For business professionals who have participated in webinars, and are thinking about hosting one, here are some reasons why you should!
- 1) First and foremost, webinars provide an extremely cost-effective and productive channel for interacting and communicating with clients, prospects, colleagues and staff. If you consider the cost of traditional meetings, which may include travel, hotel, facility costs, and catering, webinars are without a doubt significantly low-cost for the host and the attendees. Hosts pay for the webinar software usage and sometimes for a presenter, while in most cases the attendees join in for free.
- 2) Webinars allow you to reach a large audience, simultaneously and instantly, in an effective and low-cost manner. The software available today allows presenters and attendees to interact and collaborate through live question and answers periods, and document sharing. This makes it easy for attendees to participate and learn.
- 3) Webinars offer an exceptional convenience for conducting training for staff, and are a great way to host a sales demo with a prospect.
- 4) Webinars will successfully help you leverage your business development efforts, as marketing webinars are a great way to generate leads.
- 5) Webinars come in handy when you want to make an announcement to your staff and colleagues at the same time. No matter where your staff and colleagues are located geographically, webinars allow you to make the same announcement to different groups rather than sending separate emails or making phone calls.
There are several really good platforms available today for hosting webinars. At American Executive Centers, we have teamed up with Global Crossing to offer our clients both Ready Access Audio (strictly audio webinars) and/or Web Meeting, which is designed to provide seamless webinar meetings, sales demos, and training sessions. The full-featured tool set available through Global Crossing Web Meeting is quite expansive and makes it simple to schedule, conduct and join in on webinars. As the number of our clients hosting webinars is on the uptick, we are confident we chose a terrific software platform our clients will find easy to use and most effective.
American Executive Centers' Plymouth Meeting client Frank Perlmutter, President and CEO of Strategic BCP, (www.strategicbcp.com) comments, "We use webinars regularly for both sales and training. As a company in the business continuity planning industry, webinars have been extremely useful for demonstrating our software. With large clients and multiple locations in the U.S. and around the world, hosting webinars has proven to be the most cost-effective method to train all of the users of our product at multiple locations. Our travel expenses are way down with the usage of webinars!"
Below are several "Powerful Tools" Global Crossing Recommends for Managing an Effective Webinar:
- 1) Appoint Co-Presenters: Easily elevate a participant to a co-presenter so they can share their slides, applications or desktop, view the participant list, conduct polls, chat with others, and more.
- 2) Grant Control: Increase collaboration by granting control of an application or your desktop to a participant or a co-presenter.
- 3) Invite Participants: Instantly send an email inviting others to join a conference from within the conference interface.
- 4) Raise Hand: Participants simply click the raise hand button to indicate that they have a question. Those with raised hands are highlighted in the participant list.
- 5) Manage Audio Participants: Manage conference audio through the phone keypad or through the web. Dial out to participants, mute and un-mute participants, lock the audio conference, get instant operator assistance, and more.
- 6) Share Content: Integrate rich, visual content into a conference by sharing slides, desktop applications, or your entire desktop with the audience.
- 7) Engage the Audience: Make meetings and webinars interactive by chatting with participants, polling the audience or drawing attention to slide content with annotation tools.
- 8) Record the Conference: Record an audio-only call or an integrated audio and web conference.
To take advantage of our webinar software now available through American Executive Centers, simply speak to your Business Support Services team or Center Manager. To learn more about Global Crossing, visit: www.globalcrossing.com
Here are a few additional webinar platform services available: