Comments on Am I Wrong About Vendor Webinars?

• Posted by Mark , I am a vendor to colleges & universities on June 23, 2010 at 10:15am EDT

• I have been selling services to colleges and universities nationwide for 15 years. I think your list presents the ideal if the school knows what they really want (really truley know what they want). Nine times out of ten, I have learned that most buyers on campus don't know what they want, don't know what their budget is (much less if they even have a budget), and don't know if they even have authority to pursue the product or service. My business is based on developing relationships that are based on trust, knowledge, experience, and the ability to truley accomodate the needs of my client (in other words customize the service to the needs of the buyer). If you want a cookie cutter product or service, plenty of them are available on line, in catalogs and in department stores. Some day, I would like to see a list in this space of what vendors would like to see from the buyers. Best wishes.

• Making the Most of Your Vendor Webinar [The Vendor Perspective]
• Posted by Leah on June 24, 2010 at 5:15am EDT

• I think this list is much improved, primarily because it focuses on tactics and approaches to a webinar and less so on content and structure. Having gone from never doing a webinar in my life to doing over 100 last year with Kaltura, the one thing I can say is that buyers come from many different places. A good vendor and a good "webinar giver" is one who can quickly assess a buyer and cater a webinar to the buyer's needs in real-time. To illustrate this point and the difficulties of a one size fits all solution, I'd like to take on Mark's challenge.

  Below is a list of best practices for buyers titled "How to Make the Most of Your Vendor Webinar" - from the vendor perspective.

  1. Before a webinar begins, let the vendor know what you'd like to achieve from a webinar:. Here are a few types of buyers, each of which require different webinar contet: "The Learner" - wants to learn all about a product or industry and the possible applications of a solution. "The Solver" - wants to know if a given technology solution will solve a defined set of pain points. "The Builder" - wants to see whether a given solution can be integrated and customized to solve particular needs.

  2. Budget. Let the vendor know where you are in the budgeting cycle. Do you have a budget? If so, what is it. Are you planning your budget? Is there a dollar limit you must stay under to avoid entering bidding? In the same way that vendors hide prices, buyers hide budgets. We both do so for manifold reasons, but from a vendor perspective, when a buyer hides the ball on the budget it's harder for the vendor to be a partner and craft a solution that works.

  3. Competitors. Who else are you evaluating? What attracts you to the other companies? What your impression of how companies stack up. In the same way that vendors are weary of talking about competitors, buyers often keep the competition a secret. Most vendors have completed detailed competitive analysis and can share key (and yes biased) insights and save you the time of comparison if you make your impressions known.

  4. Use Cases & Pain Points. If you are trying to solve specific pain points or have use cases in mind - share them. HOWEVER, be transparent with a vendor about how you want those use cases to be interpreted. Remember that use cases are used in software development, so the more detailed a use case is, the less likely it is that a mass market solution will work out of the box. Do you want the vendor to speak to how his/her product can be modified and customized to fit your exact permisioning schemes and workflows? Or are you sharing the use cases merely as examples to illustrate the types of problems you are trying to solve.

  5. People and Roles. Tell a vendor upfront who the decision-makers are - from a technical and economic perspective and whether these individuals will be part of the webinar. If there is one person who will need to sign off on a contract, tell the vendor this up front so the vendor can prepare and use its company resources, engineers, and executives accordingly. One reasons vendors often under-prepare or under-staff webinars is that they don't know whether you've hired an intern to do evaluations, or whether key decision-makers will be present.

  6. Timeline. Share your buying time-line with the vendor so he or she knows how much material needs to be covered and at what speed.

  7. Openness. Interrupt a vendor during a webinar. The vendor is there to aid you. If you aren't seeing what you want to see then speak up. As you say above, the more communication the better.

  8. Partnership. Make it clear to a vendor whether you are the type of buyer that would ideally like to become a "key" buyer and influence the product roadmap, participate in the vendor community, and provide applications, or if your goal is to evaluate, pay, and get out. If we know this upfront, we can also cater presentations accordingly.

  Now I'm sure our negotiation professors out there will criticize these lists. There are many reasons for lack of transparency. But that's my first cut... having just finished preparing for a demo tomorrow!

• Webinar Feedback
• Posted by Tom Guerin , Purchasing Director at University of Cincinnati on June 25, 2010 at 1:15pm EDT

• My impression is the webinar guidelines may be too general. Buyers often spend a fair bit of time working internally to determine the stage units are in when they are looking for IT products. Separate tools exist to do cookie cutter evaluations (bids), explore market offerings/readiness/capacities/offerings in general (requests for information) and proposals of specialty capabilities (requests for proposals). Buyers, sellers and those they seek to serve can go severely off track if they do not carefully explore where the unit and the institution are before they reach out to the open market. If you get to the point a webiar is being used as a formal means to address an offer to sell, then a much stricter set of guidelines is indicated.

  My belief is most webinars are really educational/marketing offerings about a firms belief system of their capabilities...current, near term and long term. Sometimes they do not differentiate sufficiently, introducing the potential for strong dissatisfaction.

  One thing I would recommend adding to the good work provided is a scoresheet. It only needs to be as gebneral or specific as desired, but should allow the webinar viewer to consider why they are watching and make note of their impressions of how well the webinar addressed any points of interest.

• The Vendor Perspective
• Posted by Paul Jacobelli , President at EdTek Services, Inc. on July 8, 2010 at 11:00am EDT

• I have been on the buyer end while helping build an online learning program at a university and have been on the vendor side for the last ten years. I think Mark makes a good point that vendors have expectations and Leah does a great job fleshing that out. My own observations areas follows:

  RFPs: They are usually badly written and contain many conflicting perspectives and wants. RFP by Committee is what we call a document like that. One can often see the warring factions at a school within the RFP document. We are always willing to enter an RFP process but more often than not after we read the RFP we decline.

  RFI: This document requires the same amount of work as an RFP without any promise that the school is even going to take action. While I understand that the buyer is using this process as a way to educate themselves on their options surely this form of document need not be as labour intensive as a RFP. I have had more than enough experiences where our hard work on an RFI was integrated into the buyers strategic plan and the task of implementing that plan was kept in-house. You end up feeling like you helped the buyer think about and plan their future only to be left at the doorstep and not even thanked.

  Prices: If you create custom packages for your clients it is really hard to give them the pricing upfront when you don't know what it is they want. I often find myself talking to a buyer who says: How much is it? My first thought is ... How much is what? We do a lot of things. I don't need the buyer to tell me what their budget is upfront. We price our products and services in a fair manner and can explain why we price the way we do. However, if our products and services meet their needs then I would like the buyer to work with us to help create a pricing model that fits the resources they have and the way they want or need to do business.

  Decision-makers: One of the most frustrating things is when an assistant to the decision-maker is tasked with contacting all the vendors and sussing out who might be a good candidate to invite into the buying process. Ditto for academics or IT staff who are not fully involved in the decision-making process. When my people engage these types of contacts in a conversation they often find that the person they are talking to can't answer most of the questions we might have. So, why do these types of callers end the call asking for a proposal and pricing when they have not been able to articulate what they want and their specific requirments? If you are contacting a vendor to make a purchase it would really help if the person doing the contacting fully understood what their needs were and any other related item. That would save everyone a lot of time.

  Just Say No: If you decide that a vendor does not meet your requirements just tell them. We don't like to keep pestering you on the off chance that you might be still interested and you probably have enough to do without having to field calls and emails from these nagging vendors.

  Discussion Lists: Most vendors refrain from contributing to academic discussion lists because there is always someone standing on their pedestal waiting to rain down fire and brimstone on we evil vendors. A few months ago I broke my rules and submitted a comment offline to a few of the people engaged in a discussion on the topic of cheating in online courses on a prominent academic discussion board. We had just tackled this issue with a client and I felt I had a contribution to make. One person responded with all the fire and brimstone they could muster and insulted me personally. Another person responded with compliments and the suggestion that I post my remarks to them on the full discussion board. No chance man. Not if i am going to be publicly abused.

  Sponsoring Academic Conferences: We get called all the time to sponsor a conference. We rarely do. My experience in the past at this company and at a previous company has been abysmal. Either the vendors are placed in a far-off location with no incentive for the conference attendees to search them out or the attendees treat the vendor representatives as if they are a virus. I remember attending a major conference with my previous employer where the vendors we actually placed in a hall in the basement of another building. We had three visitors to our booth during a three day conference. All the other vendors shared that pain and were at the point of mutiny. We attended another conference focused on eLearning and were amazed to see how behind the curve the conference presentations were. Even more amazing was the fact that out in the vendor area I saw many veteran colleagues from the eLearning world who had between them maybe 200 years of eLearning experience. if the people attending that conference really wanted to learn about how to develop successful online learning programs they would have been better served by simply talking to the vendors. Vendors are mostly really good people who want to help the buyers. Also, they won't bite you and you won't fall ill by talking to them.

  Stopping now before it becomes a rant.