View it @http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhTUx63IdEA

SalesFUSION announces partnership with WebAttract, an innovative solution for Webinar Demand Creation and Management

ATLANTA, January 11, 2010–SalesFUSION™, the maker of SalesFUSION 360, an integrated sales and marketing demand generation platform, today announced they have formed a strategic partnership with WebAttract, an end to end solution for webinar demand creation focused on b2b companies.

“Webinars are a huge part of how we market here at SalesFUSION and more and more companies in the b2b space are adopting webinars as a means of getting their message out to their target audiences,” said Kevin Miller, EVP Marketing and Sales for SalesFUSION. “Having used webinars for years, we very much appreciate the solution that WebAttract has put together. Marketing a webinar is about drawing and retaining an audience, and then engaging in the proper follow up. This is the essence of b2b nurture marketing and it’s a big part of what SalesFUSION’s software enables companies to accomplish.”

The partnership includes a referral arrangement between SalesFUSION and WebAttract. SalesFUSION will offer the WebAttract solution as a valuable add-on service for its customers. In addition, WebAttract will leverage the advanced forms, registration pages and drip/trigger email capabilities within SalesFUSION to drive audience attendance for their client’s events.

“At WebAttract, we seek marketing and technology partners that can help our clients extend the dialogue with their prospects after one of our highly-attended webinars,” said Bret Smith, Co-Principal of WebAttract. “SalesFUSION’s business model and lead nurturing capabilities are a perfect fit for us and our clients”.

About SalesFUSION
SalesFUSION 360 provides software that accelerates revenue by connecting sales and marketing with prospects at the moment they are ready to buy. This is made possible through the SalesFusion 360™ suite, which complements Sales Force Automation applications by adding an on-demand enterprise lead management service. SalesFUSION 360 increases lead quantity, lead quality, and revenue conversion rates by integrating and automating the lead management process. For more information, visit www.salesfusion.com.

Tim Bourquin wrote a thought-provoking column talking about his company’s use of both live and recorded webinars. Tim is very open and detailed in his description of how they use webinars to boost awareness and revenue and it’s worth reading as a business use case. But he also brings up two major problems he is running into:

1. People are signing up for live webinars just to get the link to the recording. They never plan to attend the live session.
2. There is no sense of urgency driving people to watch recordings. The indefinite availability lowers the priority of ever watching the content.

Tim has asked his readers for commentary and solution approaches and he was kind enough to ask for my advice as well.

You may wonder if item #1 is actually a problem. “Who cares whether they watch your content in the live session? You have their name for your lead list and you have their money.” That’s a short-sighted view of the situation. There are many reasons you want your registrants to really attend. First, a webinar with a good-sized audience generates more interaction and feedback, which stimulates greater involvement in your message. Second, names captured during a registration process are not leads… They are merely contacts. If you don’t know the difference, you should do some study on the subject. Third, your content should have a purpose. It advances your goals and makes your attendees more receptive to an idea or action you want them to pursue. If they don’t see the content, you lose that.

If we stipulate that having people see your content is desirable, how can we help it occur? Here are a few ideas. Finding the ones that are appropriate for your audience and your goals is an exercise left for the reader:

1. Advertise extra content in the live session that will not be made available in the recording. This might be extra (or all the) Q&A time with the expert presenter. Or it could be a case study or group exercise. Make attending the live session have perceived value up front. It’s perfectly fine to tell people that you are doing this to encourage a large and lively live session.
2. Use a giveaway. Some companies like to offer all attendees a special goodie such as a white paper or software download. You can advertise that this is only available to live attendees. Or you can always go to the live drawing approach for an unrelated but desirable toy such as an MP3 player, Kindle, or so on. I don’t like these as a way to pull in registrants, but I do like it as a way to get registrants to attend! You can advertise the drawing AFTER people have signed up, giving them notification in their login instruction email.

How about encouraging people to go ahead and view on-demand content? Are there ways to bump up the perceived priority of watching the recording? Here are a few ideas to get you started:

1. Let people know that the recordings are only available for a limited time. This is my LEAST favorite approach. The whole value of recordings is that they can keep working for you over time.
2. Give people a time-limited password. “This password expires at the end of the week/month/geological era.” It is easy in most systems to change a recording’s password.
3. Use the advertiser’s trick of “The first 50 people to view this recording get something.” You don’t tell your audience when the 50 limit has already been reached or how many people have viewed already. You can then play the game either way… Stop giving the freebie after the first 50 or keep giving the freebie to everybody. Don’t stiff the first 50 though… That’s dishonest and illegal.

With these concepts as starting points, I’m sure you can come up with other variations. Good luck, Tim!

By Ken Molay, president of Webinar Success

Originally posted on The Webinar Blog

Of course, not all webinars are created equal. There are some specific differences in focus, and between being informed and being sold.

Read more of WebAttract’s article on Bright Hub’s Sales & Marketing Channel @ http://www.brighthub.com/office/sales-marketing/articles/63307.aspx#ixzz0egxmRLrz

3. Navigating Gatekeeper Obstacles

“How do I improve my chances of reaching my target contact?” This is a question that many people ask themselves today. After all, it is rather difficult to make a sale if you can’t gain access to the person making the decisions. So obviously, this is critical for the sales process to begin.

In Part 2, we discussed how to identify the proper decision maker, Now, all we have to do is navigate successfully around gatekeepers, such as Administrative Assistants. This is the difficult part of voice prospecting.

I am convinced that a large part of telephone success comes from the attitude or posture of the caller. Much of this falls back to personal style and comfort level. Personally, I use the “kill them with kindness approach”. It is difficult to be harsh with someone who is so nice that you hate to shut them down.

I try to make them like me, in order to gain entry. I call the admin by name if she answers with it. I record the name for use in future calls. So every time that I call, it is “Hey, Gloria, how’s it going today?” People love to be remembered and the more they like you, the more they will help.

Just think about how many mundane, rude or deceptive calls this person must field in a day, week, month or year. How many calls do you think that this person gets where the caller is actually nice to them? This immediately positions you in a small minority of those she is actually happy to deal with and hear from.

If you are going to be calling on a prospective account month after month, you definitely are going to need this person on your side. After all, she has the power to shut you down each and every call. Getting to know this person, a question at a time, helps to build a rapport over the long term.

When I was head hunting, I used to have a file of just admin information. Many, I knew about their family, their birthday’s, what they did in their off time, etc. I built it by establishing friendliness and honesty and just small talking my way into it. Eventually, I could call on these people to help me with a name, a number, comany information, etc. The minimal time that I had invested paid much larger dividends down the road.

Some people prefer the authoritative approach, where they adopt the posture of a busy, commanding executive, expecting to be put right through. I know one person that this works like a charm for. However, I have always found that the more important that they think you are, the more that they want to cover their backside, and their boss’, by knowing all the details of why you are calling. This approach works rather well on lower level secretaries, but admins that have been around for a while are not as easily intimidated.

So, how much information do we disclose and what do we actually want them to know? This is actually where the sale begins. You have to sell this person that you are not just another sales person, looking to take up her boss’ time.

I generally try to sound as if I belong, using the decision maker’s first name, and an attitude that projects that I am totally comfortable with calling him. Nervousness keys them into the fact that this is your first time and have never spoken to her boss before. I want to project the attitude that I do this all the time and this is business as usual. I answer each of her questions honestly and with a smile in my voice.

If this lady has even a hint that you are hiding something or sidestepping her questions, she will dig and dig and dig until she get’s the information or until you hang up. This just slows you down and does not establishing the right kind of foundation to build on for the future. You want to set the tone for future calls, so alienating this person is only going to make things harder for you down the road. Remember, you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

By Gerry Nason

Unlike a live in person event where you have the benefit of “seeing” your audience and their reaction to your presentation, this capability is unfortunately not part of virtual meetings, such as webinars.

Seeing your audiences body language and other non verbal gestures is invaluable. It provides feedback, in that lets you make adjustments on the fly to make sure you are connecting with your audience.

So here are five tips to help make sure you are able to connect with your audience when you are doing a webinar.

1. First, what do you know about your audience, such as their interests and what they’d possibly find of value in what you have to tell them, or why should they care in what you are going to tell them?

2. Then after you are introduced, before you start going through your slide deck, tell them what it is you want them know, what’s in it for them, and what you want them to do with this information? Taking a few moments before launching into your content goes a long way to develop a rapport, establish your credibility as a thought leader, and more importantly, it allows you to state your perspective on where you are coming from, making it a lot easier for the audience to engage and follow your thoughts.

3. Using the deliverables from the webinar invitation as your road map, give concrete examples to reinforce your key points. Better yet, tell a story about best practices or lessons learned or some of the results. This will go a long way to making what you have to say be something they might want to learn more about after the webinar by having a 1:1 with you. After all, isn’t one of your objectives in doing the webinar to extend the conversation with a more in-depth discussion?

4. Only after you’ve blocked out what you want to tell them, as well as your key points to support your message, start looking at developing your content. Rather than multiple bullets on a slide, use slides that have a visual appeal with lot’s of white space and interesting graphics. Remember, you want the audience to “hear you” not get lost in reading your text.

5. Think of your voice as an instrument, vary your pitch, tone and rhythm. Like any instrument, you’ve got to practice to sound natural. Rehearsing your talk several times with your associates really helps prepare you for making an engaging delivery. Rather than reading bullets to them, show respect for your audience by pausing long enough to let your audience know you really care and want them to think about what you are telling them. By all means now is the time to share your passion for the topic and even consider gesturing as it helps create more energy and your audience will feel it. But don’t sell or use a lot of hype, be yourself.

These 5 basic tips will help you develop credibility that not only helps to connect with the audience, it also keeps them from bailing on you, and more importantly, your talk will inspire them to want to learn more about how you can help them solve their business or technology challenges.

Let me know what other tips you use or would recommend for making sure your webinar presentations are successful.

By Mike Agron

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pipd1NWCJrg

Creating valuable, education based content is half the ticket to selling these days. The other half, of course, is getting that content read and in the hands of prospects.

Writing a blog, hosting content on your website and spreading the word on you social networks are all great places to start, but another great way to use and amplify content is to attract partners that you can share content with and help you turn that content into referrals.

Below is a list of five ways to start thinking about doing just that.

1) Guest post – It used to be that writing articles and publishing them to article directories was sound advice. It’s still not a bad way to get some exposure, but writing as a guest author for blogs read by your prospective market is a far stronger play these days. Blogs generally have a following developed by the publisher and therefor an audience that comes back and reads or content that search engines find highly indexable.

By approaching blogs that seem to have the kind of topics and readers relevant to your market and offering up valuable content you can potentially borrow the trust, also known as being referred, built by that blogger to gain added exposure to your message or expertise.

A couple of thoughts on finding blogs. Use search tools like Bloglines or Placeblogger to find related or local bloggers. While it would be great to get a guest post on the highest traffic blogs you might want to focus on blogs that are smaller and perhaps in the end, more relevant to your subject. Scan past posts to see if they appear to want guest posts and offer up original content either in the form of a full post or by way of an email outlining what you could write about. Make sure you add very brief contact information, but don’t sell in the post.

2) Host a group – Social networking platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Slideshare and Flickr all allow members to create groups. A group can be gathered around a single niche topic or even a location. By forming a group around content, community events or how to do something specific, you have the opportunity to create a place where prospects and partners might want to gather and refer others.

The key to this play is that the group needs to be all about something valuable, a what’s in it for the members only approach, or it won’t garner any attention. You don’t have to think strictly in terms of a group topic that is related to your business either. If you are trying to attract locals, a group that appeals to locals might be a group way to turn content into referrals. This Boston Networking Group on LinkedIn was founded by Jeff Popin, owner of BostonEventGuide.com. With over 3,000 members, there’s a pretty good bet this group serves as a conduit for Popin’s main business locally.

3) Bring a friend – People love free content events such as workshops and webinars. They are great ways to deliver content and great ways for people looking for information to learn from an expert. One way to build audience and generate referrals is to create “bring a friend” events. The idea here is that you can come for free, but you must bring a friend as the price of admission. You can automate the process of sign-up using tools like MeetUp or Eventbrite.

Bring a friend is a great way to expand your referral base and, as long as we’ve got the audience, make a referral oriented offer to all in attendance. If you sell a product or service make them a two for one deal today only. They get to buy today’s incredible program and get a second one free to give a friend.

4) Offer content co-branding - You’ve worked and slaved over the perfect white paper, “how to” series of articles, or video tutorials and people seem to really like them. Why not take that content to potential strategic partners (really any non-competing business that also targets your same ideal customer) and offer to let them use it. Most businesses these days realize they should be producing content like this, but hey, who has the time. Then you show up with a great little package of information all ready to go and you even let them put there logo and contact information inside when they offer it up their prospects, customers and network.

This is a great way to get in front of very large audiences as a referral. Making it very easy for people to do something they know they should is a great way to get the attention of a potential big referral fish.

5) Create an event – This one is pretty closely related to the last two, but once you’ve created a workshop or seminar, you can always take it to potential strategic partners and offer to provide it at no cost to their customer base (you get referred as the expert) – of course, don’t forget to tell them about the bring a friend approach.

To amp this approach up even more round-up four or five of the partners that you worked with in number four above and come up with an entire day or half day of great topics that your target market will find irresistible. Then each of you promote the event to your customer and prospect bases (bring a friend) and fill up the event. You can do this for free or low cost, but the goal is to get exposure and referrals from your partners while providing content that can be re-purposed in any number of ways. You can do this online off and don’t forget to record so you can use the archives in new ways too!

Posted by: John Jantsch

What does this mean?

In an interview at the 2010 Marketing Sherpa Email Summit in Miami last week, conference attendees were asked: “Is the Efficacy of Email Going Down in the Face of SMS or Social Media?”

Campaigner’s product marketing manager said “absolutely not, email marketing is a private channel for communications whereas social media is public”. http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5527/Is-Email-Dying-in-the-Face-of-Social-Media-and-SMS.aspx

Melanie explains in the interview that social media is a terrific way to broadcast your content at large and to reach out to others who like minded. As such, social media is most commonly being used to share opinions, or to chat with friends and family.

But when it comes to B-to-B or B-to-C transactional conversations — a private channel is necessary. Using email is great for this kind of communication because the sender can be extremely selective in who receives the initial message and can control the timing of delivery. Email is also highly customizable on a one-to-one basis – something that social media does not have – excluding private messages.

Furthermore, email has the great advantage of being highly track-able. Social media is the first online marketing tool that does not offer precise numbers. As such, its benefits relate more to the public awareness effect – and the benefits of email relate more to targeted (and private) direct marketing capabilities.

Posted by Melanie Attia

I’m working on a task that I only occasionally do for clients… Cleaning up recorded audio from a live webinar to make the archive more presentable. This is mind-numbingly tedious work. I typically work in sub-second increments, removing breaths, fixing stutters, reducing intrusive sounds, adjusting pauses between words, filtering out background noise, and balancing volume.

What is particularly heartbreaking on this project is that I know the end result will be imperfect. You see, the recording was made by a presenter on a poor phone line using a speakerphone. The audio exceeds the microphone’s volume range, introducing clipping and fuzz into the recording. And you can’t eliminate that… All you can do is try to reduce how irritating it sounds.

I hear bad audio on webinars all the time. Presenters use cheap headsets, mobile phones, and speaker phones. They sit in offices with loudspeaker announcements. They have their pet dog in the room, who starts barking during the presentation. They don’t check levels and they don’t position their microphone correctly, so they produce whooshes, hisses, and pops while talking. Their chairs squeak and they rustle papers loudly during their talk.

Once the bad artifacts from improper setup get into your recording, they are almost impossible to remove. Things usually get worse when the session is recorded by the web conferencing software. Almost every vendor compresses the audio down to a tinny, flat version of what it was during the live event. This saves file space and computing power.

What’s the answer? Do it right the first time. Test audio ahead of time. Have two other people on the line to listen and give you feedback on your levels, clarity, and noise artifacts. You can not and must not trust how things sound to you while talking. Think about intrusive noises and take steps to eliminate them. Put the dog in the garage for an hour. Get a different chair. If you have papers, remove any staples or bindings to leave a stack of individual pages. As you finish with each page, let it fall gently to the floor (this is an old radio announcer trick).

If you know you will be doing post-production on your recording, you may be better off recording the audio separately from the web conference recording using your audio conferencing provider’s recording capabilities. The reputable teleconference vendors have a vested interest in giving you clear audio quality and will record at a higher bitrate for better sound. Then you can make your edits and reassemble the audio with the video into something you’ll be proud of.

By Ken Molay, president of Webinar Success

Originally posted on The Webinar Blog