How many times have you seen or heard all those TV and radio commercials for Fuze Meeting, GoToMeeting, Webex and all the other web conferencing solutions talking about reducing travel costs by conducting sales meetings remotely? True, travel budgets are flat or being cut, and some of our clients have gone so far as to put a temporary freeze on ALL travel. And for many, web conferencing is nothing new. Enterprise sales and marketing teams have being using these solutions for more than a decade.
When you dig a level deep, however, all we’re really talking about here is presenting slides remotely. At least in person you have the luxury of watching your audience clicking away at their Blackberries and iPhones or even falling asleep – the first symptom of PowerPoint Poisoning. At least then you can start waving your arms around and making funny shapes on the wall with your laser pointer to regain everyone’s attention. When you’re remote you can’t stop people from switching to other applications, or worse, switching to a headset and walking down to the cafeteria for lunch. All they have to do is say “uh huh” once every few minutes.
Using simple web conferencing software and a revolutionary digital paper solution called PAPERSHOW, you can easily simulate an in-person whiteboarding experience at an incredibly affordable price (~$175 compared to a tablet PC at $1,000+). This can make a big difference on your return-on-sales: you won’t need to travel but you can still conduct a fully-interactive sales call remotely while retaining your prospect’s attention. We’ve found that while 50% of web conferencing viewers intermittently leave a remotely-shared PowerPoint slide presentation to access other applications (email for example), the “attrition” rate is less than 10% using the visual storytelling approach with digital paper. Why? Chances are your prospects and customers have never seen web conferencing used this way. We often hear, “wow, what are you using to do that?”
BTW, although the web meeting folks have been talking about their ”whiteboarding” capabilities for years, these rudimentary features are rarely used because the user can only use their mouse. Having true digital paper at your fingertips is a completely different experience, for both the presenter and the audience.
The other advantage digital paper has over slides is you can annotate the whiteboard with the feedback and input of the customer (using a different color perhaps) and then automatically create a PDF file of the final whiteboard image that you can directly email to your customer from within the PAPERSHOW application. If you haven’t quite cured your addiction to slides, PAPERSHOW provides an option to annotate slides in real-time using the digital pen.
One last thing. Just because you’re using digital paper to whiteboard doesn’t mean you can just “wing it”. You still need to follow some basic best practices, as we discuss here.
You can learn more about PAPERSHOW at www.papershow.com and can purchase it at our cost by clicking on the “store” tab above. (http://store.whiteboardselling.com).
Tags: death by powerpoint, digital paper, GoToMeeting, PAPERSHOW, powerpoint presentations, remote meetings, remote selling, remote whiteboarding, sales presentations, web meetings, Webex, whiteboard
