by Guillaume Privat, Director, Adobe Connect
Two weeks ago, I attended the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco. It was a very interesting event that touched upon a lot of subjects from how to set-up sales compensation, to boosting sales rep motivation, to what CRM, lead management, analytics system companies should consider implementing.
What stroke me though was how prevalent virtual meetings and webinars have become for sales and marketing organizations to engage with their prospective customers. Webconferencing has become mission critical to ensure sales rep can talk to prospects, to ensure marketing organization can generate leads via webinars.
Yet many organizations struggle to engage customers virtually. Their presentation are very bland consisting mostly of voice over screen share and quickly lose the audience to multi-tasking and going back to checking email.
I was particularly interested by a presentation by Carmen Taran from Rexi Media called “Virtual Presentations Can Make or Break You”. Carmen provided some tips on how to re-engage your audience every 2 minutes – as studies have found this is the most attention span you get from people these days. Here is what she advocates:
1) vary the type of content frequently: don’t just present slides that follows the same format. Vary template, add demo, video, simulation, quizzes, games.
2) use intriguing pictures instead of words to capture the audience attention and force them to listen for the solution of the riddle set in the picture.
3) create emotional connection with the audience, though story or picture.
Adobe Connect offer unsurpassed rich experience to create this emotional engagement with an audience and I was not surprised to see Adobe Connect screen shots in Carmen’s presentation. We also have a lot of best practices for engaging audience at our community site, www.connectusers.com.