Tuesday, May 3, 2011

3 Ways to Run a Bad Webinar for Feedback

3 insights from a vendor's user group webinar billed as "looking for feedback" about their product and direction "from our most valued customers":

1. Promoting as an hour, then ending as fast as possible. After a 35 minute presentation, the goal of the facilitators was to end the call as quickly as possible. Opening for questions and comments meant ending 5 minutes later.

2. Instead of answering questions, discuss how you're going to answer questions. Only read/answered 2 questions (I typed 4 myself), spent lots of time talking about having many questions, committed to communicating answers privately, said to set up meetings to discuss questions. What didn't do: Answer the questions.

3. Forgetting we're still connected at the end. The call ends, after the goodbye, with the facilitators erupting in laughter. Likely the fear of having questions didn't want to answer. But little detail that didn't shut off the volume wherever the webinar presentation was.

Wonder if that had an impact on my opinion of the vendor?

2 comments:

Marquita Herald said...

I started to laugh, then I thought of the webinars I'd attended that suffered at least one of those problems ... which is probably why I never actually "pay" to attend a webinar by someone I don't know.

Ellen said...

Cindy -- Sounds to me (aka: "Ellen the Cynic") that this vendor might have been using the Webinar as a way of qualifying potential buyers, but if they billed it as an opportunity to provide them with feedback, do they have a responsibility to answer questions? Hard to say without having attended, but clearly there was some confusion about the vendor's purpose and the attendees' expectations...

A lesson for all of us -- Thanks for passing on your experience!