Ever have a webinar presenter that seemed obligated to tell you everything they knew on a subject, and then try to convince you they needed at least 45 minutes for their portion?
A recent blog post by Kelley Decker of Decker Communications called “What If Everybody is Cursed by Knowledge?”, got me thinking that this is also a major challenge in producing and delivering engaging webinars. If you’re not familiar with Decker Communications, they are a real pioneer and well respected thought leader in the art business communications. You can find her article by clicking here
Presenters often need coaching and encouragement to bring out their best. I remember fondly a very technical webinar we produced several years ago. We had a product manager slated to deliver a case study. His job was to explain how using a new material enabled his company to get to market faster while reducing R&D costs.
What started off as a very detailed technical analysis, was transformed into an engaging presentation. We coached the presenter to tell a story about his experience, sharing his business results and lessons learned.
To summarize, our coaching strategy was to:
- Find out what excited the presenter about the case study
- Use the webinar invitation messaging to develop a few key talking points
- Ignite the presenter’s passion to inspire and engage the audience
This approach trumps reading boring technical jargon from PowerPoint slides and motivates the audience to want to learn more.
And isn’t that why you did the webinar in the first place?
Mike