• Upload pre-recorded video clips to your access code
• Playback video clips during your meeting for participants to see and hear your content
• Record your meeting with the pre-recorded video content included

To sign up for beta access to pre-recorded video playback please fill out this form. You will receive an email within 1 business day providing you with instructions on how to get started.

Currently the process for uploading and playing back your pre-recorded video clip is a 4 step process (see diagram below). For more information please be sure to view the recorded demo, the Quick Start Guide, and the Best Practices and Known Issues documentation to gain valuable tips and tricks on how to use pre-recorded video playback in your meetings. When this feature becomes generally available (first half of 2012), the process for uploading and playing back your videos in the live presentation will be very similar to uploading and inserting slides into the ReadyTalk Conference Controls.

We’d love to hear about your experience with pre-recorded video in the feedback form or in the comments below. Tell us how the feature is working, if you’re experiencing any issues, or if you have any specific feature requests. If you have any questions about this feature please contact ReadyTalk Customer Care at 800.843.9166.

Paul was formerly an Account Executive at ReadyTalk gaining valuable experience with competitors and the state of the web and audio conferencing industry. Currently in his role as Product Marketing Manager, he is in charge of the competitive landscape, on-demand audio products, and the web meeting interface. Paul loves the outdoors, his pup Huck, his wife Jess, and getting to the ski slopes as much as possible.

Download the AMA and ReadyTalk's guide to planning successful webinars.

Chances are, you are very familiar with the many moving parts that go into setting up a webinar. With assistance from the American Marketing Association, we created a best practices document to offer help sorting through those details.

As a supplement to this document, the members of our Events team came up with the following additional points to consider while setting up a webinar.

• Be sure to schedule your webinar as far in advance of the actual date as possible – ideally, at least 6 to 8 weeks prior – in order to allow enough time for proper marketing of your webinar.
• If you have a custom script, be sure to send it your Event Manager at least 24 hours in advance of your webinar.
• If your participants will be listening to the audio via their phone lines, you might consider adding something similar to the text below to your invitation or confirmation email.

To ensure you are able to join this event successfully, please dial in 10-15 minutes prior to scheduled start time. You will be greeted by an operator. Please be prepared to give them your full name and company name. You will be placed on hold until the call begins.

If you are using the broadcast audio function (allowing your participants to listen to the audio via their computer speakers, you might consider something similar to the text below.

When you log into the web portion, you will automatically be connected to broadcast audio which will allow you to hear the presentation through your computer speakers. Please make sure the volume on your speakers is set appropriately to your location and is respectful to those around you.

• Prepare an introduction slide to show prior to the beginning of the webinar. This slide can include the login information and is very helpful, especially if the dial-in number is listed. Also, if the webinar uses broadcast audio, you can also use this location to remind participants to make sure the volume on their speakers is set appropriately.
• Prior to the live webinar, you might consider sending an email to all speakers with their dial-in and log-in information.
• Prepare a few “canned questions” just in case you need them to fill time during the Q&A session.
• Think about audience engagement!!! Come up with a few ways of interacting with your audience!
• Be aware of your platform’s limitations before the live webinar (participant limit, desktop sharing, video, etc.)
• Find out what type of support you have from your platform provider before, during and after your webinar.

If you use any setup best practices that are not listed here, we would love to hear from you! Please feel free to share your thoughts as others may find it helpful in their webinar setup.

ReadyTalk understands that our customers want to concentrate on the subject of their meetings, or content of their webinars, instead of the possibility of the unpredictable costs of their audio and web conferencing use.  We want to provide the highest quality, service and reliability, as part of our pricing.  With that expectation in mind, we introduce our five new web and audio subscriptions:

• Web Meeting Pro (25, 150)
• Webinar (500, 1000, 3000)

What’s unique about these? High-quality audio, included with every package.

The Web Meeting Pro subscriptions include unlimited web conferencing and a bundle of included toll and toll-free domestic audio minutes, at a flat monthly fee.

The Webinar subscriptions include unlimited web conferencing AND unlimited Broadcast Audio, enabling participants to stream high-quality audio through their computer speakers. Again, for a flat monthly fee.

So how do you know which subscription is right for you, or your company?

Do you conduct a fair amount of smaller, internal meetings or  present projects to external clients and vendors where high-quality audio is critical?  Then the Web Meeting Pro options are right up your alley.

Are you managing larger webinars for lead generation, online training, etc, more than once a month?  The Webinar subscription options can give you the cost-effective solution you are looking for.

Interested in learning more?  Contact us today to find out more about our new subscription plans!

Beth is a Product Marketing Manager and works with our customers to understand their needs as they relate to event services and our conference center, which is used to setup the details of our clients’ upcoming meetings. Outside of the office, Beth loves to spend time with family and friends, cook, and hit the slopes.

While we knew that marketers and trainers were tired of the hassle of getting webinar data into their CRM system, we were surprised by the great turnout at yesterday’s webinar on the value of integration. If you had a chance to join us, we hope you found the event worthwhile!

Many thanks to Helena Brito from Mandiant, Jill Myers from OverDrive, and Pat Buchanan and Dave Kornegay from SchoolDude.com for speaking on the event. Each of them shared fantastic insight into how the integration has made a difference in their business and responded to questions from our audience during a lively panel discussion.

Because we had so many great questions, we couldn’t get to them all during the live event. In fact, we had such a high volume of questions that answering them all would make this blog post painful to read.

So, here is my take on the top 5 and you can access a full transcript of the Q&A here. You can also sign-up for a demo and learn more about ReadyTalk for Salesforce here.

1 – Q. How does sales use webinar information to close more deals? Did you face any resistance to adoption within your sales organizations?

A.  By having access to webinar data directly from the Lead or Contact record, sales can instantly see which topics their prospect is interested in and tailor their message to speak to the prospect’s specific use case or pain point. And, because attendance data is captured in Salesforce immediately after an event, sales can strike while the iron is hot and capitalize on opportunities rather than delaying follow up until marketing can do the manual work to get the data into the CRM.

Each of our panelists shared that ReadyTalk for Salesforce has been very well-received by their sales organizations because it:

• Gives them timely and convenient visibility into valuable webinar data right from the Lead and Contact record
• Makes it easy for them to invite prospects and customers to webinars and online trainings directly from the Lead or Contact record

In fact, Helena from Mandiant shared this feedback from one of her account executives during the webinar:

“Awareness of participation in events by potential customers allows me to enter the conversation with relevance and value, thereby earning their attention.”

2 – Q. When I look at a customer record will I be able to see a history of their webinar interaction directly associated with their customer profile?

A. Yes, ReadyTalk for Salesforce attempts to match each participant with a Lead or Contact record in Salesforce based on email address. From the related Lead or Contact record, you can see all of that person’s meeting activity and drill down to the Meeting Member record for full details.

3 – Q. Is there a diagram or goal funnel (visualization) to see drilled down results quickly at a high level?  Will we be able to see a report generated from an event?

As I look back, one of the things we dreaded most was wrapping up after each webinar – particularly the time-consuming task of getting registration and attendance data out of our webinar platform and into our CRM system. This painful process involved waiting for our webinar vendor to finalize the attendance report, downloading it as a .csv file, manually de-dupping the data and then uploading the clean data into our CRM. Depending on the size of the event, this work could take 2-3 hours – both numbing our minds and delaying time-sensitive sales follow-up. What a headache!

These memories were fresh in my mind when I joined the ReadyTalk product marketing team and learned that my first assignment was to define an integration between ReadyTalk and salesforce.com. Now, two years (and countless customer conversations) later, I’m excited to be heading to Dreamforce to launch ReadyTalk for Salesforce.

Designed to help marketers and trainers skip the tedious spreadsheet work, ReadyTalk for Salesforce streamlines once-manual processes by automatically capturing registration and attendance data in salesforce.com. The application even makes it easy to create new Lead records for registrants and attendees not found in salesforce.com.



As an added benefit, ReadyTalk for Salesforce increases access to important webinar and training programs by allowing sales and others in the organization to:

• See a summary of which sessions their prospects and customers are involved
• Quickly send webinar or training invitations right from the Lead or Contact record

So far, we’ve had great feedback on the application from our early access testers.. If you want to see it in action for yourself, register for an upcoming live demo or come see us at Dreamforce next week (Booth #1021). Ready to get started? Install the free ReadyTalk for Salesforce application from the AppExchange now.

Here’s to marketers and trainers spending their time doing what they do best instead of manually schlepping data back and forth between systems that can’t talk to one another!

As Director of Product Marketing, Anita is focused on talking to customers about their needs and translating these into priorities for the ReadyTalk product roadmap. Before joining ReadyTalk, she gained first-hand experience with the challenges of running a webinar program while serving as director of marketing at an IT analyst firm. When she’s not thinking about conferencing, she likes to do yoga and spend time with her dogs.

So there you are, delivering the concluding remarks to end your very first webinar. You’re feeling quite good about your prep work, your marketing efforts, and the fact that a good number of participants actually showed up! Then, you read the very small number of surveys that were tuned in and your seemingly incredible presentation turns about to be “meh.” – meaning ho-hum or booooring.  What happened!!?? Why are so many webinars painfully boring for the audience?  Here’s why:  It’s the speaker.

Remote presenting is tricky. After all, you have zero control over your audience; you can’t see them at their  home office. This is not a scare tactic, but you truly have a big responsibility to keep your group engaged in your presentation. There are three main tools at your disposal:

1. Your voice
2. The visual presentation and content
3. The web presentation software

In the upcoming series, we’ll concentrate on what I believe is the most important piece of conducting a great webinar:  The Speaker’s Delivery.  Good speakers can take boring subjects and make them palatable, if not enjoyable.  Practicing and perfecting your inflection, tone, and your ability to connect with the audience are paramount in conducting a great webinar. You don’t have to be a professional public speaker to get high marks on your presentations and keep people engaged; in my next few posts, I’ll cover a variety of ways to turn your anemic webinars into the compelling presentations you strive for.

In the meantime, what tips would you share for being a good and engaging presenter?

Shawn Cardinal is ReadyTalk’s training guru. He’s hosted hundreds of webinars and train customers (and employees) on best practices for hosting polished webinars and engaging audiences. When he’s

As companies get more comfortable delivering content over the Internet, they are looking for ways to actually make money in the process, by charging attendees to participate in the events.

This is not a new idea, of course. Organizations have long offered events and training sessions for a fee—sometimes, a very steep fee. People will pay hundreds, even thousands of dollars to learn more about their industry, develop best practices, and get trained on specific tools and technologies to better do their jobs. But will they pay for that content online? Yes—but with some caveats.

First and foremost, when you take training and education out of the literal classroom, you need to make sure the content is king. No one likes business travel. (Well, OK, some people like business travel, but most people don’t—and their numbers are dwindling thanks to high gas prices, lousy airline services, and the rapid spread of bedbugs across the world.) But people continue to attend in-person meetings for the networking as much as for the information. That networking is less likely in a web conference, which is not necessarily a bad thing—without the socializing, events can be shorter and more focused. But it puts pressure on the presenter to make attendance worth everyone’s while.

The great thing about webinars is that they can deliver clear, specific information to a targeted audience at a very low cost, and without the need for travel or time wasted getting to and from the event. So what attendees lose in networking, they gain in time and productivity. But they also expect the content they receive to be worth the time they do invest—especially if they are paying a fee to hear it.

So as you consider offering webinars as a way to generate revenue, pay close attention to the information you’re delivering. Generally speaking, you should start with training that you would normally charge for in person, rather than entirely new content. This will appeal to an existing customer base that already understands the value of your sessions, and which is looking for an alternative to the high cost of travel and large commitment of time such events require.

Once you see success moving from an in-person delivery model to an online one, you can start to explore other topics for fee-based webinars. These might include industry or job-role best practices that will resonate with your customer base, or market trends they need to understand to better do their jobs and stay competitive.

Make sure your presenters take advantage of the tools web conferencing provides to deliver interactive and engaging sessions, including chat and polling capabilities. And price online events lower than their in-person counterparts, at least until you test the waters and get positive feedback—and strong revenue—from your initial efforts.

For more on paid webinars, please join me for a (free) event on the topic. Register here.

Melanie is a renowned expert in unified communications, collaboration, social networking and content-management technologies in the enterprise. For 15 years, Ms. Turek has worked closely with hundreds of vendors and senior IT executives across a range of industries to track and capture the changes and growth in the fast-moving unified communications market. Melanie writes often on the business value and cultural challenges surrounding real-time communications, collaboration and Voice over IP, and she speaks frequently at leading customer and industry events.

“An educated consumer is our best customer.”

That’s the tag line from a series of TV ads that ran on the local station when I was a kid in New York, for a mom-and-pop clothing store. It was a counter-intuitive message for the time, but it’s always stuck with me, because it’s always made sense. And it’s as true today as it was back then.

Using webinars for customer training can save you time and money.

As all sales managers know, it’s easier to get more business out of an existing customer than it is to land a new one. That means your sales efforts should focus on your customer base to drive revenues—and the best way to do that is to demonstrate the value of your products and services, day in and day out. If your customers know what makes your offering better than the competition’s—and are able to use them efficiently and effectively, whenever they need to—they will be much more likely to continue doing business with you in the future, and to look to you for new products and services as their needs arise.

Indeed, having a well trained customer base that understands your product delivers several clear benefits:

• Higher customer engagement. If your customers know how to use your products and services effectively, they’ll become much more engaged with your business and your brand. That makes it much more likely they will look to you to supply their future needs in your market area.
• Decreased customer attrition. When customers understand your business and your products, they are much more likely to stay loyal to your brand. This is especially true if they feel they are getting added value from interacting with your business. Educational sessions that highlight broad areas and issues of interest—which may be related to your products and services, but not directly about them—can go a long way toward cementing customer loyalty.
• Higher revenues per customer. When people know how to use your products effectively, they will get more value from them—and they will look to your business to supply new products and services as they need them. It’s much easier and more cost-effective to grow business with an existing customer than jump-start business with a new one.
• Lower overall support costs. By providing ongoing training to your customers, you are essentially nipping support and service issues in the bud. This will help you keep costs down, since you can address these needs for more people at one time, and on your schedule. Anytime you can lower the number of support calls into your business, you are lowering costs—and improving customer satisfaction in the process.

By keeping your customers educated on the market you operate in—offering them best practices advices, news they can use, and specific product information—you are ensuring they stay connected, invested and loyal to your business. For more on how web conferencing can help you stay in touch with your customers, regardless of where they’re located and without incurring enormous expenses—join me for a webinar on Wednesday, February 23, 2:00 p.m. EST entitled “Effective Online Training: Tips from the Experts” and learn the insider secrets to a successful online training program.

Melanie is a renowned expert in unified communications, collaboration, social networking and content-management technologies in the enterprise. For 15 years, Ms. Turek has worked closely with hundreds of vendors and senior IT executives across a range of industries to track and capture the changes and growth in the fast-moving unified communications market. Melanie writes often on the business value and cultural challenges surrounding real-time communications, collaboration and Voice over IP, and she speaks frequently at leading customer and industry events.

In response to the increasing demand for online training tools, ReadyTalk is hosting an event entitled “Effective Online Training: Tips from the Experts.” on February 23 from 2 – 3 p.m. EST.

Who Should Attend:
You should attend this event if you currently train employees or customers virtually or at a physical location. Also attend if you are looking to improve on your current training program or start a training program for your own organization. You will hear from three speakers who run their organization’s respective online training programs.

What You Will Learn:
In this webinar, you will learn:
• The essential tools to any successful online training program
• How to increase attendance to training sessions
• How to build interactive and engaging online training programs
• How to measure the impact of your online training program

Register for this webinar and learn from the experts on how to make your online training program a success.

As the senior demand generation manager at ReadyTalk, Mike helps manage and execute ReadyTalk’s demand generation programs, which include email, online advertising, telemarketing and tradeshows. He also oversees ReadyTalk’s lead management process and marketing funnel by using Eloqua and Salesforce.com to automate ReadyTalk’s nurturing programs and lead follow-up.

When I ask C-level executives about their biggest concerns when it comes to deploying new technology, one topic always tops the list: training. That’s a bit of a head scratcher, really. Training is, after all, something completely under a manager’s control. But in fact, with the increasingly virtual nature of the workplace, it’s harder than ever to make sure employees get the training they need—whether it’s related to technology itself, or broader business processes and corporate policies and regulations.

Organizations today are managing a growing number of remote workers, partners, suppliers and customers—all in the face of increased competition, pressure to keep costs down, and rapidly changing markets. These companies know they must continually train their employees and constituents, as quickly as possible, to ensure that they are up to speed on the latest company and product information; in-house technology; and business processes. But even as corporate training is becoming more important, it’s also more difficult, with trainers and their students spread out across vast geographic regions and time zones, and even across cultures.

Good corporate training must address several key issues:

Corporate training should be available to employees on-demand.

• On-demand, rather than scheduled, training. It’s no longer enough to plan a series of training sessions and expect employees to “show up” at the given time. With people working in different time zones, from various locations, and juggling multiple job roles, they can’t be expected to prioritize training ahead of business-critical projects or their own work schedules.
• Insightful, relevant content that engages attendees while ensuring their training needs are met. It’s critical to be able to cut through the multi-media clutter, while making sure that the information imparted is understood and retained. And as with all learning, corporate training greatly benefits from participant collaboration. Video, too, can add value to the experience and make it more interactive.
• Ongoing learning as needed. It’s important that corporate trainers be able to offer refresher courses and follow-up classes on an as-need basis, to ensure employees remain up to date on the latest information, and that they can refresh their memories on certain elements of a program or process days, weeks or even months after the initial training took place.
• Keeping costs and travel in check, while reaching more people more often. This is the age of innovation, in which employees must work with colleagues, partners and customers to develop content and ideas quickly and decisively. Training is critical to prepare all employees for this new way of working. But as more of those employees are located in remote locations and home-based offices, reaching them with training becomes more difficult and costly. Managers need solutions that can extend across the boundaries in the most cost-effective manner.

The good news is, web conferencing can help corporate trainers meet all these needs—easily, and cost effectively—and sometimes better than real-world events. For information on how companies are delivering effective online training through web conferencing, join Melanie for “Effective Online Training: Tips from the Experts,” a free webinar on Wednesday, February 23 at 2 p.m. EST.

Melanie is a renowned expert in unified communications, collaboration, social networking and content-management technologies in the enterprise. For 15 years, Ms. Turek has worked closely with hundreds of vendors and senior IT executives across a range of industries to track and capture the changes and growth in the fast-moving unified communications market. Melanie writes often on the business value and cultural challenges surrounding real-time communications, collaboration and Voice over IP, and she speaks frequently at leading customer and industry events.