Until recently, purchasing a new technology solution involved lots of phone calls and an on-site visit from the vendor for long days of meetings with PowerPoint slide presentations and live demos. Oh, the good old days. Now, with a global pandemic and government orders to quarantine or stay at home, many of us are taking a crash course in how to work from home and have meetings using new tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and others.
Online collaboration and presentation technologies have been around for many years, of course. At Novarica, we’ve been using online collaboration tools since before I came on board in 2013. We also have participated in hundreds (yes, hundreds) of vendor presentations and demos in recent years as part of our research and when advising our solution provider clients. In that time, we’ve seen many good presentations, but just as many bad—and even a few ugly ones. When it comes to vendor presentations and demos, “We know a thing or two, because we’ve seen a thing or two.”
Online presentations and demos have their challenges. Despite the recent popularity of Zoom, tools like this are poor substitutes for an on-site meeting and can take longer due to technology glitches or other distractions. It’s easy to ask everyone in a physical conference room to mute and put away their mobile phones—not so much on a virtual session. There are also differences in how to effectively communicate so you can be certain that what was said was what was heard. Online presentations require a new set of best practices that differ in some ways from best practices for on-site meetings.
Online Best Practices Examples
While a complete look at best practices for online presentations and demos is beyond the scope of a blog post, here are some that we’ve learned at Novarica from past presentations and from hosting our series of Town Halls for both carriers and vendors:
- Slide Preparation: Less Is More
On presentation slides, it’s best to avoid dense content and to use only as many slides as are needed, and not one more. It’s difficult for an audience to stay focused for more than 90 minutes at a time, and in our world filled with screens, from cell phones to tablets to laptops, typical attention spans are measured in seconds.
- Meeting Preparation: Test, Test, Then Test Again
Make sure you test your meeting platform, including the presentation and demo. That includes both ends—make sure the receiving end has the technology, network, projection equipment, and audio that it needs in advance to minimize technology issues at meeting time. Use the 30 minutes before an online meeting to ensure the audio and video quality are what’s needed. If the video looks unacceptable, have your backup ready (see the next point). It’s okay to proceed without video as long as the audio is crisp, clear, and consistent (with a low level of lag), but if the audio isn’t working well, reschedule.
It’s also important to make sure that all demo servers are dedicated and high-performance. Insurers are particularly concerned right now about cloud performance, and vendors who have a poorly performing demo because “it’s the demo server” will just reinforce to an insurer that they aren’t ready for a fully virtualized environment.
- Meeting Initiation: Measure Backups Twice, Cut Online Presentation Once
A few items will help when starting the meeting. First, send the slide deck in advance, preferably a few minutes before the meeting time, so that it’s readily available to participants without them having to search through their email. Having the deck on their local workstation is a quick backup plan should your conferencing platform experience an outage or poor video sharing. As another backup, have a recorded video of any key demonstration elements ready on a shared file platform (like Dropbox, Box, etc.) to be streamed locally, if that’s appropriate.
- Meeting Protocol: Online Etiquette Expectations
It’s good to review the agenda, meeting etiquette, and any technical issues at the start of the meeting. A best practice I saw recently on a series of meetings was that a moderator reviewed some rules at the beginning: stay muted unless called on, how to use the “Raise Hand” and chat functions, and so on. Decide how you want to run the meeting: for presentations, all on mute, but for discussions or Q&A, maybe everyone is unmuted. Laying out the expectations in advance helps, and the moderator can help with keeping the meeting flowing, fielding questions from a chat window, and making sure everyone has an opportunity to go off mute for a comment or question. We’ve also learned from our Town Hall events that including a video stream of the speakers helps audience engagement: It seems more important to focus when participants can see the speaker as in in-person meetings.
These are only a few best practices—this list doesn’t discuss areas specific to online presentation for slide formats, effective messaging, or better organization of content. These tend to be best reviewed in the context of a specific presentation, and at Novarica we provide presentation critiques of online sessions for our solution provider clients on a regular basis. If you’re a solution provider, whether you’re a client or not, and are interested in learning more about how to optimize your online presentations, please contact me at [email protected].
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