| ||||
Running successful seminars
Seminars are the workhorses of management communications, able to bear multiple loads. They make excellent sales tools. They can train your distributors and other agents about your company's products and vision. Most fundamentally, perhaps, they can help create trust and drive home the value that your customers derive from your products or services.
So how do you run a successful seminar? You must orchestrate a complex array of marketing, logistics, presentation, and follow-up issues. Preparation, testing, and rehearsal are critical; a burnt-out projector bulb can derail months of work. But the payoffs can mean more sales from well-qualified prospects, motivated agents, and long-term customers alike.
Experts offer the following tips to ensure success:
Focus the value. The key to getting the most out of the seminar is to ensure that it offers genuine information that is tightly connected to your own core product or service offering. Tax- and estate-planning seminars, for example, are offered by many accounting and legal firms as a way to meet new clients. But don't undertake them unless that kind of planning is at the heart of your firm's offerings. If you need to bring in outside talent to deliver more than a mediocre seminar, be aware that it is the outside talent that will draw most of the new business, not your firm.
 | |
| Seminars should be 60% education and 40% entertainment. | |
 |
|
| —Nick Wreden |
Target the audience. The key to successful seminar design is audience personalization. Begin by asking yourself, who am I trying to reach? What are the needs of the people who might attend? What are their hopes and fears? Then, design a program that focuses on addressing those fears and realizing those hopes. This can be as specific as you can make it—down to the individual. One company inspired attendees at a seminar on leadership by putting each of their pictures on a mock Time magazine cover under the heading "Person of the Year." Then, the instructors began the seminar by asking each participant to sketch out a plan for personal growth that would lead them to being named Person of the Year.
Keep everyone awake. Presenters need to be credible and interesting. Hard sales pitches are taboo. Involve the attendees as much as possible. Some successful techniques include role-play, interactive exercises, and Q&A. According to one rule of thumb, seminars should be 60% education and 40% entertainment.
Be generous with handouts: Don't let attendees walk away empty-handed. At least provide a copy of the presentation. Better yet, provide binders that include copies of the presentation, supplementary material, and references. Also include a welcome letter and speaker bios.
"How am I doing?" Ask attendees to self-evaluate before-and-after knowledge on the topic and solicit suggestions for improvement. Evaluation forms are also a good place to ask for names of others who might be interested.
Seminars can develop trust with new and old customers in good times and bad. They should be the first budget item you add and the last you cut in any comprehensive marketing communications program.
· · · ·
Webinars—a high-tech, low-travel alternative?
Rising travel costs and time pressures are contributing to an increase in Web-based seminars, or "Webinars." "It's hard to get people out of the office, especially at the executive level," says Janet Ripley, marketing programs manager at software developer Clarus in Atlanta. "But our monthly Web seminars have proven to be an excellent tool for educating prospects about e-business without requiring a trip to a seminar site."
How it works: Participants sign on to access a Web site. They may view PowerPoint presentations or video, and interact via online text chat or simultaneous audioconferencing. Technical arrangements for Webinars, which can be archived for later retrieval by those who could not make the original event, are usually outsourced to specialist companies.
For each Webinar, Clarus contacts about 10,000 prospects, based on internal, purchased, and distributor lists. Employees, media, and financial analysts are also sometimes invited. About 5% to 10% register, and about 30% of registrants sign in. Generally, there are 100-200 participants per Webinar.