Webinars: Behind the Scenes: Co-Hosting My First Co-Hosting experience with Salesforce
There are numerous components to running a successful event,
from choosing the right talent; to driving registrations and getting people to
attend; to creating engagement with attendees via polls, Q&As and content
downloads; to scoring leads; to meaningful follow-up after the webinar.
Join us with our journey, as we share a behind-the-scenes
look at my first-time at co-hosting a Webinar.
This opportunity to co-host a Webinar came at an apt time.
As is my practice, every quarter there HAS
to be an achievement – Either in the form of Salesforce event promotions or a
blog or Trailhead Badges. And I did not have anything that I was currently
working on and that made me irritable & edgy. This opportunity gave me a
way to channel all my energies into one direction; To transform boredom into
productivity and to channel anger and restlessness into something constructive.
I was super excited to work with Shashank Srivatsvaaya, our
Developer Relations Manager, Salesforce and Satya Sekhar – Trailhead Developer,
Salesforce.
I had met Shashank during one of his presentations in a
Developer’s Meet Up in Bengaluru – He spoke about Scratch Orgs and some of the
other new fantastic features from the new release. Shashank needs no
introduction as his contribution to the Salesforce community is widely known.
He is a Speaker, blogger, Event organizer, Senior Developer Advocate and an Evangelist.
Little did I know that I would get a chance to work with one
of the veterans from the Salesforce brood. Call it Serendipity!!
Prerequisites
Webinars are not as easy to conduct as they look like. A lot
of hardwork and efforts go into it. And when I worked with this amazing Team I
got to know how much grueling backbreaking work it is to bring a quality
webinar to the community. It’s not a job, it’s a huge responsibility.
·
Webinar
Topic: Choosing a right topic is as crucial as the webinar itself as most
of us would see what the topic is before we hit on the ‘Register” button.
·
Timing:
Timing is everything. Ensuring to host the webinar at a time time convenient to
the audience becomes important to have attendees.
·
Content:
Choosing the right content becomes crucial and chooses the content which is
beneficial for them.
·
Duration:
The average engagement time with a webinar is 60 minutes.
·
Webinar
Formats: Deciding on the Format of the Webinar: Webinars can be executed in
many ways – You can opt to do a Live Webinar or pre-record it. However, for
this webinar Shashank decided to give the webinar a little twist to it to break
the monotony; He chose a Role-Play Pattern.
·
Finding a
Speaker who has communication Skills.
·
Scheduling
Dry Runs: Practice makes Webinars perfect.
·
Demo:
Preparing the demos around the features covered in the webinar.
·
Slides:
Content creation.
Hassle Free Commute
My travel, Stay and commute were hassle free with everything
taken care of by the Salesforce team. With all the accommodation and travel
hassles taken care of, all I had to do now was to focus on my webinar scripts
and give my 500%.
PREPARATIONS:
A List of Topics that we were supposed to cover in the
webinar was shared with me.
Also Shashank and Satya were patient enough to take me
through how and where to find these topics in the release notes; (It is easy to
get lost in the innumerous pages of the Salesforce release notes).
I was asked to read through the release notes around these
topics and was encouraged to come up with any doubts or questions I might have
if I had difficulties in understanding some of the topics covered as they were
purely technical in nature.
The next day I spent reading the release notes. To be frank,
I can finish reading a Sidney Sheldon novel or any book on fiction in an hour,
but when it comes to release notes, I get lazy and never get to finish reading
the whole stack of the release notes that folks at Salesforce spend hours
putting the content together for us.
Links to some of the previous Webinars conducted was shared
with me to get me familiarized with the way Webinars were conducted.
I religiously did my homework reading all that I was asked
to and using a voice recording app recorded my voice, a small mock-up of a one
minute introduction and sent it to Shashank and Satya to give them a heads-up
about how I would sound on the mike and based on what they would hear, should
they have any second thoughts about replacing me with someone better. (Fingers
& Toes Crossed. Gulp...)
To make the Webinar a little interesting and adding that
extra-edge, Shashank decided on a Role-play pattern for the webinar which made
it interesting for the listeners as well as the participants. The format was a
Consultant asking a Developer questions around some of the challenges faced by
them and also what new features Summer ‘ 18 release has for them to make the
Developer’s lives easier.
The next step was the Dry-Run sessions were scheduled.
The more you practice the less the chances for things going
wrong. Even if you forgot your lines, your brain would automatically pick-up those
lines from the previous practice sessions.
Shashank wanted the conversation to be more spontaneous to
break the monotony and to ensure that the webinar did not sound too slack.
Testing the Waters
We did a first dry run via Google hangouts to check if Satya
and I gel as a team and would work together. Satya Sekhar had already hosted many
webinars and has conducted many online Salesforce training sessions but this
was my first webinar. His experience and my quirkiness worked like magic!
Challenges:
Internet Connectivity
Issues – Just as the “Dry-Run” scheduled time was approaching my internet
decided to act-up. I started having internet connectivity issues. The very
first day I logged in with both my phone and the desktop, not to take any
chances and ended up hearing my own voice echoing; it was simply the technology
at fault. Shashank simply smiled and asked me to logout of any one of the
devices. And at once my nervousness disappeared. And once I connected via one
device things looked well, Of course for me.
Quiet Rooms: Finding
a quiet room which is less frequented and available to avoid disturbances is
always a challenge.
Working from
different Locations
Time Constrains
Demos: And like
most platforms technology comes with their own faults; If you are in IT you
would have heard “…But it worked perfectly well yesterday!!” phrase way too often.
Sometimes the Demos don’t go as planned. It’s like they have a mind of their
own!!
Precautions
All Webinars hosted by Salesforce are recorded and made
available to the community in general. All sessions are recorded which means
there is no scope for goof-ups, as the recorded Webinars go directly to the
Salesforce Repository & this is etched in history for years to come.
Also, Webinar means no Face-To-Face with the audience; and this
means that the only way you can connect with your audience is only via your
voice and the slides that you share on the screen. Therefore the communication
needs to be impeccable with no slurring or usage of fillers or crutch words.
Voice should be loud enough but not at screeching decibels and words to be
spoken with utmost clarity.
Crutch words are basically fillers that we use in between sentences
when a speaker is trying to figure out what to speak next, or how to continue,
in other words, crutch words are verbal tics.
Linguists call these crutch words as fillers. Sometimes
they're also called discourse markers, pause fillers, or hesitation forms.
A filler word is any meaningless sound, word, or phrase used
during speech to fill silence.
Examples of some crutch words are as follows:
·
Uh…
·
Um….
·
Er…
·
Aaaa…
·
Like…
·
Okay…
·
Right….
·
You know…
·
Hmmm…
·
So….
Also, the sound system would pick up the tiniest of sounds
from the background. For instance I am old school, and had written notes on
stacks of paper which I had numbered such as : START – INTRO, 1, 2 , 3 , and FINISH which had my introduction
notes, the sequencing of the questions, and how I would end the conversation towards
the end of the webinar. During one of the Dry runs, Shashank who has hosted many
Webinars & In-person sessions during Developer Meetups, decided to hear us
practice via earplugs, as a participant, just the way how the webinar attendees
would do. And this proved to be very insightful as he found that those
paper-shifting made a lot of noise. Being a veteran and with his expertise on
the subject matter, he gave a lot of tips on things that we needed to be
careful about not only the background noise, but also on punctuation, pause and
spacing between the sentences.
When you do not pause at the right place, the whole meaning
of the sentence changes!
He also gave us heads-up on how we sound, where to pause and
how to make the Webinar more “Conversational” and sound more natural, rather
than someone feeling that you are reading a script. Though, both Satya and I
were indeed reading from our scripts, but it had to sound as though we are
conversing naturally and not sound robotic.
I flew in to Salesforce Office one day prior to the webinar to
practice, this time face to face, instead of google hangouts. We were good with
the scripts-practice, but we were still missing one crucial component. Since
the Slides are Demos were still a Work-In-Progress, there was a need to do a
complete dry-run along with the slides and the Demo to understand which demo
comes after which question, duration of the demo and which slide comes after
which conversation. Being in the office and practicing helped a lot.
Did you know that Salesforce has a set of colors that we
have to use? And each color represents a department or a particular product? Or
the fact that if you are using the color blue, you need to use the right shade
of blue from the palette? There was a good amount of time invested in editing
the slides to get the right font, images, background color, highlighting and
even the sequencing of the slides.
What Worked For Us
Team Spirit: We worked as
a "TEAM" towards a common goal of hosting a quality Webinar with
minimal mistakes and ensuring people who registered for the webinar are not
disappointed.
Working on Crutch Words: We
worked on our “Fillers”; We marked that common spot where we would usually go
wrong and focused/practiced much around areas where we were more prone to
making mistakes.
Rehearsals.
Improvising: Working and
improvising on the Script to increase spontaneity & X-factor.
Eye Contact: A lot of Eye contact
to make it sound more conversational than reading a script.
Homework: Individual preparation before
the joint rehearsals.
Captain Cool: Shashank’s calm and composed nature helped
us relax immensely and reduced the pressure of performance. A leader is someone
who can bring out the best in people and in Shashank, I found his patience and
the way he communicated the places where we needed to work on in a manner that
is not offensive, made us give our best!! And the result is a smooth –sailing
Webinar J
A
pressurized mind crumbles under pressure, while a creative mind works its best
when given freedom & steered in the right direction. I guess it’s all
thanks to our Captain Cool Shashank
Srivatsvaaya.
Staying Calm & Focused:
Slowing down while talking is important. Sometimes when we are anxious or
nervous, unconsciously the tempo raises and the pitch while talking accelerates
resulting in conversations sounding like disclaimers towards the end of an
advertisement. If you pay attention to any advertisement, let’s say an
advertisement for Mutual Funds, the whole advertisement is smooth and slow but
towards the end, the disclaimer “...are
subject to market-risks” is read out so fast that as an audience you cannot
make out what is actually being said. The same happens during a webinar. The
key is to stay calm and focused and talk slowly but clearly.
Sign Language: We decided
on a Thumbs-Up Sign to signal the each other to move on to the next set of
question. Sometimes you do not know if the person is just taking a pause before
continuing or is done with the explanation. A Thumbs-Up signal made my life
much easier to understand and I relied on it to wrap up the previous conversation
and move to the next question.
Comfort-Level with Team:
The comfort-level that you share with your team also makes an impact to the
final outcome. I am fortunate to have worked with some of the finest brood from
Salesforce who made me feel comfortable, despite their seniority and treated me
as an equal; my voice was heard, I was involved throughout the project and
Transparency was maintained. The entire programme was carried out with utmost
sincerity.
Our Team
Our Team: Shashank Srivatsvaaya, Satya Sekhar, Vishwas Vikas and me.
With our Captain Cool Shashank Srivatsvaaya Developer Relations Manager - Salesforce
With Satya Sekhar - Our Tralhead Developer
I hope the webinar was insightful and you enjoyed attending
it as much as I did co-hosting it.
The link to the Webinar recording will be made available soon at the
same link that you used to register for the event:
Want To Be a Speaker?
Come join the party!! If you are interested in becoming a
speaker for the upcoming Webinars, the Team is very much open to the idea and would
love to accommodate you!! Interested folks from the community can reach out to
Shashank on bit.ly/webinarinapac or email him at
ssrivatsavaya@salesforce.com
.
My take Away from the Webinar
I received a Salesforce Hoodie from Shashank, which is now my prized possession & I guard it with my life; After all, I earned it!!One other important take away from this Webinar was that my mother was happy that I invested my time learning something new. She’s a tough boss to please and doesn’t approve me wasting time. All I can say is I cannot be Thankful enough for this experience. It gave me a sense of achievement.
Picture with Maa – All Smiles!
