Tim Minton
Okay, hi, everyone. I’m Tim. And this is Dean. And this is our third and sort of final webinar in this series. So there’s a fourth webinar in two weeks, but that’s 100% pure Q&A, where Dean has agreed to answer any and all questions that you have for him. But in today’s webinar, we’re talking about what goes into making a great webinar. So welcome, Dean. It’s nice to see you again.
How are you?
Dean Waye
Oh, good, excellent.
Tim Minton
Good. Okay. So last week, we talked a bit about the thoughts and the feelings that a B2B audience should experience plus the kind of the order they should experience them in. And today, we’re going to kind of show the structure that the presenter uses to build that message for the audience with the ultimate goal that they respond to the call to action dead.
Dean Waye
Yeah. Okay. So last week, one of the Q&A questions was, did you need to be a speech writer or a copywriter to keep an audience’s attention? And the answer to that is absolutely not. You can rely on like the structure that we’re going to talk about today to keep the audience engaged. So today, we’re going to talk about the structure, which is basically wrapped around the safety question and all the little questions that go into the safety question.
Tim Minton
Got it? And the safety question is something that you mentioned last time, and you talked about it, maybe for the people that are just joining, can you remind us what this is?
Dean Waye
Yeah, in B2B, or ultimately answering one question that the audience will have in their head? And if you don’t get past that question, or that objective, you don’t make any further progress on that question is, because everyone in B2B that you’re talking to is an employee, usually of some kind? How do I know it’s safe for me to vouch for you in here at my company, right? You don’t win a sale? By answering the safety question for them. But you will lose the sale, if you don’t get past that hurdle, you have to be one of the safer options, you have to be a valid choice. If you look too dangerous, or flaky or disruptive, you’re probably not going to make it through the corporate process and ultimately get a signed contract.
Tim Minton
That’s right. It’s the blocker. You have to get there. But let’s begin. So I’m curious, how should people start their webinars?
Dean Waye
Okay, so they definitely want to start with a gap. Right? And that means that you’re answering the question, what is that? So I always give people a template for what the gap should be, it’s usually one of three options. So you’re either saying, everyone thought X was true, turns out x was never true. Or you’re saying X was true, but something recently changed. And now x is no longer true. And if you don’t make the change, you’re going to fall behind? Or x is true. No question x is true, but not for you, you’re special, your company, your industry, something is different about you. And so you’re not seeing success, by you know, doing x because x is never gonna work for you, you’re different somehow. Right? And then, so you’re showing them the gap. The idea behind the gap is you’re showing them that you understand some of their reality, and then you break that reality. And then you’re gonna show them like, what their new reality is, and how you’re sort of going to shortcut them to a positive future. And then from there, you’re going into, like, what’s I totally lost my train of thought there. What are we talking about?
Tim Minton
The gap and how that can bring us into the positive future, essentially.
Dean Waye
Right? So you’re doing that? And then you’re answering the question. The second question you’d go into after what is that is? How do I know I can trust you? And what you tell me. And the idea behind there is, that’s when you introduce yourself. Last time, we talked about introducing yourself, and how I said, I spent a lot more time explaining how to introduce yourself than you would ever actually
Tim Minton
spend introducing yourself. Five minutes on,
Dean Waye
we spend a lot of time on the introduction, right. But, you know, that’s kind of how it needs to work. And then and then, so I won’t spend any time about how to introduce yourself, we covered all that in way too much depth last time. And then the next one that you’re looking for next question that the audience would have that you’re answering is what’s in it for us? You know, like you’re talking about, you know, what are they going to get?
Tim Minton
Yep, but maybe before we go there, Dean, can we get back to the positive future so you explaining making the gap A short read, there’s something, you know, what is this? I need to figure this out. But what is the positive feature? If we could just go a bit deeper there?
Dean Waye
Yeah. Okay. So that’s a good point. The gap is about explaining to them whether they, they either know that they already know that there’s a negative present, right. And we said before, if the President’s not negative, there’s no problem to solve. So, but even if they don’t know or kind of understand or don’t understand your angle on what their negative present is, that’s what the gap does, like it breaks their current reality, it tells them that something is no longer true, or it’s not going to work for them. And so that’s the negative present. And then of course, you introduce yourself. And then what’s in it for us, is where you’re starting to paint a positive future for them. So throughout the course of the structure, that we’re going to talk about the seven questions, we start with a negative present, which was the gap. And then we introduce ourselves, and then we talked about the positive future, which is basically everything can work out really great, if you, you know, will shortcut you this product, or this process, or my company will shortcut you to the positive future, if you give us money. And if you buy from us, and then eventually down the road, we’re not there yet. But down the road, we’ll call forward to that, as we’ll talk about the negative future as well, we’re not gonna spend a lot of time in any webinar on the negative future. But just towards the end around the call to action, we talked about the negative future. But that’s what the positive future is, it’s like, you’re in a negative present, you could be in this happy place. I can shortcut you there. Or we can chalk it up to there.
Tim Minton
Right. And last week, he said something, which I thought was one of the more interesting points, whatever it was about, basically, whatever the audience’s problem is, it’s not their fault, or not completely their fault. And he said, this is important when you establish these kind of negative features and positive features, right?
Dean Waye
Yeah, nobody’s gonna know audience is going to hang around, while a stranger, even a stranger that they might, you know, think has a nice title sort of breaks them about how they effed up, or their company effed up or was stupid or wasn’t didn’t look forward or for any other reason, right. And it’s their fault. And, and now, like, sit, sit tight for 30 to 50 minutes, while I talk to you about why it’s like all your fault, no one’s going to do that. So there’s always some external reason why they’re in their negative present. And that’s not their fault. And so you make a point, don’t have to spend a lot of time on it. But you make a point, showing that it’s not their fault, or entirely their fault. Where they are. And instead, it’s a, you know, I mostly deal in tech and in tech you deal with, we usually, it’s usually it didn’t exist before, this problem couldn’t even be solved cost effectively, a solution literally didn’t exist, because we invented this, right? There’s always like some reason that you can show that, you know, this trend needed to reach a certain spot or the technology, the destruction needed to mature to a certain point, or no one thought this was even necessary till now. But there’s always some external reason. And you always point out that it’s not the audience’s fault that they’re in their negative presence.
Tim Minton
Yeah, yeah, it seems so simple when you describe it, but very important, as you mentioned, and then after this, so you set the stage, this is when you get to really geek out over the details and the features of your product, essentially, is that right?
Dean Waye
Yeah. So after you start, after you’ve sort of established the negative present with the gap, and you’ve introduced yourself, and why you’re the expert that should be talking to them about this right now. And then you talk about the negative present, then you start talking about, like the positive future we talked about was what’s in it for us. This is by the way, it’s worth mentioning. This is benefits, we talked about benefits. First, we talked, then we talked about features, but yeah, then we move into the detailed part, the part that’s existed for as long as webinars have existed. And that is how does it work. And that’s when you get to go into detail and geek out about all your stuff, and all your features and a lot kind of stuff. And a couple of things to remember about the How Does It Work section? I mean, it’s usually at least half sometimes two thirds of the entire length of a webinar is the How Does It Work section. A couple of things to remember inside that section is first, your goal here is too and I think we mentioned this last week, but just to be clear, your goal, people think oh, yeah, my goal in the in the geeking out section and how does it work? Is it just layer detail after detail feature after feature after feature, I’ll show all the screens, blah, blah, blah, right? And you’re just we’ve done a lot of work up to this point with the structure to frame the audience’s, you know, perspective and mentality about what you’re going to say in a certain way. And so you don’t want to just beat them to death with the other stuff, is your goal is to make them think or believe or you know, and by that I’m not trying to say you’re not being manipulative, I’m saying that you’re just being transparent. We’re going to show you details. We’re going to open the kimono. We’re going to show you what’s involved in this kind of stuff. We might even show you workflows and stuff. They should come away with the impression that okay, this is kind of complicated. it the way that this the way that my negative present, you know, is today and the way I get to the positive future, and they’re gonna shortcut me to it. I, that’s, it’s not worth building myself, it’s not worth doing myself, it’s complicated. These folks have done all the thinking on this, they’ve done all the work on it, you even want to make sure that you include one, sometimes two slides or, you know, sessions, little bits inside, how does it work that will slightly overwhelm the audience. So it doesn’t, it shouldn’t look so complex, that a human being couldn’t understand it. But by all means, if you’ve got a complex slide a diagram or workflow or project plan, or whatever, you know, this is the time to show it, you want to slightly overwhelm the audience.
Tim Minton
And this is describing what’s in it for us essentially, what you mentioned earlier. Yeah,
Dean Waye
this is the reason most people mean, no one showed up to your webinar so that you could talk to them about the gap. No one showed up about the positive future, probably very much with what’s in it for us, they showed up to learn how does it work? Well, the change in the structure is it used to be you’d introduce yourself, that would take like a minute, or four or five, if you’re like really going to want to bore them. And then the entire rest of the thing until you get to the Q&A would be how does it work. And that almost never drives adoption of a call to action, it almost never results in anything other than a better-informed audience who don’t do anything with the information you gave them. So then the other thing to remember, around the How Does It Work section besides, you know, providing the details and slightly overwhelming them and letting them know that this is complicated, but we’ve done all the work and we’ve done all the thinking, and you can just have our solution for money is to either the halfway point, you’ll get a feel for either the halfway point or the two thirds point is when you do your big pivot. Okay, and you’ll either do a deep dive pivot, or you’ll do a horizontal pivot.
Tim Minton
Okay. And we mentioned that I think in episode one, is when we talked about this, okay, a question here is like, how do you make sure that the audience is interested or excited in what you say in Pivot, because obviously, you’re taking them down a road, and then suddenly changing directions.
Dean Waye
So the pivots job is to give the audience a bit of a break, mentally, right. And it’s very similar to if you think about it, if you’ve ever gone to a theme park, and you get in line, and you can see, you know, where the where you think the line would end, and then you get there, and it turns out, you need to turn left. And then there’s another part of the line that you haven’t done yet, or in doctor’s waiting rooms, right? They’ll people who have not yet been admitted, go in one place, and then there’s a different waiting room, once you’ve been signed in, and I like and they keep you know, we really like change an hour, an hour as humans, our little meter, or how long we’ve been waiting, or what we’re doing or how long we’ve endured something is very susceptible to interruption just by changing the venue, or putting us in a different room or a different part of the line. So the pivots job is to basically be that change into another part of the line or the other part of the waiting room. And you either pick your most popular feature, or the thing that you want to highlight, or something that, you know, the audience might not be interested in yet, but you know, there’s a great story behind it. And so that’s your deep dive pivot, you go in like you guys think, okay, this is x, you know, seems kind of normal seems like every other companies feature x. Turns out, it’s not every other companies feature x. And I’ve got a great story to talk to you about this. And then you do a deep dive in that one feature. And, and so you’ve changed the waiting room that they’re in, but you’re still educating them, or you do the horizontal pivot instead of the deep dive, which is, and so you thought you were in this lie. Now we’re gonna move you to this line where you can kind of see the other line, but it’ll be it’ll give you a different perspective on how other customers are using the feature, or how, how we do it differently than everyone else, or how we discovered or stumbled on something that other companies are using our software in ways we didn’t even anticipate. And if that happens to me, since I started giving away the structure last month, people have been getting back to me, they’re using it in daylong meeting facilitation, they’re using it in seven minute video sales letters, they’re using it in all kinds of ways, and telling me that, you know, it’s been iterated through, it’s been tested, and the structure works great, whether you’d like to stretch it out or shrink it down. But, you know, again, customers will find uses for stuff that you didn’t even use, that’s a great horizontal pivot.
Tim Minton
Okay, okay, that’s super clear. So I think that really describes it, how does it work section? So then the question becomes, you know, what’s next? What’s after? How does it work?
Dean Waye
Right. So, after you’ve done the How Does It Work section, that’s when you move into like, the negative future, you know, What’s, what’s gonna go wrong? If are, you know, what’s the what happens if I don’t do this? Right? Right? And so that’s when you’re painting, you know, and again, you don’t you’re not trying to do fear mongering, you’re not trying to scare people you’re trying to like, show them. In contrast, you’re sort of bookend. So if you think about it as a book ending, there’s the How does it work part in the middle, right, leading into that was the positive future. And then coming out of it is the negative future. So like, I’ve shown you what the what success looks like, I’ve given you the details on like, what’s involved in it. And now, like, let’s talk about what happens if you don’t normally in B2B, this comes down to some sort of problem with scarcity. So you’re losing money every day, until you implement a solution like this, or your competitors are continuing to gain market share or move ahead of you, until you know, implement a solution like this. We schedule these tough in B2B. And so you normally need some sort of internal kind of scarcity.
Tim Minton
Yeah, we talked about this last time, it’s not like in the consumer world. And you have to, you have to create that reason of why essentially, they have to move forward. And,
Dean Waye
yeah, yeah, I mean, sometimes you’re lucky, in a way, sometimes you’re in an industry where some kind of external scarcity already exists. But generally speaking, you cannot say, you know, we, you should buy this, now, we’re only going to sell it for like X number of more months, and then it goes off the market, right? It’s not an airline seat. Companies don’t buy things that they don’t think they can also buy tomorrow. And next month, and next year, companies are very big on continuity. And you also can’t do time scarcity, for the most part, with B2B because you can’t say like, and I think we mentioned this, either last week, or in the first session, is you can’t say to a company, if you buy by the end of this quarter, you know, by the end of q3, or the end of the year, then you get like this discount, they don’t care, they’re going to come back next year, and ask for the discount, and you’re gonna give it to him, because if you don’t a competitor is gonna give it. And so there are some industries or some situations where you do have external scarcity in B2B. So if you’re an agriculture, the growing season, obviously is going to drive that, if you’re in Canada, winter is coming, some things you just can’t do in the winter, or don’t want to do in a Canadian winter, you know, or like a Northern European winter or in Russia. But for the most part, there is no extra. There’s no external scarcity that you can rely on. So you need sort of an internally focused scarcity. But you do need to take like a minute or two and point out like, you know, guys, don’t let don’t just let this go. Right. It’s easy to not do anything, but don’t let this go. Because something is happening. If you don’t take action, either, like things are getting worse for you. Little by little by little like slicing the salami, or else competitors are making gains, and you’re not keeping up are getting ahead of them.
Tim Minton
Yeah. How do they get out of the negative future? Yeah. Okay, so we have how it works than the negative future, which makes sense. So the last section then must be the call to action.
Dean Waye
Right, the CTA, the
Tim Minton
CTA, the most exciting fire for a lot of people. But my question I like to ask it this way is, what do people get wrong about the CTA,
Dean Waye
people get a lot of stuff wrong about calls to action; they get the call to action is a train wreck. For most B2B webinars, man, it’s like, I probably attend more webinars than anyone else, you know. And, like, it’s, it’s, it’s not, it’s not a productive experience, for the most part, because everyone just kind of does the same thing, which is all default type stuff. No one ever, you know, they’ll put in a lot of structure, and they get to the call to action, they kind of bolted on at the end, and it feels so different. It’s, it’s usually the only pivot in the entire session is the pivot into the pitch or the Q&A. I mean, the CTA, and people are like, they’re awful about it. But I’d be there are some things that you should stop doing, right? Even if you even if you never perfect calls to action. If you stop doing these, you’ll immediately see a better result. The first thing is people are very vague. And this is the worst, worst offense. They’re very vague on their call to actions. Their call to action will just be like, hey, guys, so like that’s all you know, that’s, that’s my presentation, please visit our website, www dot blah, blah, blah.com. Right. And then that’s it. Like, that’s not a call to action. There’s nothing to do there. They have no idea what they would do if they got to your website. So it’s really terrible.
Tim Minton
It’s like an afterthought, essentially.
Dean Waye
Yeah. Like they couldn’t bother to come up with something for you to do. And spend like three breaths telling you about it. And then the next one is ideally you would have just one call to action. But no more than two. And there’s an interesting sort of psychological angle around whether if you’re going to have to, first of all Khalsa actions come in two flavors other than vague, which you shouldn’t use, there are soft call to actions and hard call to actions on hard doesn’t mean they’re difficult, it means that they’re much more sort of hardest and specific. So a soft call to action would be something like, so everything I’ve talked about today, we’re continuing to find out new stuff about it and continuing to add features. So subscribe to this newsletter, and you will always be up to date. Right? So it’s very minimal interaction, it’s very minimal amount of work for the audience, but it’s a concrete action. And so that’s, you know, subscribe to our mailing list, get on a newsletter, you know, watch this video that we’ve already done, these are all softer, calls to action. And then there are the hard call to action. So these are normally where you’re trying to move them into some sort of personal interaction with your company. So schedule a one-to-one demo, or book, this discovery call with sales, that kind of stuff, right? If you’re going to have two calls to action, you should have one soft one, and one hard one. And the easiest way I’ve ever found to explain this and why this works, is how if you’ve ever had, like a holiday meal, like, you know, Sunday, where you eat a lot Christmas or you know, whatever, right, whatever holidays in your country, and you’re like, you’re full, okay, like wow, like, my, that was fantastic. What a spread like I had so much, which is, well we still have like ice cream and pie, we have still had dessert, well, well I can eat. Right, your, your section in your stomach, and in your mind, for all the main core stuff. It’s full. But apparently, in our brains, there’s a second category, another box where dessert goes and it hasn’t been filled yet. So I mean, there’s a very big difference between ordering two pints of beer, or one pint of beer and a shot of Jack Daniels. Okay, there. For some reason, it’s very different, not only like a lot less alcohol, but less volume, but a different tastes different, like experience the whole thing, right? And so you want if you have to have, you know, your boss is really on you and you have to do more than just one call to action, then you have one soft one and one hard one there, they have to be so different, that the audience immediately understands that these are not the same kind of things. The other upside about that the nice part is that a lot of times, the audience will do both calls to action. As long as they’re very different, right? Once the main course wants dessert, once the beer wants the Jack Daniels, right, they need to be so different. It’s like oh, yeah, I don’t mind that one. I don’t know why that one either. And they’ll do that too. I’ve got room, I’ve got room for a discovery call. I’ll do it. And so off you go. Okay, so yeah, very have them be very different. Otherwise, you’re just going to run into trouble. And then let’s see,
Tim Minton
we have the don’ts are Don’t be vague. Don’t use more than two CTAs. And even make sure that they’re different. Right? The people that should think
Dean Waye
yes, people. Okay, people, companies, they’re kind of full of themselves, right, and in a way to kind of jackasses and what they will do is they’ll have a slide up, where they talk about the call to action, the slide is up for, I don’t know, I’m like a couple of minutes. And then the slides gone. Because now they put up a slide that says questions or Q&A. Never have we talked about this before, never have a slide that says questions or shows people that they’re in the Q&A section, like ever, ever terrible idea, it gives so much of the audience permission to mentally check out or even physically leave. So instead of having any slide like that, as soon as you get to the point in your webinar, where you’re ready to talk about the call to action, you put up the information, you know, whether it’s a slide or something on screen, like you guys could do, right for telling them you know what the calls to action are and how to do them. And then that image, that slide stays up for the entire remainder of the webinar, until the entire webinar is finished, and you tear down the session. Right, you give people as long as you possibly can to read and explore what the calls to action are, and then do them you do not just throw it up for a couple of minutes, and then tear it down. So you can move on to the next slide. That’s insane. For most companies, they’ll see an instant uptick in the responses for their call to action. If they just leave the call to action slide up for the five or 10 or 15 minutes at the Q&A. It’s gonna
Tim Minton
give people give people the chance to act essentially.
Dean Waye
Yeah, just leave it there. Like Who are you that you think you’re so important that people are like right there with a pen and a notepad or they’re right there to type it in so that they can get that information quickly before the call to action slide moves away and they’ve lost it. Like that’s insane. You leave it up as long as you can, so that everyone has anyone who might possibly be interested in it has a chance to figure out what email address to send something to or what to click on or where to go or what to do. So I mean, that alone is usually enough to give you a pretty decent uptick in the response to your call to action.
Tim Minton
A lot of people get this wrong then. And it’s something that I see often, you’re, you’re doing your whole webinar, if you put up a Q&A slide, which you’re saying is essentially permission to check out everything else. Then after the Q&A is over. They go on to the CTA and flash it up for just a few seconds. And then, you know, maybe not even the correct CTA, or two.
Dean Waye
Yeah, and the CTA, the call to action is always the very, very last thing that you do. Because every audience, whether they sort of consciously have realized this about themselves or not, they think that every webinar has three parts. There’s the little bit at the beginning, where everything’s getting established, and you figure out who the person is blah, blah, blah. And then there’s, that’s the company’s part of the webinar. And then the second part, how does it work? That’s their part of the webinar. That’s why they showed up, that’s why they register. And then once their part is done, and you move into the Q&A, attendance will just start to crater in the Q&A. Right? Right. Most people, like they never show up. They don’t register for a webinar to get to the Q&A part. That’s very rare. Right? Right. They don’t, there’s always they don’t register so that a stranger can ask another stranger a question. Right? That’s not what webinars are for webinars are there to get an information dump and a low-risk kind of low-pressure kind of way?
Tim Minton
Totally. So this is a great transition, though, during the last section, which will be for the CTA is a Q&A. So maybe we can, like do a bit of a deep dive here. Like what do you like to tell people about Q&A?
Dean Waye
Firstly, this is the most dangerous part of the entire webinar, which meant you have to meet a Q&A And I don’t mean to, you know, frighten anyone. But a Q&A is survival of the cleverest. It’s, it’s the Wild West, it is like it’s a Darwinian kind of part of the whole thing. The so, I mean, some people a Q&A is kind of a wasteland for a lot of webinars, there are people who will ask questions, just so that they can make themselves seem smart. There are oftentimes competitors in the Q&A, who will try to sort of throw a bomb in there. There are people who are trying to ask a legitimate question, but the question has already been answered in the presentation, and they just didn’t, you know, they went out to get a snack during that part. And so making everyone else listen to the answer would be a bad idea. Because the audience has already got this once and they’re probably not interested hearing it again. Right? And then there are like actual questions that are interesting, and you want to tackle. So a couple of things. One is you do not You’re not required to answer every question that comes up in the Q&A. There are two ways to handle this, you can just simply ignore them. I don’t like doing that. The other option is, all of my clients get a like a blog post that follows the live event. And we tell people during the Q&A, there’s going to be a blog post, we’re going to send you an email with a recap and a blog and a link to this. It’ll have the replay video; it’ll have a transcript. There are tons of places you get a transcript on these days. So it’s very easy to get a transcript. We like to lightly edit the transcript to take out you know, umms and ahhs and solos and whatever if the transcriber put it in there. And so and then any questions we didn’t get to in the Q&A, we’re going to answer them in writing in the blog post, and we do. Right? So you’re not required to answer every question. Second, you’re not required to answer questions and answer in order as they come in. And you do cherry pick or curate the questions that you choose, right? If you only have like one or two questions in the Q&A, and it seems fine, then go for it. Or if you’re, if you’re, if you’re in our situation right here, where I’ve already agreed ahead of time, Tim, no matter what they want to throw at me, I’ll tackle it. And in fact, we got you know, the thing coming up two weeks from now, where they can ask anything, and I will answer it, like anything, I will answer it. But again, you know, most of your speakers, they don’t do 100 plus of these a year for themselves, plus whatever they do for clients. So you know, it takes a while to kind of a thick skin to just be ready to take on any question that someone so don’t put your speaker on the spot. And don’t put your audience in the uncomfortable situation. By just accepting that whatever someone throws in the chat box, you’re going to throw it at your speaker. That’s not fair. Right? So not fair to the speaker and not fair to the audience. So cherry pick your questions. You’re not required to answer all of them. Ideally, you have a blog post after the event so that you can answer any other questions in writing or anything you don’t you just can’t get to or don’t have time for. Right? Because, you know, sometimes there’s a there’s a legitimate prospect asking you a question they just asked, it’s so late or there were so many other things to get to that you’d want to answer their question, but you just don’t have time. Right? The speaker’s got a meeting with their boss coming up right after this webinar, they gotta go, kind of thing.
Tim Minton
But can be a great, great reason to follow up as well. Yeah. But something that you mentioned in one of our previous sessions deemed that I love the concepts, and I think it’s something that we’re gonna do going forward is you talked about a scary question. And I think we’ve covered wire, but can you explain it one more time for people who might just be joining? Yeah.
Dean Waye
So this came from way, like decades, and like 4000 years ago, when I used to work for politicians, you know, I don’t do any political work and haven’t in a long time. But I mean, politicians would go on call in radio shows. And today, it would be podcasts and that kind of stuff. Right? The last thing you want is the host to open it up to the audience. And nobody calls. Just crickets. Right. There’s nothing worse in a webinar than a dead Q&A session. Like it’s the absolute worst, and not only makes the speaker feel kind of unappreciated, it makes the audience think that makes the audience doubt whether or not anything that they just heard is very important. Because not a single person now. And that’s one of the other reasons why attendance and attention fall off so much in the Q&A. Anyone who if you put up a question this this, Hey, now we’re in the Q&A. And the person in the audience doesn’t have any questions, or thinks that you know, they’re pretty satisfied, they understand, then they don’t feel they have a reason to stay. So they drop right away. So we’ve got six styles of questions that we will set up for speakers. And but we recommend that if you’re only going to have one in your Q&A, that you see that you at least have one question that you ask yourself, or that you know, someone in your audience has volunteered to ask you. And I don’t mean just an employee, like, you know, sometimes, because I’m interested have a question. Well, we like the scary question. We really like the stack. We’ve tried all the other styles, there’s the you know, you’re asking the wrong question. Question. There’s the expected question with the unexpected answer. There’s the that’s the right question to ask. But you’re thinking about it the wrong way. Here’s the other way to think about it, that’ll totally blow your mind. You know, we’ve got a whole bunch of this. But the scary question, nothing has pulled, nothing has tested as well as the scary question, as the very first question in the Q&A that keeps the audience hooked and scary question is just this. You can go talk to someone in your sales department, or you might, you might even know it in marketing, or whoever. There’s some question that a customer or a prospect might ask. And if it just comes out of the blue, you’re gonna go, well, well, it’s kind of like this. And don’t take it wrong. Like there’s a question that will make you uncomfortable,
Tim Minton
right.
Dean Waye
And that uncomfortable question, the scary question, the sketch the question, that’s okay, if you know what’s coming, and have a little bit of time to sort of formulate an answer in your head, but would feel like we sandbagged you, if we just threw it at you with no prep. That’s a fantastic question for Q&A, because a lot of people even as they’re about to click off and say, Oh, that’s okay. That’s a that’s a that’s, that’s, that’s an interesting question. I might wait and listen, while they try to come up with that. And it’s usually a good question that would make someone legitimately squirm, you know, you guys have been talking about this and blah, blah, blah, and what’s involved. I read this morning, that or I read two weeks ago, that your biggest competitor just came out with the same feature. So like, why would why is why would I care about yours? Right? I mean, that’s a that’s a squirmy question, right? It’s a scary question. No one would no one likes getting questions like that. But everyone loves listening to people answer questions like that,
Tim Minton
right. And if you come across sushi, then maybe you’re going to harm your expertise or, or kind of
Dean Waye
reverse version of the webinar, you prepped for it, and you tweak your slides. And I mean, you even made sure every bullet point either had a period or didn’t, but at least they were all consistent, right? You try to polish it up and look as professional as you can be. And then someone throws a scary question like, Oh, crap, all my work for impressing people. What’s going to happen now? And so we recommend that you start with a scary question. And again, everything we do is to make sure the audience has the best possible experience. And a scary question is a fantastic way to improve the audience’s experience in what is otherwise kind of a wasteland for attention. The Q&A period.
Tim Minton
Yep, yep, I love this concept. But Dean, I think we’re coming up on our time limit for the third time in a row. These such sessions either hit again, amazing, but of course, I want to give the audience a chance to press you on anything they’ve heard. So I want to see if we can go to some questions.
Dean Waye
So your producer just broke the rule and put up a Q&A slide, but
Tim Minton
it only lasts a few moments.
Dean Waye
Its name is Luke, by the way, and I’ve met him and he’s like super organized. So it’s not surprising that he has a Q&A slide. He’s probably got everything ready at his fingertips. Okay, so you’re about the keys. I haven’t been reading anything in the chat. You’re about to ask a question. I have a suggestion for you. Okay. Okay. So, for contrast, before anyone else gets to ask a question, like, what? Scary question. Would you not want to answer? Yeah. Contrast or about, like, your expertise or whatever.
Tim Minton
Okay. I love it. I guess. Okay, I want to connect it to maybe this session. Okay. I think a good one would be, why run a webinar, if there’s much faster ways of getting people to interact with your CTA? I think there’s interesting challenges, like the concept of webinars themselves, right. Should I run this?
Dean Waye
I know my answer, but I’m not on the hot seat. What’s your
Tim Minton
Yeah, let me go first, and then maybe you can follow up? So I think, I think yeah, there’s definitely like faster ways, right? You can use ads, you can use ebooks, website. But I think it really depends on your relationship with the person that you’re selling to, and how complex of a problem you’re solving with your product. So I think like, you know, in B2B, most of the sales are to someone that you know, so you have a relationship with them before they purchase. It’s not like b2c where you’re trying to convert people right away. So in order for that to happen, you need to have brand awareness. And webinars are actually fantastic for this, they let you show the human behind it. They’re great forum for explaining like complex problems, it creates a two-way conversation with the chat, which then helps build a connection. And this helps you learn about the customer so that ultimately you know more about them, and you have more efficiency. So not for everyone, but highly important for B2B.
Dean Waye
Yeah, that would be an uncomfortable question, because it basically it says like, why do you think what you do is important whatsoever? Is not a waste of time? Yeah. All right. So my answer, I think, somewhat similar yours. But I don’t think that for most people who are in an audience in the B2B webinar, for instance, I don’t think most of them know much about the company or the product, right? They may know the brand name, but that’s about it. And there is, there are only two ways to take something that’s quite complicated. And engage an audience long enough so that you can make all the relevant points and achieve all the stuff and get somebody to do something at the end. Because if you think the webinars job is to just explain something, then there are other ways that you can go about it, they may or may not be better, but there are definitely alternatives. But to get someone to do something, after it, there are only two ways to do it. There is a with there’s a video with a high production value. I mean, like you’ve really spent money, to have a video company to put it together and everything from you know, a script, to graphics, you know, high res everything, right? You can do it that way. But for most businesses, I mean, that’s going to cost 30 to $50,000 a pop. And so the only cost-effective way to explain to an audience of prospective customers, how your complicated thing works, and why it’s great. And, you know, and sort of get them to feel more comfortable with it is to put a human being in a live session between the audience and the complicated thing that you sell. And there is no other cost-effective way to do that. So that someone who can do something afterwards, like call you or buy from you or set up a meeting, right, there is no cost-effective way to do it other than webinars, right? It’s not the only way you can have highly produced videos. I love highly produced videos, but they’re not the cost-effective way to do it. Okay, and also, you have to spend the money again every time you make another one.
Tim Minton
So what I love about your answers to the question, Dean is you put that PDB scarcity in there with the cost piece.
Dean Waye
Yeah, I can’t help it. It’s all built into my brain now. Everything. It’s called forward callback interstitials. Scarcity,
Tim Minton
you name it. No, I love it. I’m learning as we chat. Okay, so great, great question with the scary question. But let’s go to the Q&A from the audience and see if we can pull some up.
Dean Waye
Okay, by the way, before we get into this one, a comment came last time, or the time before, where someone says, that guy knows so much about webinars. I want to be like him when I grow up. That person better be a lot younger than me. For that answer to not be insulting. I’m just gonna say that right now. Alright, let’s go to our question.
Tim Minton
Okay. So they’re on notice in the chat, I’m noticing, okay, so they’re here. First question from Francine. So if the goal is to get someone to book a demo, is it good to omit some details? So they have questions to ask to the sales team?
Dean Waye
No, they’re gonna have their own questions. Anyway, this is this is this is related to another concept. And I think this may be where the questioner is coming from. So first of all, you’ve done the negative present, you’ve done the positive future than you did the negative future, then you sort of slid your call to action in as a way to, you know, get relief from that negative present, and then make it easier to get to the positive future, negative future versus positive future? Well, you only have a certain amount of time anyway, in a webinar. And these days, almost all webinars are at least scheduled for 30 minutes or 45 minutes, you almost never see 60- or 90-minute webinars anymore, they’re almost unheard of. If you if it’s a 60-minute webinar, or it’s a someone is still stuck in the old thinking, and default, and they don’t understand that they should at least aim for a shorter one. If the audience wants to go longer. That’s great. But the most destructive, false idea in all of sales and marketing is this. They would buy from us, if only they knew everything we know. Right? Nothing murders, audience attention, and nothing murders persuasion faster than trying to dump all the details on somebody. So by definition, since you have a time bound event, you can’t possibly give the audience everything or pre preempt or, you know, in advance answer all of anyone’s questions anyway. So you don’t need to pull anything back. Really the only thing you would ever pull back is pricing. And, and for an obvious reason, right? You don’t want to eliminate people or have them self-terminate themselves from the buying process, because you’ve named a price before they could fully understand what the value is. So other than holding back price, I wouldn’t really hold back anything. Or rather, I wouldn’t deliberately try to hold back anything, you’re only gonna have so much time anyway. So you’re always going to prioritize and triage what you’re going to say, in a session. And then for everyone else, they can book you can give them either a soft call to action or a hard call to action as a way to, you know, move them into a nurturing process or, you know, expedite them to a sales process. So you don’t have to worry about holding it back. You only have so much time anyway. Just you know, the mistake is not holding it back. The mistake is trying to tell them everything. Like you’ll drive them away before they even bother to get to the end of the webinar.
Tim Minton
So don’t omit things, but rather focus on getting the right details in there.
Dean Waye
Just tell them the most important stuff.
Tim Minton
Okay. Okay, great answer. Let’s see if we have another question here from the chat. On up.
Dean Waye
Okay, I can only see the chat out of my peripheral vision. But all session long, it’s you’d swear the chat was being run by a bunch of like, dribbles on crack. I mean, it’s just been like, the whole time. Last time it was a bit more sedate on this time. It’s crazy.
Tim Minton
Yeah, that’s good. People are people are curious on this one. Yeah. Next question here. This is from Andre. So question, should the main speaker engage directly with the audience? By reading out messages throughout the event? I see this session too much between Tim and Dean. It’s like the chat room is a total separate space from what the speakers are doing. So love this question. I think it’s really interesting to, to hear how you’re gonna answer this one thing.
Dean Waye
Okay. So there are two styles around this. And webinars basically come in two styles anyway, right? There’s the presentation style, or what you call the traditional style. And there’s an interview style. And regardless of which one you’re using, there are sort of, from that two styles for what to do with the chat. So if you’ve got certain things that you want to make sure are covered, then it’s okay to ignore the chat until you get to the part of the session where you would engage with the audience. If it’s an interview style one, where you’re not so much focused on asking certain questions. I mean, most hosts go in with certain questions. They want to get answered, right? Because they’re the advocate for the audience. And they’re sort of the representative of the audience. For the more we’re just live hanging out style, I don’t have a problem with going into the chat and seeing what’s there. But you can’t kind of plan around it because you have no idea ahead of going live, whether the chat is going to be active or not. I mean, unless you’ve done it with the same audience a bunch of times. For most B2B webinars, you don’t get the same people from one to the other. And a lot of times you don’t have sort of, you know, a super active kind of chat anyway. So there’s nothing wrong with waiting until the interviewers’ main questions are covered before going to the chat at all. Plus, it gives the it gives everyone the audience and the speaker and the interviewer, and the producer, you know, the unknown, the unseen, Mr. Luke is handling a lot of this stuff, it gives them time to have a bunch of content that’s in the chat, so that they can start cherry picking the very best, most interesting the things that are most likely to engage or be interesting to the entire audience and everyone involved. If you’re going to just engage with the chat as comments come in. The challenge with that is that on the one hand, if someone’s making a comment, and it happens to be really relevant to the thing that was last said, that’s fantastic. But in most B2B webinars, it’s less likely what you and you’re breaking the first rule of Q&A, right, or the second rule of Q&A, by engaging with the chat all the way through, which is you’re inserting into the narrative, something just because it’s there, and in the order that it came in. So you’re not necessarily saying or doing anything that the entire audience might be interested.
Tim Minton
Okay, well, something you mentioned in there’s interesting, Dean, it makes sense for if you’re kind of just hanging out and chatting. But I’m curious, have you seen that in a lot of B2B settings? Is this something problem? So
Dean Waye
the problem you face, the problem, all of us face when it comes to producing B2B webinars is that for the most part, it is a group of people who don’t know each other, don’t know the speaker, and don’t even really know the company very well, or the host in the session, so you’ve got a whole bunch of strangers who are strangers to each other. And, and so you don’t find a lot of the sort of YouTube Live tick tock live sessions where people are throwing stuff into the stream. And the host is just there to engage with the audience. Right? In a B2B webinar, the host is not there, nobody’s there to engage with the audience. They’re there to spend time informing the audience, which is why the audience registered in the first place, there’s a topic or set of data that they want. And secondly, to guide the audience toward the next step. That’s where the engagement is going to happen. I mean, I’m perfectly happy, I would, you know, turn my head and I would, because my monitors, it’s a big monitor, but it’s out of frame, you can’t see it on the camera. You know, I’m perfectly happy to go through and, you know, talk and talk back and we’re and accept challenges or do whatever, for everything that’s in the chat. But for most B2B webinars, that’s not why people registered in the first place. And so there’s, you sort of guide them out into an engagement that’s somewhat handled in the Q&A. And then the rest of its handled more one to one with the company. Right. So
Tim Minton
you can keep the narrative going. Okay, nobody,
Dean Waye
nobody’s clamoring for me to go on Tik Tok and ask questions. I don’t even think I have a tick tock account.
Tim Minton
Hey, maybe, maybe it’s,
Dean Waye
I need one. Next market for you.
Tim Minton
Let’s see if we can pull another question here. Okay, another one from Andre. Another question. Do you guys agree with using trivia, like types of exercises with the audience? Maybe give them some prizes for the winning answers? Do
Dean Waye
you see this a lot more in b2c kind of webinars, and it can work really well there. Because a b2c webinar is we talked about before the safety question in B2B is, how do I know it’s safe for me to vouch for you in here, like at my company, the safety question for b2c is how do I know I won’t regret this purchase. And so anything that you can do to make someone feel like they’re part of a group, you know, part of a tribe that there’s affinity or adjacency in the experience, and even give them some kind of a little gift, that that’s very much a b2c kind of thing. You know, it’s less useful in B2B. And it’s the same reason really, that sort of the hero’s journey kind of structure doesn’t work very well, in B2B people. Everyone in B2B comes to every engagement with a possible vendor with a level of skepticism. And you’re not going to get over the skepticism with a $10. Starbucks card.
Tim Minton
Right? It’d be easier if it worked that way.
Dean Waye
Yeah. In fact, it almost makes it worse, because it’s like, now you’ve accepted something from a vendor. And you know that this is, it’s much more transactional in B2B. And I don’t mean, it’s a one off calling it transactional. I mean, there’s an expectation that they need to provide something in the webinar, which is the information and sort of general guidance and stuff and what you’re providing are paying with that for your attention. And so anything beyond that, that they give you, there’s sort of, okay, what do they expect to get from me in exchange for that, right? At a minimum, they’re gonna want my, you know, work email address, or my full name or something like that. So it can be a lot trickier to use that stuff and B2B works great. You just see that can.
Tim Minton
you know, yep, Okay, great question. Great answer. We’re gonna have to wrap it up because this is our time limit. So everyone, two weeks from today, we’re doing our fourth and final session. So same place, same time, but two weeks now, this is gonna give us an extra time to gather your questions. Make sure that we can really challenge Dean. So join that there’ll be a lot of should
Dean Waye
they email the question too, if they want to send it ahead of time.
Tim Minton
Yep. So there will be an email coming to everyone that’s registered for this event, where you can just simply reply with your question and then ready to go for Dean. And Dean, you’re going to be doing the full Q&A. You said your answer any whatever they want to ask. So join us for that in two weeks. DNA was great. And I will see you soon.
Dean Waye
See in two weeks. Bye. Bye.