Leading a successful conference call isn’t just about getting a reliable conferencing service and calling into the conference. There are things that you have to do before it’s ever time to call into your conference to ensure that it will be successful. As a leader, it’s important that you do three things well before your next conference: pick a good date and time, get people to attend, and present compelling and thought provoking information.
Here are some tips from our e-book How to Plan, Setup, and Execute a Successful Webinar.
Pick the Right Date and Time
You’ll never be able to pick the perfect time for everyone but what we suggest is picking a time that is good for most of your participants. We’ve found that the most popular times are right before or after lunch (10 AM and 1 PM in respective timezones) and meetings held on Tuesdays or Thursdays get the best turnouts. Avoid Monday meetings unless you need to get everyone ready for the week.
Send a Better Email Invite
The easiest and most common method to achieve getting the word out about your meeting is to send an email blast or calendar item directly to participants. The problem with this is that your emails will often get buried in other requests and notifications. Make your subject lines quick and focus on the who, what, and when. A good example: Marketing Webinar Featuring Bob - The Greatest Marketer Ever.
Bonus: Use registration pages and know who is going to attend your event. You can also use the system to send out reminders so that people remember to attend your event.
Create Great Presentations
You can pick the most popular time of day and send out the greatest invitation known to the invite world but if you aren’t presenting something of worth then you won’t get people to stick around for very long. Content is what your participants came to the presentation for, but there’s a fine line between too much and not enough information on your slides. Keep the text to display to a minimum and use visuals to make your points. Remember the 10 / 20 / 30 rule from Guy Kawasaki - no more than ten total slides, twenty minutes of presenting, and thirty point font for your slides(to keep you from cramming too much information on a slide.)
Leading a conference call is more than just using the mute button when you should and sticking to your agenda. It’s about what you do to plan the call, how you get people to participate, and presenting information your audience wants to hear.
You can get more great webinar tips by downloading and reading our ebook.