Companies are having to confront how to bring their workforce back into the office (if at all). While your clients need to wrestle with the logistics of this move, you need to address how to actually implement their vision from a technical perspective. Your clients need you to focus on the cybersecurity, infrastructure, and balance it all with the logistics of the technical implications of their post Covid-19 workplace transformation.
The pandemic necessitated many changes for most businesses to stay functional. Businesses scrambled to replace in person meetings with Zoom or Teams, or moved from on-premise solutions to the cloud. While they may have shored up some of the issues with the mad rush to just make things work, returning to the office will have its own technical needs to make the process smooth and secure. Assets have been shuffled around and what worked before may not work now.
We rounded up ten different aspects we’ve seen MSPs encounter when helping their clients return from the pandemic and the considerations which go into the process. Each of these aspects feeds into the others, so something which seems common sense at face value can have a profound effect when you make note of it as a specific part of the process.
We’ll start with the basics of cybersecurity, infrastructure, and the logistic concerns. Sign up for the full version of this article which includes the actual 10 most common aspects we have seen our partners deal with during this return and what to consider when working with them. There’s a difference between knowing something exists and applying it.
Cybersecurity Concerns
With the return to the office, there are going to be many new security concerns to square up. Devices have been effectively out in the wild for a year, needs in the office have changed, and you need to be aware of everything touching the network. This is something you normally keep up with in the regular scope of running your MSP, but it is exacerbated by the fragmented nature of work from home.
This section will cover the security concerns at a high level since there really isn’t a one size fits all approach to security. You need to audit assets in the office and beyond, audit devices coming in, make sure that the network makes sense for the new normal, and make sure that old methods of getting in are removed when they need to be. While each of these are straightforward enough in writing, there are multiple parts to consider. We start with security since you should always think about the security implications first (where possible).
Considerations:
What assets are in production (locally and remotely)?
What assets are available for use?
Is everything in storage up to date?
What solutions are in use (SaaS, on-premise solutions, etc.)?
What solutions have been added?
What can be removed, what can be reduced, and what is essential?
Infrastructure Concerns
The move to work from home during the pandemic necessitated many changes to infrastructure. Most businesses didn’t previously have a scalable system in place to facilitate the widespread move to work from home. The changes you or the client have made to the infrastructure impacts security, but it also impacts the logistics for your client to come back to the office to work as necessary.
While infrastructure often bleeds into logistics and vice versa, we are going to define the infrastructure as the actual technical infrastructure which transparently supports the logistic concerns. Certain onsite infrastructure may need restoration to service, other infrastructure may need adjustment to support safe habits, and you may need to change out onsite infrastructure to support cloud migrations or other changes from the pandemic. Some things didn’t make sense to have centralized when working from home, but can provide value back in the office, while other things will slow down from everyone working off the same connection.
Considerations:
How is your client returning and what do they need to stay safe?
How does this work with their expansion and growth?
Do they need more bandwidth, more flexibility, or both?
Logistic Concerns
While many clients are returning to their offices, the logistics of how they do business is probably going to change. Before the pandemic, if someone was sick or on vacation, they might have some way to do work, but there wasn’t often the need for a way to do their entire job remotely. You expected someone to be gone for a fixed amount of time, not potentially permanently while still working.
Your security policy for your client and even the exact specifications of infrastructure changes will depend on the logistics of how they do business. If they implemented a new cloud infrastructure, you may have the bandwidth exhausted or barely touched depending on how the business adapts to their return from the pandemic. The cat’s out of the bag with remote work as at least a potential option, and businesses are going to strike a balance. Logistic changes will mean new movement in and out of the office, and new long term plans for the new normal.
Considerations:
What changes is your client making and how can you facilitate them?
What changes have happened to your client’s business model and how do those impact logistics?
Why are they making certain choices and is there a better way?
Conclusion
There are so many other considerations we can dive into, but these 10 main points across 3 different levels of consideration should help you get deeper into the process. You may not be able to shore up every single consideration depending on the logistical constraints of your client, but you can make sure they know the limitations of what they’re doing and how it impacts their business. No decision will ever be perfect without unlimited resources or extreme luck, but you can make sure that every decision is the right one for you and your client.
This list isn’t exhaustive, but it should help you towards exhausting the considerations you need to have for helping your client. What other considerations can you think of and how does it fit in with everything else you’re doing? How can you turn your client’s vague idea into a tailored plan that covers their bases for their return from the pandemic? How do you make the process scalable between different clients without having to reinvent the wheel at each level?
It might help to go through this list in a different order as well to target from a different metric for your considerations. If flexibility is the most important requirement, start with the logistics and work from there. If the infrastructure requires the biggest changes, consider starting there. It really doesn’t matter where you start, just that you take all of the important elements into consideration to ensure your client’s success.
Every client is different and some will be going back into the office while others won’t. You need a plan for each client to facilitate the logistics and infrastructure behind their decision and a way to keep them safe every step of the way. Now that things are changing, what does your client need, and how can you facilitate it for them?
READ MORE: Check out our full 10-pg guide here!
Meet Luke Glover, Research & Development Manager
Luke Glover quickly became a tremendous asset to the entire team at The 20. Read below to find out more about Luke.
What do you do here at The 20?
I am the DevOps Manager. I develop new tools, solutions, and automate tasks for The 20.
Describe The 20 in three words…
An IT company.
As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Growing up, I wanted to be an Aeronautical Engineer.
What’s the most challenging thing about your job?
The most challenging thing about my job is coming up with outside the box solutions for seemingly impossible tasks.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
My family is my greatest achievement.
What do you think is the most important quality necessary for success?
Perseverance
What do you like most about The 20?
The opportunity for growth and advancement.
What do you like to do in your spare time? / What are your hobbies?
Video games with my son, working on my cars, and making knives.
Where are you going on your next vacation?
What’s your top life hack?
Pretty much any skill you ever wanted to learn can be learned for free on the internet.
Interested in working with Luke at The 20? We’re hiring! Check out our Careers page for more info.
Sales cadence is a new buzzword in B2B sales, but it’s really just a new name for an older concept brought into modernity. Sales is traditionally viewed as a transactional process rather than the development of a relationship. Sales cadence is the process by which you transform a transactional paradigm into a scalable, reproducible methodology to foster lead development and growth. Done right, it increases the volume of successful leads while reducing their relative cost.
Sales cadence is about contacting a lead and nurturing the relationship to where they’re ready to buy or ready to part ways. It takes 10-12 touches to get the average lead in most B2B endeavors, but managed services can take closer to 14-18 touches in our experience. You’re trying to get someone to trust their business to your service, so they need to see more than the brochure. They need you to remind them of your existence and service without becoming intrusive. You need to show them what you offer and how it can help them as well as understanding the specific challenges they face.
Let’s see how sales cadence works with the B2B process, how to build a script, what technology can do to enhance your results, and how it works for an MSP (or other managed service). The process is nothing new, but there has been a paradigm shift in how it is approached. You can sit and cold call over and over, or you can choose to create a process that makes each call worth something while saving you time and effort.
Sales Cadence and the B2B Process
A business relationship is still a relationship, the difference is the whims of the individuals are more muted by the goals of the business. You work with people and sell to people, but you also need to sell to both the individual and the company to make B2B actually work. People don’t remember the vendor that gave them a card once at a show, they remember the vendor which reached out (for better and for worse depending on the approach). How are you making potential leads aware without scaring them away? You don’t sign a potentially life changing contract on the first email, so how can you make your lead trust you and your process to make the right choice for your business and theirs?
The sales cadence process for B2B sales breaks down into several factors. You need to know who you’re addressing, where to find them and what they need, how to contact them, how often to do so, and what to do to either seal the deal or move on without hurting anyone’s feelings. How you balance the importance of each factor or what will work for you and your industry is something which you need to iterate on and improve. We’ll touch on how to draft your content after going over the general stages.
1. Who Is Your Target Lead?
This is the first question you need to ask yourself. Who are you targeting with your current sales process? What do they do? What do they need? How can you deliver it? To sell something, you need someone to sell to and someone who will buy.
You need to create a persona of who you’re trying to sell to that matches what you expect from their industry. If you specialize in servicing the hospitality sector, you’re not going to get the same requirements, or even trends and personalities you deal with as the energy sector. You aren’t necessarily targeting the individual, but you do want to be aware of who you’re reaching out to at a company. They aren’t the final target, but they can act as the gatekeeper as well. What is your ideal lead and what do they look like from an abstract perspective?
2. Where Are They and What Do They Want?
Now that you know who you’re trying to work with, where can you find them? What do they want from a business like yours? You need to find where your leads are and know what they want (if anything). These factors go together since you may know where a bunch of ideal leads are, but it doesn’t matter if they don’t want or need anything from your business.
If you work well in an industry with heavy channel connections, shows and conventions can be a way to generate leads, but so can something like LinkedIn (which is also a lot cheaper). Where are your prospects and how can you get in touch with them? It doesn’t matter what system you have if you can’t get in touch with leads to actually get movement.
3. How Do You Contact Your Leads?
While we’ve touched on finding where leads are and how to potentially make the first contact, the whole point of establishing sales cadence is to establish a line of communication rather than a one-off outreach. You have to identify your prospect, then find a way to establish first contact, but how do you reach them and keep the cadence going? Some people want email only, others want to hear a person on a phone, and others are a complete mix. Who are you dealing with and what works to get in contact with them?
If your prospect’s primary contact is busy, how do you get their ear without wasting their time or making a negative situation for either of you? A phone call is more personal, but some people don’t want to deal with personal. Every relationship has boundaries, and you need to find a safe balance where you don’t push too hard and don’t hesitate too much either. Either find out the ideal communication method for your client, or try to anticipate it based on the persona you assume for the industry if nothing else.
4. How Much Should You Reach Out?
You want a cadence and not a cacophony of communications. Don’t hit your prospect up every single day (unless they’re receptive to it), but don’t let them go too long without reminding them of your existence. For most prospects, this is going to be once every few days or a few times a week. Sometimes it pays to start slow, then increase frequency, but sometimes the reverse is true. It can also help to vary up the methods of communication.
What works depends on who you’re working with. For most prospects, you’re going to spend around a couple weeks to a month with correspondence every few days. You want to ping the prospect and get their interest, not bug them or waste time calling when they aren’t available.
5. Moving On
There is a point where you need to either seal the deal or move on with your process. Once you’ve hit a dead end or gotten the client’s interest, you need to move to the next steps.
If a client isn’t interested, you want to send them a “breakup” message of some sorts. Something along the lines of: We’ve tried to contact you a few times, but haven’t heard back. Flesh this out with how your solution could be of help to their business and leave the door open in case they are interested or receptive down the line.
6. Iterative Improvement
Why didn’t your sales process work out? Ideally, you can ask your prospect, but this may alienate them down the line or they may ignore it. Another way to approach this is what did your new client like as a prospect, and what did they wish you did differently?
You aren’t necessarily looking for them to give exact suggestions, but what did they like and dislike about the general process? How does this correlate with other input from other prospects? Is there a specific message or step where prospects drop off? What can you do better the next time around and how can you test it?
Building a Script
The general process for building a sales cadence with your “script” is to focus on creating a scalable and reusable process rather than a singular script. Having a script or base to work off of just makes this process easier.
When establishing a sales cadence, you have 3 main steps. First, you need to get the prospect’s attention or reach out. Second, you need to build rapport and gauge their interest. Finally, you need to steer them to the funnel or let them go.
Introductions
The first cold interaction is about them. What do they do and how can you hook them? Establish your understanding of their business and dig deeper while introducing why they should spend time even talking to you. If you have multiple parallel processes, this can help you gauge what the individual and the business are like and provides a way to steer closer to what should work.
For instance, we may start a cold call with something like: Hey [name], we haven’t had the pleasure to meet yet, but can you give me 2 minutes to share something with you that could increase your revenue and profitability by 3x to 10x? This sort of wording gives them a reason to want to listen. How can you distill your service down to something accessible and advantageous for them?
Most businesses are looking to use a service to either improve revenue and profitability, or to reduce costs to enable the same. Who are you and how do you help them hit their goals? What challenges do they face and how can you address them? We follow up an introduction with something like: I am part of the expansion team for [your company]. We are a group of MSPs across North America who came to together to form a national footprint and we focus on three things: lead generation, sales and scale. We enable our members to grow top line revenue and profitability by 3 to 10 times in a short period of time.
Provide data and statistics for what makes you the right choice for them. You may touch on their specific business or you may work from a script or a form email. What works depends on the clients you’re hitting and what they’re expecting. A focus on you and how you help businesses like them can make for a more scalable process rather than focusing on each company from the very first introduction. You’re going to hear “no” a lot at this stage, so the easier you can make the initial touch, the more success you can get long-term for your lead generation.
Rapport
Once you establish a basis for rapport, you need to build interest in your service. How does your service fit into their business? How could your service fit their business? What could you do to make their business work better? Where are they potentially lacking? Transition from focusing on them to focusing on how you fit into their future. Evolve your strategy from expressing what you do to what you can do for them, and try to get commitment for either a call or a meeting, or a similar commitment.
This is where marketing collateral starts to get even more useful for the sales process. What do you have that showcases your successes and your specialties and how does it fit with the potential client? No one is expecting you to custom-make pieces for each individual prospect, but the right piece on hand can seal the deal. Get your one-page sheets ready about how you saved clients money or how you improved revenue. Start with the more general pieces tailored to what they mention (or you gather) as an obstacle and grow into what they mention as their pain points or in the direction they ask questions.
Get communication going at this stage. Get them involved and asking questions. The more the client is curious, the more likely you are to make it to the next step. What data or nice pieces do you have or can you make to forward this branch of the relationship? Take note of what the clients ask and have it ready for the next pipeline. This is also the stage to push the prospect a little harder to connect so you can try to seal the deal.
Moving Forward
We already talked about the breakup itself, but as you try to build rapport, you also want to set the stage to exit or to seal the deal. Target their pain points, target their issues, target the problems in the industry, but don’t preach to them. You want to push them to the naturalness of your relationship with their business without them feeling pushed. If that doesn’t work, you want to leave them with something to ponder and an open door to come back to.
Try to get commitment to move forward with the process if they seem receptive. Are they interested in your offerings or is there a specific offering they’re curious about? What would it take to get them to sign? This is the stage to get a little more aggressive so long as you don’t get too aggressive.
Leave the ball in their court if things aren’t working. It can help to push potential times in the future to reconnect, but this tends to work best if the prospect has shown some interest so far. Leave them with some food for thought and wait a healthy amount of time (several quarters or even a year) to revisit the prospect unless there’s a reason to be more aggressive.
Technology’s Role In Sales Cadence
Technology facilitates the communication itself more often than not, but how can you use technology to do more? Are you sending emails out directly or are you automating this process to have more insight into where the process works or doesn’t? It’s not enough to measure a response or not.
Is your prospect opening your email? Are they reading some and not others? What is working in the process and what isn’t? Are you controlling for these factors and fixing them as you can codify the issues? Modern marketing platforms provide these tools in various formats, but you need to make sense of the data. Analytics don’t mean much without an understanding of the implications of each data point and an understanding of how they’re measured.
Are you using Hubspot or Mailchimp? Do you use an email list through a CRM or are you keeping it in Excel? Some things work, but they can inhibit you from reaching your potential. We know in tech that: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” just doesn’t cut it in most technical enterprises, so why should it apply with your sales process that leverages technology? How can you enhance your process to shave off the inconvenient bits to make it more scalable?
How Sales Cadence Can Work for Your MSP
Most people who start an MSP aren’t business types. It’s hard to run a technical business with only business and sales knowledge, but more than a few MSPs have made it off of a good technical basis and word of mouth. The problem is, while you can subsist with this method, you hit a wall for growth and scalability.
Many MSPs join groups like The 20 just for the sales and marketing offerings (though our technical offerings are a great hook too). We are able to grow because we can keep selling. You may have enough clients now, but what happens if an industry crashes, an owner sells, or similar? If you aren’t continuously adding prospects, you’re probably going to shrink and hit a less ideal equilibrium sooner than later.
Sales cadence is about acknowledging that a sale for a “big item” isn’t necessarily a single transaction, and a way to scale this process and make it reproducible. Sales scripts are popular because they work, but sales cadence takes this to the next level. You aren’t reciting a script, you’re touching the prospect in certain ways, seeing what happens, and using this to grow and improve your process.
What are you doing to ensure your MSP succeeds? What are you doing to make sure that you have an exit plan when the time comes? Do you want to run each bit of your business forever, or do you want to be able to hand it off? The simpler you can make your business needs in terms of their time and effort costs, the more you can focus on scaling the rest of the business. Even if you don’t feel the need to grow, being able to have a more results-oriented process should the need arise can pay dividends to your security. What are you doing to establish a better sales process to ensure your future success?
Tap our expertise to grow your MSP business.
Most MSPs never reach $1M in recurring revenue. With The 20 MSP Blueprint, you’re
able to grow top-line revenue and profitability by 3-10X in a short period.
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Meet Stephen Yeoh of Un1teee!
Tell us a little about your MSP…
Un1teee is located in Thousand Oaks, California. We were established in 2009 and are a staff of 4. Un1teee is focused on dental practices and CMMC compliance.
How long have you been a member of The 20?
We’ve been a member since January of 2021.
Why did your MSP originally look to partner with The 20?
We were looking for a way to scale without staffing up and it was a bonus when The 2o announced the marketing program.
Tell us about the biggest change in your business since joining The 20.
The biggest change has been being able to tap in to the community to avoid making mistakes. The marketing material and guidance is also very helpful.
What do you like most about being a member of The 20?
The community and support.
What do you think is the most important quality necessary for success?
Several qualities – customer service, integrity, relationships, perseverance, reliability, be able to pivot quickly
What are your biggest business challenges?
Marketing/Sales. Scaling up to provide onsite support.
What are your areas of focus for 2021?
Dental practices and CMMC compliance in the LA area from Calabasas along the 101 to Santa Barbara. We are also looking at building out automation to be efficient.
What advice would you share with an MSP looking to scale their business?
Consider The 20 – it adds a whole new dimension in terms of options to scale.
What book are you currently reading?
Mainly documentation and training videos – buried in learning the new stack.
Favorite blogs/podcasts
Interested in becoming a member like Un1teee? Click here for more information!
Save the date for VISION 2021 – The MSP Event of the Year!
VISION 2021 provides two days of compelling speakers, educational sessions, and networking focused on business best practices, thought leadership, and growth. VISION brings together technology industry leaders and professionals from around the world for three days of non-stop learning and networking. Hear from industry experts and learn proven, results-generating strategies to grow and scale your IT business.
Join world-class MSPs and ITSPs for 2 days of non-stop learning and a wealth of insightful sessions. The conference is supercharged with content catered to every member of your MSP team, from tech to exec.
Connect with IT professionals and experts from around the world. Exchange best practices and share tips, tricks, and secrets for success with a powerful network of MSPs.
2020 was a tough year for a lot of people and 2021 is all about the comeback. Our theme for VISION this year is The Year of the Return.
Register NOW!
Meet Tom Schrader of Competitive Arts!
Tell us a little about your MSP…
Competitive Arts Inc is located in Green Bay, WI. Founded in 2005, we have been serving the Green Bay and Fox River Valley area for over 15 years.
How long have you been a member of The 20?
We’ve been a member of the 20 for about a year and a half.
Why did your MSP originally look to partner with The 20?
Joining The 20 was a very easy decision. For years, we had grown organically through nothing more than referrals. When we decided we wanted to grow at a faster pace, it just made sense to join The 20 so that we could bring scale to the technical side and marketing expertise to the business side.
Tell us about the biggest change in your business since joining The 20.
Since joining The 20, we have grown the depth of our relationships with our existing clients. The pool of products we access and the increased knowledge pool across a fantastic membership base has taken us from being a trusted resource for our clients to an invaluable resource.
What do you like most about being a member of The 20?
The sense of community we get as a member of The 20 is inestimable. Being able to get advice from other members on all aspects of running a business is phenomenal and more than a little unique.
What do you think is the most important quality necessary for success?
I believe the most important quality when striving for success is persistence. There will be events that can be hard to push through, but the persistence to push past is how success is achieved.
What are your biggest business challenges?
The biggest challenge for us will always be embracing change. Whether we are talking about adoption of industry standards or business practices, adaptation is the path to moving forward. The challenge is in deciding to not sit back and continue on the same way as in the past.
What are your areas of focus for 2021?
For Competitive Arts, 2021 will continue to focus on growth. Growing the business helps bring about new challenges and these challenges keep us sharp and let us provide for our existing clients in ways that may not have been evident previously.
What advice would you share with an MSP looking to scale their business?
No one is an expert in everything. Experience is the most expensive way to buy anything. Rely on trusted advisors who have been there and overcame.
What book are you currently reading?
Business Made Simple by Donald Miller and From a Certain Point of View (a collection of Star Wars short stories)
Favorite blogs/podcasts
WTF with Marc Maron, Monday Morning Podcast with Bill Burr, Revisionist History with Malcolm Gladwell
Interested in becoming a member like Competitive Arts? Click here for more information!
Crystal McFerran of The 20 Featured on CRN’s 2021 Women of the Channel List
Full Press Release
Plano, Texas, May 10th, 2021 — The 20 MSP, a leading business development group for managed service providers (MSPs), today announced that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Crystal McFerran, Chief Marketing Officer, to the highly respected Women of the Channel list for 2021. This annual list recognizes the unique strengths, vision and achievements of female leaders in the IT channel. The 2021 Women of the Channel list acknowledges women from all over the IT channel, including vendors, distributors and solution providers.
The women honored on this year’s list pushed forward with comprehensive business plans, marketing initiatives and other innovative ideas to support their partners and customers, helping them through the uncertainty brought on by the global COVID-19 pandemic. CRN celebrates these exceptional women for their leadership, dedication and channel advocacy.
McFerran has been critical in her leadership of The 20’s strategic planning, demand generation activities, and go-to-market execution for managed service provider members. She is an accomplished marketing professional with over 16 years of experience in B2B marketing, demand generation, marketing communications, lead nurturing, content strategy and multichannel marketing for the IT industry.
“CRN’s 2021 Women of the Channel list acknowledges accomplished, influential women whose dedication, hard work, and leadership accelerate channel growth,” said Blaine Raddon, CEO of The Channel Company. “We are proud to honor them for their many accomplishments and look forward to their continued contributions to the IT channel.”
“I am extremely proud to be part of this list and to be recognized alongside many talented, hardworking, incredible women,” McFerran said. “I want to thank CRN for this honor and look forward to representing the women in the channel.”
The 2021 Women of the Channel list will be featured in CRN Magazine on May 10th and online at www.CRN.com/WOTC.
About The 20 MSP
The 20 is an exclusive business development group for Managed Service Providers (MSP) aimed at dominating and revolutionizing the IT industry with its standardized all-in-one approach. The 20’s robust RMM, PSA, and documentation platform ensures superior service for its MSPs’ clients utilizing their completely US-based Help Desk and Network Operations Center. Extending beyond world-class tools and processes, The 20 touts a proven sales model, a community of industry-leaders, and ultimate scalability.
For more information, visit https://www.the20.com.
Follow The 20: Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
About The Channel Company
The Channel Company enables breakthrough IT channel performance with our dominant media, engaging events, expert consulting and education, and innovative marketing services and platforms. As the channel catalyst, we connect and empower technology suppliers, solution providers, and end users. Backed by more than 30 years of unequalled channel experience, we draw from our deep knowledge to envision innovative new solutions for ever-evolving challenges in the technology marketplace. www.thechannelcompany.com
Follow The Channel Company: Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
© 2021. CRN is a registered trademark of The Channel Company, LLC. All rights reserved.
Meet Bianca Rochell, Sr. Tier 1 Support Desk Technician
Bianca Rochell quickly became a tremendous asset to the entire team at The 20. Read below to find out more about Rochell.
What do you do here at The 20?
Support Desk Tech
Describe The 20 in three words…
Fun Tech Company
As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be and do everything I am capable of doing, accomplishing as much as possible.
What’s the most challenging thing about your job?
The most challenging thing about the job is not being able to help every person like I would like to. Sometimes, we just have to let go and let someone else help, but I love finding resolutions.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Owning a successful business
What do you think is the most important quality necessary for success?
The most important quality of your success is within you. When we step out of our own way and let go of the fears that keep us from being great, we can accomplish amazing things and inspire others to do so.
What do you like most about The 20?
I love being able to dress casually and having a pretty laid back environment.
What do you like to do in your spare time? / What are your hobbies?
I love playing, producing, and mixing music, practicing yoga, learning as much as I can, and spending time with loved ones.
Where are you going on your next vacation?
Somewhere with see-through turquoise water and white sand
What’s your top life hack?
My top life hack is staying balanced and aligned with focus towards forward movement and daily growth.
Interested in working with Bianca at The 20? We’re hiring! Check out our Careers page for more info.
Does the thought of a Zoom webinar bore you? What about a virtual happy hour or some other event which more often than not just feels forced and awkward? It would be a lie to say that something doesn’t change when you move an event from being physical to being digital, but that doesn’t mean the change is always for the worse. Digital events require someone to facilitate them and keep them on the rails enough to not fall into chaos, but organic enough they don’t get stiff.
When you facilitate an event, you have to take into account the presenters (who’s speaking, which may include the organizer), the audience (who’s listening), and the environment (where the event takes place). You’re not selling out on tickets to a death metal concert at a retirement home, and you’re not putting on a concert outdoors near an airport. The big difference between a physical and digital event is the control you have over how the audience can interact and your control over the environment.
A fun environment where people can interact even if the presenters or hosts aren’t that interesting is going to be more memorable than a stuffy event which was just okay. An amazing lecture in a drab, boring room is just as exciting to the right audience as a party in a fun environment. Each factor is important, but not every factor is relevant for every scenario.
What Makes a Webinar Exciting?
A webinar doesn’t really have an environment associated with it. Your presenters and your audience are sitting in their homes, in a cubicle, or in an office (alone or with a group). Each person is in their own bubble away from others (as a whole). You lose control of the environment which means you have to more than make up for it with the content and targeting the right audience.
A webinar is exciting when the content is relevant and the audience can connect with others (be they the presenters or each other). Exciting content in the wrong package for the wrong audience is just as bad as boring content which is dressed to impress. There has to be the right kind of energy to excite the audience and keep the whole show moving.
Traditional conferences and master classes are about getting access to information, but also about interacting with the people who hold said information. Everyone is going to have a different level of understanding going in. You don’t go to a master class to just listen, you’re trying to get an answer to something. The lecturer may answer that something, but if they don’t, you’re going to want to interact and ask.
An exciting webinar is going to work within the confines of what it is. You can’t provide the same environment so you have to keep the show moving. You need to maintain the energy, and you need to make it interactive enough that people don’t feel they may as well watch it on YouTube.
Staying on Track
Your webinar is like a chemistry experiment, even if you control for every part of the process, things can (and probably will) still go a different direction. A good chemist will plan first, but react accordingly when the reaction doesn’t go as planned. There’s not much you can do if the raw ingredients are wrong though.
A good organizer is going to help keep the participants on track, and the audience engaged. When an event is interactive, it runs the risk of being derailed down line after line of tangent. Many organizers cut out the interactiveness or otherwise limit it, which can dampen the energy of the whole event though. The event goes from trying to be a digital conference to a plain lecture. While this can work with some scenarios, it ruins the experience for others.
To stay on track, plan for interactions and plan for questions; have multiple lines you can take a topic without it diverging from a planned direction. What questions do you anticipate from the material which you’re presenting? Get a feel for what would be most likely to come up and prepare a way to address each possibility without letting the webinar drift off course.
Have a general plan, but don’t try to plan every single detail. Prepare for what the webinar covers, and prepare for where it can go. If you plan too rigidly, you’ll choke the life out of your webinar when the wrong question or wrong contribution pops up. Moving the interactions to the end can help, but what happens when you have multiple contributors building off of each other? What about with a multi-part series?
Retaining the Human Element
Unless your webinar is a lecture series, you need to retain some form of interactivity to keep the human element intact. People don’t just visit conferences to listen and learn, they also go to interact and mingle, to make new connections and network. The nature of events changes when they go digital, so the nature of how you foster this human element has to change with it.
A digital event is binary for interactions, either you’re able to interact or you’re not, while a physical event tends to be more analog. When in a physical place, you’re going to have more opportunities to bump into someone and get talking. The shared space and the shared goal leads to more natural ad hoc connections. You can’t easily offer this in digital events (though people try with things like Second Life or other VR solutions), but you can offer something different which can scratch the same itch.
Involving the Audience
Personalize certain sessions, give your audience an opportunity to talk to you or your fellow presenters and participants. It doesn’t have to be throughout the entire event, but it should cover at least a portion. One way to consider handling this is to have multiple groups of presenters which can round robin open sessions. This provides the opportunity to split up the audience into smaller groups which can be more involved with the presenters.
You don’t get the same effect you get with an in person event, but you give a chance for people to interact with their presenters and ask the pertinent questions they may not ask (or get the chance to ask) in front of a huge group. Done right, you can put people from similar industries together or some other tiering to provide “group sessions”. Open group channels which are open at certain times can also spurn camaraderie, but it can also be a recipe for disaster. You have to know your audience to know how these solutions will work out.
How can you facilitate involvement with the audience and for the audience? More personalized access to presenters can be a huge boon, but only if you know everyone will prepare accordingly. The subject your webinar covers and the industry (or field) its in will affect what is going to work. If you’re in something like IT, large groups are usually going to be a bit awkward in person, but smaller groups may open up.
Larger groups online tend to be more awkward than larger groups in person. You can whisper to a person next to you at an event, but it’s harder digitally. Keep this in mind when planning for a webinar with any kind of interaction.
Putting It All Together
A webinar needs to have a human element or else it loses its energy. This human element is going to require interaction and flexibility. Keep in mind, you don’t have all of the same resources you would be able to rely on with a physical event. How can you facilitate an organic experience for your audience through a different medium?
The answer to this question is going to depend on the purpose of the webinar and your industry or field. Why are you putting on a webinar? What is its purpose and what is your audience looking to get from it?
Once you can answer these questions, you can work in ways to prepare for the unexpected and make your webinar an interactive experience more in line with a physical event rather than something which may as well be a YouTube lecture. Allow questions and input which will provide value to the audience member asking, and to the whole group.
People will be coming in at different knowledge levels and with different understandings of the topic. Give them a way to get what they need at their level without running off into countless tangents. Prepare the material so that you can move naturally down the path you’re given without planning so rigidly you can’t get a little off course.
Don’t just try to open the flood gates on your first rodeo. Build up to a more interactive approach in stages rather than just trying to jump in head first. A truly open session is going to be chaos unless its planned for. As you find ways to facilitate a higher energy and more interactive rapport between your presenters and your audience, you’ll find ways to shape your sessions around what a good presenter would do within the medium at play rather than just trying to turn a physical event into an online one.
