What opportunities has eWebinar opened up for you that you didn’t have before?
There are two big ones. We can now give demos to sales leads that before we were just letting fall through the cracks. And we've been able to supercharge our training and onboarding on an ongoing basis.
How has eWebinar helped you pursue sales leads that were falling through the cracks?
Our salespeople do direct sales through live web demos. They really only focus on mid to large sized real estate brokerages, because those are the highest value sales. We’d always wished we could give more love and attention to smaller sales leads, like small brokerages, agent teams, and individual agents, but it just didn’t make sense. Either our salespeople didn’t have the bandwidth — period — or they would end up spending the same amount of time on a sale for a fraction of the return.
Now, when one of these leads submits an inquiry through our web form, they automatically get an email inviting them to join our next webinar, which is an eWebinar. And since we can schedule eWebinars as often as we like, these people can join a session while their intent is still high at a time that’s convenient for them, if not immediately by watching a “replay”.
And the experience is interactive! We used to send a video, which had zero engagement. Now, customers can ask us questions through live chat as their questions come up throughout the webinar. They have a direct line of communication to our support team while they are gathering the information to decide whether or not they want to purchase our solutions. Our customers can feel heard at the moment they have questions.
The interactions eWebinar provides help too. They really seem to keep customers engaged. Way more people are staying to the very end of our eWebinars than ever watched the video we used to send out. Plus, we learn so much more about them than we ever did before through their responses to the interactions. It’s really quite amazing.
And the whole process is basically automated. The small leads that used to fall through the cracks are now getting the attention they deserve. Meanwhile, our sales team can keep focused on what they do best and on where their time makes the most impact.
How have you used eWebinar to supercharge your training and onboarding?
In this regard, eWebinar was a no brainer. In fact, we had been waiting for months for the product to be ready and were one of the very first to jump on board.
As a SaaS company, you're never doing enough training for your customers. In our industry, turnover is high and agents make their own schedule, which makes it even harder to reach them. We’ve always been strapped for training resources and have never really been able to keep up with the demand.
When you close a deal, you have this narrow window of opportunity to impact the level at which your new customer is going to engage with and adopt your product. Before, we would hold one kick-off webinar to train everybody and have it recorded, share the video, and hope for the best. Oftentimes, agents couldn’t make our one training and we would have no idea if they were getting what they needed from the recording. Besides, a recording of a regular webinar isn’t that great of an experience anyway. A video is static. There is nothing to engage with and the host is frequently answering questions that are irrelevant to anyone who watches in the future. It’s just lousy. Only our largest customers had ongoing, dedicated training, and only on a bi-weekly basis at the very most. The whole process was broken.
Now, with eWebinar, when we close a deal with a company, we can offer dedicated training and onboarding on a regular basis, regardless of whether that company is large or small. In fact, we can host multiple training sessions per week. Our customers are happy because they feel like they are getting more for their money, and our team is happy because they no longer have to do the live presentations. Having eWebinar is like having a couple of extra members on our team. With some content planning, we have been able to automate this whole part of our business. Adoption and engagement of new customers have already increased.
I should mention increased training has impacted sales too. We make a lot of our revenue through upselling. We now do four to six times more training than we did before. The more our users learn our products, the more likely they have been to upgrade and buy more advertising.
What are the things you love most about eWebinar?
There are a few things. First of all, the fact that people can attend when it’s convenient for them. That’s huge.
Think about how people watch video content today, think Netflix and Hulu… They want it when they want it. Not when you want to give it to them. With eWebinar, you don’t ever have to work around the schedule of your presenter. You can just make it available whenever it needs to be available. For your customers.
eWebinar is so much more than streaming video content though. I can take any video and turn it into an interactive webinar. I don’t have to give up that two-way engagement with my customer. We use Intercom and we have a support email, but giving attendees the ability to ask us questions while they're watching an automated webinar is a different and better experience all around.
Outside of that, I just love how easy it is to use. The concept is simple and straightforward. It’s a great experience for our customers and looks great. The design is beautiful and professional, which makes us look like stars.
Is there anything else you would like to share about being an eWebinar customer?
The eWebinar team is super attentive, responsive to bug fixes, and really listens to customer feedback when pushing out new features. I'm always surprised at the speed at which they move. It's a well thought out product overall and I'm impressed with it. Really excited to see where it goes.
