The Future of Webinars

Last month, I delivered the first webinar of its kind: a live broadcast of the presenter (in this case, me!), delivering a presentation – in front of my slides.

This truly is breakthrough technology as delivering a webinar in this way has never been possible before. Being able to see the presenter as well as the slides keeps audiences engaged, and makes presentations far more effective. This really has the potential to completely revolutionise the way webinars are delivered in the future.

The webinar explained how and why businesses should be using video content to drive sales, and just what the latest technology is capable of. But don’t worry if you missed it – you can watch the recording here!

Technical vs Application Selling

So a few of us spent 5 days last week at a huge Broadcast Exhibition in Amsterdam, IBC 2012. We were there primarily to support our Strategic Partner, Ultimatte, but also to announce our partnership to bring high end video production values to the corporate presentation market.

The interesting thing is that wandering around this huge event (14 halls and 1300 stands), there wasn’t much selling going on. Lots and lots of technical people having lots and lots of technical conversations, but the sort of conversations I would expect to overhear at a trade show were largely in the minority.

What I mean by this is that there are lots of questions from the visitors that ask, “How do you do that? How do I do this? I need to do this – what do you have that will help?” and almost exclusively the response is a detailed technical explanation of HOW to solve that problem.

But the inner salesperson in me wants to avoid answering these questions and ask WHY: “Why do you want to do that? Have you thought about what impact it would have if you did this?”

Our new Partners at Ultimatte are engineers through and through, and are really comfortable having the ‘This is how it works’ conversation. As a result, they are very cautious of my approach of stopping passersby and asking, “So do you ever have to record amateur presenters?”, before proceeding to deliver a case for SightDeck if they say yes. Inevitably they want to know how it works and I have to pass it off to someone who actually knows. I’m clearly in the minority here, perhaps everywhere – I really don’t care how things work, I care about what they can do for me!

So I write blogs but I have no idea how to publish them, I drive cars but don’t know how to service them, and now I record presentations on our SightDeck but I… Well actually after 5 days of listening to the experts I do know how this thing works and can definitely say it’s very cool. But still not as cool to me as what we can do with it…

For the first time in 15 years we can actually demonstrate what we do on the web. We can record us presenting our slides. We can take clients and record a version of their presentation for training, for marketing, for sales, even for fun! SightDeck will not only revolutionise how we market, but how we sell, and how we deliver our work to clients. It’s the most significant breakthrough in presentation technology since InFocus launched the first Data Projector.

Technical selling has its place. Most people won’t buy something they don’t understand, but when it comes down to it you don’t often buy a piece of technology just because it’s cool… OK that’s a lie, I just bought a GoPro camera with absolutely no application in mind – I just got excited on the GoPro stand… And come to think of it, I might have spent $200k on a SightDeck because it’s cool, but I did have to make a business case for the loan… which meant a lot of commercial selling as well!

Check out our IBC 2012 presentations using our brand new SightDeck here.

How Do You Record a Bright Screen? Introducing SightDeck!

For fifteen years we have been making clients’ presentations better and then training and coaching them to deliver amazing pitches, but we have struggled to show the world what we do. The problem is that when you put a presenter in front of his slides, and then both presenter and slides in front of a camera, it looks terrible. Screen images aren’t bright. Carbon copies of their slides look terrible.

Your eye has an iris that automatically adjusts to allow the right amount of light to hit your retina, allowing you to see things that are dark, as well as bright. Carbon fibre irises in cameras can’t respond in the same way, and so images that contain two subjects that give off different amounts of light don’t record well with a single camera.

In a TV studio there are a handful of genius lighting experts that, given enough time and equipment, can produce a solution that would allow you to stand in front of a plasma screen and interact with it, but you’ll need a $200k camera, as well as the studio, to get close to what we can produce using Ultimatte’s ground breaking SightDeck technology.

In a nutshell, SightDeck projects a low contrast, dimmer version of your graphics onto a light sensitive screen. The system detects the shadow of the presenter and removes them from the image, projecting pure white light onto the presenter. The system then takes a feed of the presenter on a transparent background and places them over a bright carbon copy of their slides, thus producing an extremely high contrast, high quality composite of presenter and slides… in real time!

We think this is going to revolutionise the business presentation market, and we are launching two new services on the back of this amazing technology: stream62 and view62.

stream62 is to use this technology for the live broadcasting of clients’ content, over IPTV, video conferencing or broadcast systems. We think this is a great solution for webinars, sales pitches or video conferences.

view62 is for recording content for video on demand systems; we see applications for websites, e-marketing tools and sales collateral that will blow your prospects away.

Business presentations just got a lot better.

Team Coaching

I’m in an office opposite the boardroom of a client in India, while the team we have been coaching for the past 2 days is doing their pitch. The other members of the m62 team here are back at the hotel asleep, having worked until 1AM to finish the changes to the presentation.

I’m not normally here, I’m normally either in the room or on the way home, this halfway house is uncomfortable, but I guess that’s the role of the coach. At some point the coaching stops and the team play the game. You either did a good job or you didn’t, it’s now up to them.

It’s going to be the same next month for the Under 10 (years old) rugby team I’m coaching, when they step out on the field for the Cheshire Cup competition; except I will be on the touch line watching every move, every pass and desperately trying not to care how they do as long as they enjoy it.

Team versus individual coaching

There are lots of similarities between the two types of coaching, kids in sport and sales people in business:

1. They all want to win
2. They all need positive encouragement
3. Guided discovery is better for them than directed learning
4. They generally all want to be coached but want to pretend they don’t need it
5. Cohesion as a team trumps individual star performances

And my role is pretty similar as well:

1. Share knowledge in a constructive way
2. Demonstrate where appropriate
3. Praise good behavior
4. Identify and correct bad behavior
5. Ask questions to encourage thought

On the whole, coaching is coaching, and the big differences are really around coaching individuals rather than teams. I’ve coached thousands of presenters and hundreds of teams and the role is different. With an individual it’s about being the best they can be. I spend my time refining performance, tweaking and nudging the presentation and the individual until it delivers the optimum result.

Everyone is on stage

For teams in a presentation, the best presentation on the day is all for nothing if one “Cast Member” (a non-presenter who is in the room because he/she is important or knowledgeable) undermines the pitch in some way. A bad facial expression, poor body language or an inappropriate interjection. It’s a team game and the star player won’t win the game for you if the rest don’t support them. As in Rugby or in Life, success depends on your team not just you.

Oh one more similarity between kids at rugby and salespeople in a pitch—if they lose, they all want to cry! Well, occasionally me too!

How Much Does it Cost?

Almost every time I sit to write a sales presentation for a new client, somebody wants to talk about their pricing. Rarely have I heard a convincing argument for cost being a value proposition.

“We are cheap”

I have two issues with this. The first is you have to be absolutely sure that you are the cheapest. If they have three quotes and you are not the cheapest then their conclusion is going to be that you are either lying (not good) or don’t know your market (possibly worst.) Either way, you’re making the case for them to actually choose the cheapest option. You lose!

Second, you are moving the conversation away from the value you offer to the cost of delivery, which breaks the fundamental principals of negotiation:

You cannot discuss cost until you have determined value.

“How Much?” is a buying sign. You don’t ask this unless you see some value in the product or service you are talking about. Waiting until they ask gives you a clear indication of interest.

How you price vs what you price.

Even when they ask, I’d be tempted to describe the pricing model rather than the absolute cost of the deal—and I would always tie it to the outcomes. For example, m62 STAT is a fixed price engagement to help clients win big pitch presentations. Before we tell the client our price, we ask how much the deal is we are pitching for. I’m working on four at the moment and each is worth in excess of $500 million, even at outsourcing margins (2-3%), the price we are going to charge for a 78% win rate is immaterial.

Cost of doing vs. the cost of not.

In fact, my usual response isn’t about the cost of our services, but the cost of losing. All four pitches will have bidding budgets of close to $1 million, making our fee irrelevant. Winning is the only thing that matters. For our clients, the question is always the same–what’s the cost of getting it wrong, or the value of getting it right?

So when do you talk cost?

Simple. You have to get the client to ask for the price, then you put a value (to them) on the service (a big number compared to your fee) then you share the price (a small number compared to the value).