It's hard to believe that webinars and internet marketing tools are still relatively new concepts in some companies. Just before my 7-year maternity leave back in 2000, I was helping my sales team at MCI Conferencing introduce the concept of "web-based data conferencing" to our customers which included Xerox. Ironically, though we never met, within a few months of my leave, my boss, Mark, was working at Xerox on the team that was developing the Xerox Webinar program.
It's 8 years later, and we have been working together for almost a year in a much different technology and a much different world than we had in 2000 and early 2001.
What better time than now are we all positioned to make the most of this technology! Want to really partner with your customers? Let them know that their success is important to you!
In your customer acquisition, build a reliable and approved list of customers, and give them information, presentations, and tools to help them grow their own business while you grow yours.
Look for synergies between your customer's industry and your own, and build a presentation series around it. Back in 2000, my VP of sales partnered with one of my customer's VP of Sales to conduct a short webinar series at both companies.
Today, we have customers who do the same, and then also bring in industry experts to a "round table." The presentation is then broadcast on a webinar, and provide the Brainshark replay later as an on-demand "webinar for one" for those who missed the live version.
Every company should have a regularly scheduled presentation series designed to help their customers grow their own base. Your monthly or quarterly newsletter should have a dedicated space for your webinar news.
Our customers always provide live links to register for upcoming webinars, and to go directly to the Brainshark replays of webinars that have passed. We are also developing personalized landing pages for key customer contacts. These are like a little mini-reference books compressed down to a singular web page that provides the customer with all the tools and reference points he needs for past, current and upcoming web events.
Mark and I marvel at how closely we missed each other back in 2000, when our entire business was a budding technology. With the tools of today, we'd be much less likely to miss each other, now.


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