For most businesses, getting away to attend a conference can be time consuming, costly, and difficult. First there’s the travel, the being away from the office, and the pile of fires to deal with when you get back.
Almost everyday, vendors, organizations, and media outlets host online webinars. These webinars are generally designed around educating partners and non-partners on services, products, and business practices.
With the wealth of knowledge that is being provided online, you could, at just about anytime provide training to your staff, without ever leaving the premises. The key to signing up and attending webinars is to make sure the content is relevant and that the information provided is not just an hour-long sales pitch.
It is best to research any potential webinar by visiting peer forums and asking questions to see if others have attended past webinars by the speaker or promoter. This is an important step to keep you from wasting time or giving up on future educational events based on a bad experience.
Once you have personally attended a number of satisfactory web events, you can assign employees the task of attending. This will not only benefit them, but it will also benefit the business by assuring that employees are keeping up with trends and changes in the industry.
If you have attended webinars in the past and have been discouraged based on the lack of content or incessant selling, now is a good time to give webinars a shot again. Vendors are spending more time, effort, and dollars on providing partners with educational material to drive additional sales.
Though the purpose of most of these vendor-sponsored webinars is to get partners to sell more products, the value of the material is not always based around this thought. Many vendors are finding webinars as a good way to interact and build relationships with their partners.
If you are very busy, keep a watch for web events that are presented around lunch, or at off peak hours. These events, often called lunch and learns, provide a good opportunity to get office staff together for education, even when busy days are abundant.
The biggest thing is to create a culture of education in your business. By doing this, you will have happier employees, and quite possibly bigger revenues.
