Systems Thinking: How To Pull Off Outstanding Webinars

Giving top-quality webinars doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a complex system that takes a lot of practice to grow it into something sexy.

Is your company willing to put in the effort to give a killer webinar? If you approach it with a systems-thinking perspective, I think one can make it all worthwhile. Here’s how:

1. Keep webinars small by limiting the number of attendees
2. Give webinars more frequently (i.e. iterate often)
3. Improve each iteration, adding only a little complexity at a time

These are the steps I’ll be taking to turn our webinars from a lead-generating machine to a lead-converting machine.

How did I come up to this set of steps? That’s what I’ll be going through. It comes down to Gall’s Law for complex system, and differentiating the Learning Zone from the Performance Zone. These come into play to get good at any complex high-stakes performance.

Last week the company I work for just held their largest webinar, and I was the presenter. This wasn’t my first webinar and I’ve spoken to large audiences before. Despite this, it wasn’t the success I was hoping for. For one thing, we encountered numerous technical issues. Looking back, I could have given a great webinar had I established the right system that lead up to it, and I’d like to share this insight with you. What’s more, even if we avoided all technical difficulties, I’d still be dissatisfied with the content of our webinar. We’ve been stagnant, and I think we can deliver much more effective webinars if only we experimented, while mitigating the risks — more on that later.

A system is fragile if its subsystems aren’t fully tested. To minimize risks, make many small-scale iterations. That will let you incrementally build up to a well-functioning complex system, much like the startup philosophy of “Iterate Fast and Release Often”. The benefits are two-fold:

1. Eliminate chances that subsystem failures come at a high cost.
2. It allows you to try things to ultimately deliver a much more effective webinar.

“The system of hosting a webinar” was destined for failure due to its complexity and its reliance on unreliable subsystems. The way to solve this problem isn’t to just “try harder”, “do your best”. I don’t believe that’s the root cause of the problem. We rehearsed the broadcast a few times and we still ran into issues. It’s like developing a whole new software product, or a whole new car. If you start from scratch, you can do all the testing you want but when the rubber hits the road a complex product will invariably fail.

By Gall’s Law, the Hiccups Were Guaranteed

We wanted to host a webinar with all sorts of new equipment, and just about everything had problems:

• New webinar hosting service: While it was the moderator had used it in the past, they have had issues with it and are still getting used to its interface. We accidentally broadcast someone’s face instead of my computer screen for the first 5 minutes… Awkward.
• New speaker-microphone setup: The speaker and microphone interfered with each other, making it hard for attendees to follow along.
• First time giving live demonstrations: This actually worked out fine, surprisingly. Murphy’s law spared me there.
• New camera: Its auto-focus functionality didn’t work right. About half of my screen-time was out of focus.
• Many more “first times”: I’ll spare you the details, but the point is there were many potential points of failure.

We were ambitious with this one. We had a lot of attendees, and as good as our intentions might have been, all this “new stuff” made it all more likely to fail regardless of all the trial runs and the preparation. We hadn’t paid attention to Gall’s Law (excerpt from Personal MBA):

All complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked. Complex systems are full of variables and inter-dependencies [ … ]

You will never be able to anticipate all of these inter-dependencies and variables in advance, so a complex system built from scratch will continually fail in all sorts of unexpected ways.

This is why a better approach is to bake in multiple smaller iterations that lead up to this big webinar. By hosting smaller webinars, we limit the potential damage it can cause. And by making them less ambitious (shorter, and crammed with less live demos), we limit the number of things that can go wrong during those webinars, and we grow from there.

This is all nice and dandy, but the reality is that it’s not always as easy as just saying “Do more smaller webinars”. There is a cost to doing more webinars, and that cost needs to be justified.

Besides, the main reason we host webinars is to capture leads. Once captured, it doesn’t matter that much how good the webinar is. Of course, we won’t just broadcast garbage, but if I want the company to improve their webinar, I need a compelling reason for upper management to invest in the system I’m proposing.

Finding our Return On Investment Elsewhere

Hosting a webinar for 10 people or for 100 people costs the same for the company. To maximise our ROI we’d want the maximum number of sign-ups for the webinar (signups = leads = potential sales). So it seems like I’m being pulled from both ends: I want as many signups as possible but I want to host smaller webinars. Can I have my cake and eat it too?

I think so. We could limit the number of places in a webinar. We can even advertise this limit on the signup page since exclusivity improves people’s perception of a product or service. (Kissmetrics does this, and they know a thing or two on giving webinars…) Thus, we get more iterations without hurting the number of leads. We can still serve everyone by simply split the signups into multiple cohorts.

Nonetheless, it’s still more effort for me to host it multiple times. Again with the ROI: How can we make it worthwhile? What can else can we gain from multiple iterations other than dealing with technical difficulties which should only be temporary anyways?

How about continuous improvement of lead conversion?

When a lead attends a webinar, we have an opportunity to sell them on our product or company. Our salespeople and sales director seems to care only about having that list of leads to hit up. But in my opinion, dismissing the webinar, where we have at least 30 minutes of their precious attention, is a waste of an opportunity to woo the prospect.

So what’s stopping me? To put it bluntly, fear of failure. We host webinars only once in a while, and every time we do it’s a high-stakes situation, with too many attendees to take risks.

When I look at how others in our industry are hosting webinars, I can see we can definitely step our game up. We can at least match them, but perhaps we can even surpass the big players. For example:

A webinar is a live event. But nobody in our industry really treats it like it is:

• Our webinars have always had the same format: 25 minutes of presentation, followed by a Q&A session. No questions are answered during the first 25 minutes. We might as well prerecord it and just press play it back on the day of…
• At the Q&A session barely anyone sends us questions. We haven’t warmed up the audience.
• Questions must be submitted in a private message to us. Then we pick and choose the ones we want to answer.
• No attendee is able to communicate with other attendees.

That makes for a dull, unengaging event… It’s like a YouTube video with disabled ratings and commenting. I hate it. So why do we restrict interaction? Because we’re not sure we’ll be able to deal with a difficult question. We’ve had competitors attend and throw us a curve ball. And with a large audience, badly handled questions feel catastrophic, so we’d rather eliminate the risk.

Managing PR in real-time at a webinar is a skill that can be learned, if only we are given the chance for deliberate practice. We can try different things and innovate, if only we would find ourselves in situations where mistakes are acceptable.

Creating Low-Stakes Islands in an Otherwise High-Stakes Sea to Allow Ourselves to Reach the Learning Zone

If we are constantly in a high-stakes situation, all we will do is try our best and that will actually stunt our improvement. I found this TED Talk to be an idea worth sharing:

The most effective people and teams in any domain do something we can all emulate. They go through life deliberately alternating between two zones: the learning zone and the performance zone.

The learning zone is when our goal is to improve. Then we do activities designed for improvement, concentrating on what we haven’t mastered yet, which means we have to expect to make mistakes, knowing that we will learn from them. That is very different from what we do when we’re in our performance zone, which is when our goal is to do something as best as we can, to execute. Then we concentrate on what we have already mastered and we try to minimize mistakes.

By constantly hosting webinars with a large attendance, we constantly find ourselves in a high-stakes situation. I like the way Briceño worded it:

We can create low-stakes islands in an otherwise high-stakes sea. These are spaces where mistakes have little consequence.

And so, by hosting multiple smaller webinars, we give ourselves a chance to improve our webinars beyond what anyone else does in our industry.

Nobody else allows their attendees to ask a question live. We would be the first ones to do this and to truly take advantage of the fact that a webinar is a live event.

There are other things that can be done to improve our webinars. For example, keeping the camera on while I speak to my audience rather than only showing slides is perhaps another way of making things more interesting and relatable.

There are many more ideas to try. The point is: If webinars are important to your company, you can be strategic about it. It’s a complex system, and it can be fragile. Subsystems must be fully tested, and we can do this by making many small-scale iterations. Not only does this keep failures manageable, but it will give you room to breath, to try things and ultimately, to deliver a much more effective webinar.