, interaction that in some ways can even be better than you find face-to-face.

Susan Solivic: When you’re talking about interaction are you talking about verbal interaction, emails, how does that work?

Jaclyn Kostner: Oh, thank you for asking that, it’s really on every possible level that we can interact. It is going to be voice to some extent, all these depends on how many people are in the webinar. You’ve got 10 in it, you can have a lot of interaction with voice. People can respond to polls, there are audience response panels that they can kind of indicate some of the non verbal cues. There are also ways that in a presentation sense they can asks questions back to me directly, right during that live event.

When I’m speaking in front of an audience face-to-face, people can ask me those kinds of questions. They just kind of fit there and listen and enjoy the speech but in online setting, people can ask the question anytime and my presentation team behind me can actually decide which questions they want to ask me verbally at the end or they can respond to them on my behalf.

So there’s a lot of interaction that’s going on. It’s through the keyboard, it’s through the mouse, it’s through our voices and it really depends on the size, the number of people that are on the webinar.

Susan Solovic: Jaclyn, you said earlier that using a webinar is really even better than being in front of a live audience. How can that be?

Jaclyn Kostner: Well, I love being in front of a live group that when I present to a live group of I don’t think it’s all over the world. When I present to a live group of a thousand people, when my presentation is over a lots of people come up so they like to talk with the speaker afterwards. But if I’m lucky I’ll get a hundred cards because everybody that’s in that room is off to the next event and of course they want to still communicate with me, I might hear from some of them but I have about a thousand people there and maybe I get a hundred cards.

On the other hand when I’m on that webinar and I ask people do you want to opt in, then all of a sudden I’ve got 741 people that say that they would like to leave their name with me so I can contact them.

Susan Solovic: How do you create the interaction when you really can’t see the people you’re talking to?

Jaclyn Kostner: Well, when you can’t see the people that’s when you fit me to think most about building in the interaction because clearly interaction quality is everything, it is the key to success. So when you’re designing the presentation you have to really build the interaction into it. For instance when I’m in front of an audience I like to really know a little bit more about them so I can tailor my message to them. Often you don’t know until you are right in front of them. Well, if I'm in front of a live audience I can’t tell who’s the Vice President and who’s the first level manager but when I'm in a webinar, I can put a poll out there and I can say tell me what’s your level of leadership in the organization.

And then I and everybody else let’s link to that webinar can really see that. So it’s a level of interaction that you got to decide what kind of questions would be relevant to yourself and to this audience. Can I take him to see each other either but through this polls they can sense that there are other people that are also online with them and it just kind of makes that systems kind of melt away.

Susan Solovic: Are there other ways to implement a news webinars other than for marketing in your business?

Jaclyn Kostner: Oh absolutely, there are really two other very key ways but I would suggest and one of them is through training. So many of our organizations do some kind of training or mentoring of people and if it’s done face-to-face that’s wonderful if you can do that. But, in a virtual setting let me tell you what happened because people tend to think face-to-face training is really the best. Do you like face-to-face training?

Susan Solovic: Actually Jaclyn, I prefer the face-to-face.

Jaclyn Kostner: Right. In face-to-face, I’ve got to tell you I love face-to-face too. But if you ever been in a training session where you’ve been there for a day or two or three and your brain is just on over load.

Susan Solovic: Absolutely, you just can’t absorb anymore.

Jaclyn Kostner: You can’t absorb anymore and no matter how wonderful that training was and how great the presenters are when you walk out that door a lot of it’s going to get left behind.

Susan Solovic: Well, there are some studies that we’re done that looked at whether some alternatives that works. There was this large computer company that used to hire about 5000 managers a year. They brought all of them in for two weeks of face-to-face training. Talk about brain overload. Well, when the dot com bus happened at the end of the 1990s or early 2000, this large computer company had to change their whole venue for training.

So rather than bringing in 5000 managers shortly after they were hired for this training they brought them in just for about two to three days and then they delivered the rest of the training virtually for the most part, 60% of the training was done virtually and only 40% was done face-to-face.

When they finally tested everybody, when this was over, guess what they found, by blending that training a little bit of face-to-face and a little bit of virtual they were able to have significantly higher results. The managers learned five times more by having a blended approach that means a little bit of face-to-face and lower that virtual.

Susan Solovic: Well, I guess the other great thing with the webinar you can actually go back and watch it again.

Jaclyn Kostner: Absolutely, and what I would suggest here is that any small business that’s offering face-to-face training, even if it is with people locally, that you can take maybe a day of that training material and put it into small segments that you deliver on a webinar and you will have much better retention, much better impact.

In fact there were several other studies that said if you blend it like what I’m suggesting here that you can actually increase the impact of your training by 30to 65%.

Susan Solovic: We talked about sales costs earlier. How can use webinars to replace the one on one sales face-to-face type of meetings?

Jaclyn Kostner: We do a lot of one-on-one sales with webinars because it allows you to put your picture on there and let them see who you are and kind of help to create that relationship. But, when you’re dealing with business on the internet, you kind of be thinking about sometimes people are not going to be face to face. So when you bring on all those leads, I talked about from the marketing seminar and you wanted them to try to sell people, you know you don’t have to sell just one person at a time. You can sell five at a time, ten at a time, a hundred a time.

There is one person I know that did a webinar and in one hour webinar that was a sales oriented webinar made over a hundred thousand dollars. So our whole concept to sales needs to change. The face-to-face is what sales people like. They went kicking and screening into using webinars as a tool because they wanted to hand shake.

But what we’re clearly finding is that if you really build in enough interaction into those sales costs that they feel is warm and as personal as being face to face and what you do is you open up the ability to sell wonderful amounts of products and services to people that can literally be anywhere in the planet.

Susan Solovic: How do small businesses know their customers would even like webinars?

Jaclyn Kostner: Well, most small business people have a very personal orientation of their business and so they’re really very much in the mode of—well I want to have a handshake, we need to be face to face. And I think that if your clients are in that category, you need to give him that face to face but, there was this very interesting study that was done last year by Christine Sullivan and I was on this team was in 2006 people can go on my website at Distance.com to find it. But, they interviewed 1000 business professionals from around the world, from businesses that were $5 million in sales up to $5 billion a year in sales.

And I asked them, how do you like to meet and seven out of 10 of them said I really love to meet face to face but, here’s the surprising part of it, they said that if a meeting is two hours or less 83% of them said I want to meet on a webinar.

Now, is that a astounding or what and so for many times businesses were on our worst enemy because we’re in this mode of all I’ve got is to be face to face. I’ve got to be face to face. But in reality what this study said is 17% of them do but you can very safely if you build an interactive seminar or webinar that is designed to sell, you can be very successful selling a lot more product by adding webinars into your sales strategy.

Susan Solovic: Okay Jacky, I can see that you’re very passion about using webinars and you’ve really convinced me but I’ve got a question. Do you think webinars will make face-to-face meetings obsolete in the future?

Jaclyn Kostner: I think that business is a very personal way to interact with other people and there’s no better place to interact on a personal level than taking someone else to lunch, or taking them out to dinner, or treating a client to an employee or somebody. Really, there in a very special way but the way of the world is that our clients are going to be all over the world. For every small business there are people that are out there all over the world that just want to know you exist. They want to buy your services and unless you really get into learning how to use webinars to market your business, to sell products, to deliver how your value to customers then you’re livening your own success. So quirt quick answer is when you can be face to face be face to face but if you really want to grow your business we’ve got to get a lot better about using webinars and make them warm and personal and powerful in growing our business.

Susan Solovic: Well Jacky, thank you so much for joining us and that’s really some great information tips. I certainly learned a lot.

Jaclyn Kostner: I’m happy to have been with you today.

Susan Solovic: And once again our guest joining us today has been our Dr. Jaclyn Kostner, we appreciate you being here and we thank all of you for joining us here on sbtv.com. Be sure to stay tuned to SBTV where small business is our only business.


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