Excuse Me Sir, You Dropped Your Data…

You Dropped Your Data

Masterful WebEx Presentations – Part 3

Your WebEx presentation was meticulously planned. Flawlessly delivered. Your audience vigorously interacted with you – and with each other. Time to pack up and grab a beer, right?

Not quite yet. You’ve left something very important behind — valuable data. Just about any interaction, be it a chat exchange, Q&A session, or poll result are valuable to keep. Why? Because capturing every question, comment, and (perhaps most importantly) complaint of your audience provides great insight into the power of your message… It also reveals how effective you are addressing these issues in real time. And the more you generate feedback by incorporating interactive tools, the more data you will have to analyze. Here are three examples.

Sales Team Meetings

Want to learn the greatest challenges your 500-person sales force faces in a couple minutes? Launch a poll. Rumors about your competitor’s R&D programs? Start a conversation in the chat panel. Product or service problems that continue to plague rollout? Leverage the Q&A panel. Sure there are other ways to get this information, but when a virtual meeting convenes the floodgates can open and those off-the-cuff comments turn into critical nuggets of information. Often, presenters lose valuable freeform communication captured in chat or on a whiteboard because they don’t save the data before closing the virtual meeting. Don’t let this happen.

Webinars

Capturing and analyzing interactions with potential customers or prospects after a webinar is critical – even if they don’t buy your product. What is the big deal about Q&A logs and chat responses? They are customers discussing your product. And these discussions can offer a great deal of knowledge about how the market is responding to your offering. Prospects are also supplying clues about their true needs — which can only help you refine your pitch for the future. Perhaps someone posts a question about your product beta that – you later realize – should be answered by your R&D team. Or perhaps you figure out in hindsight they’d be more interested in a different or upcoming product? Capturing and analyzing your entire interaction with them gives you a leg up in determining how best to follow up and continue the conversation offline. After all, everything is about converting that lead to a customer!

What’s more, virtual conferencing is almost unbeatable for doing customer research. Ask everyone you pitch the same three questions about their needs and surely you will understand your market better.

The Challenger Sale is one of our favorite sales strategy books. Rather than recite a standard pitch, the book’s philosophy is that successful salespeople tailor their message to their customers’ specific needs and objectives. Wanna know a great place to gather data about customer needs? Yep, a virtual conference.

Corporate Training

For corporate training, analysis of participant data is gold. You will know instantly where audiences are getting tripped up on the material. Capturing the Q&A logs is a great place to start. Also, examining the discussions and activities that result from simultaneous breakout rooms (where an audience may practice what they have learned) gives a clear picture of how well trainees are retaining information.

Managers: want an idea about how well your staff has been performing in that expensive training you signed them up for? Ask for data detailing their interaction during the conference.

Interested in more in-depth advice for virtual meetings? Check out Successful Online Presentations, our virtual meetings and presentations workshop that coaches teams on state-of-the-art virtual presentation design and delivery techniques through instructor demo and hands-on practice.