As a product manager, you will be called on to present a number of webinars. Webinars are a great tool to help you reach out to a large audience and showcase the benefits of your product. However, it is also very easy for your audience to easily lose interest in your content. After all, a webinar is just a PowerPoint accompanied by your voice. This leads to a number of problems:
- They cannot see you: and therefore, they don’t get to see your body language or the non-verbal cues that are such an important part of person to person communications. This makes it important that you deliver the message more effectively than you would have had you met them in person
- You cannot see them: you do not know if they are listening to you or if they have put the webinar on and gone out to grab a coffee. You don’t know if they are listening to you intently or playing with their cellphones. And given that you are not face to face, it is very easy for them to tune out without any guilt
- You don’t listen to yourself: as a presenter, given the pressure to deliver your message, it is very tough for you to listen to yourself. You do hear your own voice – but it is really hard to listen, analyze, and speak. This raises the risk of your voice becoming a monotone – and that can be both soporific and make it easy for people to lose interest in what you’re saying
So, how do you engage the audience? How do you ensure that they listen to you and engage with the messages that you have for them? Here are a few simple steps:
- Have something valuable for your audience: Give them reason to listen. Remember, they are taking time out of their busy work schedules to listen to you. So, don’t make it an advertisement for your product. Use the opportunity to give them real value. Include statistics, facts, tips, tricks, methods that will help them meet the objectives that they seek to achieve from your webinar
- Keep it the right length: Do not overbook or under-book time. The best webinars are between 30 minutes to 50 minutes long with time for questions. Do not schedule longer webinars. And see that you respect everyone’s time. Don’t book off 60 minutes for content that needs 20 minutes, and please don’t go over time!
- Build in stories, anecdotes, and examples: People love to hear real life stories or examples. Remember to build them into your talk track. If you are talking about product functionality, talk about real world scenarios where it will be useful. Talk about stories of the challenges people face without such functionality. Give people a reason to connect.
- Use humor and questions: To prevent your voice from being a monotone, remember to build in ideas into your talk track that will help you naturally modulate your voice. Build in humor. Talk about something funny related to your topic. And please, no politically incorrect or embarrassing humor please. If you don’t know how to be funny, don’t try this. A bad joke or an incorrect one is worse than none at all. If you can do a poll, it’s great. If you cannot, at least ask questions that can get them thinking – and then answer it for them. For example, you might want to say, “Let me give you a moment to think…how long, do you think, the product needs to get this accomplished? 2 minutes? 5 minutes? Well. You’ll be surprised to know that it only needs ….” Get the picture?
- Don’t read off a script: If this is one of your first few webinars or if you find yourself searching for words in day to day conversations, it may be a good idea to prepare a script. But for heaven’s sake, don’t read off a script. It sounds preachy, and lame. And, your audience will lose you in an instant. If you do have to keep a script, use that as talking points – but speak naturally. That will help get the right intonations in your voice and will also make you come across as honest, spontaneous, and genuine.
A webinar is a show…and you’ve got to be a good artist to pull it off successfully. There is very little that you can control – not the topic, your own voice, your accent, or even your audience. Trust me, I don’t love my voice. I would have loved the timbre of my voice to be deeper …and would have liked to sound older and more firmly reassuring than I do. But then, these are things you don’t control. And yes, talking about what your software does for the IT guy isn’t the most attractive thing either. But then, there lies the real challenge.
Over the past year, I have done over 25 webinars…and each time, I’ve tried to use the mantras above to make sure that I do a good job. It seems to have paid off…the attendance from the group is high and growing…and people come back with nice things to say. Try these tips and let me know if they work. And if you think there is something that I’ve missed and can do to make my webinars better, feel free to suggest them by writing a quick comment to this blog post.
