#TDSU Episode 279:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:19 - Building Agent Fire

00:01:55 - Webinars for scrappy startups

00:03:05 - Structuring webinars effectively

00:04:08 - Engaging through webinars

00:05:14 - Growing webinar attendance

00:06:35 - Rob’s prerecorded webinar mishap

00:09:23 - Tailoring learning for real estate agents

00:10:21 - Repurposing webinar content

📺 Lifetime Value: Your Destination for GTM content

Website: https://www.lifetimevaluemedia.com

🤝 Connect with the hosts:

Dillon's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillonryoung

JP's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanpierrefrost/

Rob's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-zambito/

👋 Connect with Amanda Hershberger:

Amanda's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandahershberger/

[Amanda] (0:00 - 0:16)

The micro is probably where we need to start looking and going. We do record them. So we record our webinars, the office hours, we don't to keep that intimate to make sure come ask questions and not feel worried.

But we do put it in our help center as an article so that we can reference and share those.

[Dillon] (0:25 - 0:36)

What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with lifetime value where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:36 - 0:38)

Hey, how's it going everybody?

[Dillon] (0:38 - 0:41)

And we've got Rob with us. Rob, can you say hi?

[Rob] (0:42 - 0:43)

How are you?

[Dillon] (0:43 - 0:48)

I'm great. And we have Amanda with us. Amanda, can you say hi?

[Amanda] (0:48 - 0:49)

Hello.

[Dillon] (0:50 - 0:56)

Hello, hello. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Amanda, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Amanda] (0:56 - 1:13)

Sure. So I'm Amanda Hershberger. I'm a real estate agent that pivoted into customer success and have been in customer success for five years.

And for the last year and a half, I was the founding member of a customer success team. So building from the ground up for a real estate tech startup.

[Dillon] (1:14 - 1:14)

Which one?

[Amanda] (1:15 - 1:18)

It's Agent Fire. So it's a real estate website company.

[Dillon] (1:19 - 1:23)

Cool. Is that like a playoff angel fire? Yeah.

[Amanda] (1:25 - 1:38)

This is our CEO's baby. He loves that name. And it's actually a lot of fun. I will say it gets funny sometimes because we shorten it to AF.

And that doesn't always turn out to go well.

[Rob] (1:38 - 1:41)

All I know is you're probably putting out a lot of fires.

[Dillon] (1:44 - 1:54)

Heyo. Amanda, you know what we do here? We ask one simple question of every single guest.

And that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? So what is that for you?

[Amanda] (1:55 - 2:04)

Yes. So what's on my mind is webinars are not just for big teams. They're a great way for scrappy startups to plunge above their weight.

[Dillon] (2:04 - 2:06)

I love that. Where do you find the time?

[Amanda] (2:07 - 2:42)

That's the thing. It gives you time. So I am a tiny, tiny team.

There's two of us, over 2000 clients. And so it's kind of crazy sometimes. And so in order to reach our existing clients, webinars are how we do it.

And so I think a lot of people forget to use webinars when you're that tiny. And it seems like it's a lot of work, but it opens the door to cut down on support tickets and to get contact, get that community going. And I think people forget to use it.

[Dillon] (2:42 - 3:00)

And what is a lot of work to get it to do it the first time, right? But then it gets easier over time. It's probably do you have support or are you the one, you know, building the list and creating the infrastructure so that people can join and creating the content?

Like, are you responsible for all of that?

[Amanda] (3:01 - 3:04)

For me? Yes. But that doesn't necessarily have to be the case for everyone.

[Dillon] (3:04 - 3:05)

That's a lot.

[Amanda] (3:05 - 3:57)

But I think it doesn't have to be structured right away. You know, you have to have a client list somewhere of your current clients or work with your team to create, even if it's not everyone, a big list of people that you think would be helpful. And for us, we started with everyone.

We sent it to everyone. They have a chance to, you know, decline. They don't have to come.

But we started with some of the features we were listening to in support that they're getting a lot of tickets on. And we tried to come up with some fun structure. Luckily for me in my background, I had a lot of years of doing webinars for my brokerage before I went into working for the startup.

So I might have a leg ahead compared to some people that are starting from the beginning. But just having a fun title and having some direction and someone to help with the chat was where we started.

[Dillon] (3:58 - 4:07)

Right on. OK, so that's all. I love that little tactical piece at the end of like maybe what you need in order to execute on an MVP.

JP, why don't you jump in here?

[JP] (4:08 - 5:13)

Yeah, I think that, yeah, I really do agree with that last part with someone to manage the chat. I've seen some chat. Yes.

But I do think that this is like I'm thinking about this. There's something about this is very refreshing to me. You know, it's it sounds more modern, like as a way of meeting customers where they're at.

I've heard folks talk about wanting to create communities, wanting to do this sort of like this idea of like scaling or how do we do it? And I feel like webinars seem like a great way to be able to service like so many customers, but at once and also be able to still sort of build that community between them. So I think that that is I'm surprised I haven't heard about it more.

Maybe I haven't asked about it more or maybe people just aren't doing it. But I do think that that's a really great approach. I guess one question I have is what's like the average attendance of one of these webinars?

Yeah. 2000 clients.

[Amanda] (5:14 - 6:09)

So I mean, we've had pretty disengaged clients just because my team didn't exist. And so, you know, we were a small startup and they weren't used to hearing from us. But by our second time, we had over 100 attendees.

If we started at 50, we doubled it and went to 100. And it's just been growing from there. We've experimented with titles.

So we found that you need a really good title to catch them and get their attention because so much is competing with their time. But if we're listening to the clients and we know the type of features that can help and we always incorporate strategy into the training. So it's not just a how to.

We can also have a discussion on the strategy behind what our clients are doing, what we're suggesting. And I think that helps with attendance, too, because they're not just here to sit and learn. We're doing that and then we're getting their gears going to think about how to actually.

[Dillon] (6:10 - 6:33)

And I think that you need that now, like we're hearing that a lot more, even just customer success in general, it can't just be about the features. It's got to be about the way it impacts and builds into the or slots into the workflow of the customer. Wow.

100 by your second webinar. That's fantastic. I had a question that is now escaping me.

So, Rob, I will finally let you speak.

[Rob] (6:35 - 6:48)

Funny story. My first time running webinars, they were made to look live and they were not live. Robert.

Robert. I know.

[JP] (6:49 - 6:49)

Robert.

[Rob] (6:51 - 6:53)

Look, I was breaking.

[Dillon] (6:53 - 6:54)

You sent them to a YouTube page?

[JP] (6:55 - 6:56)

This is nasty work.

[Rob] (6:56 - 7:40)

No, no. This is peak nasty work. This is peak nasty work.

So it was 2016. I was breaking under the pressure of a growing customer base. And my friend said, hey, I've got this webinar platform here.

Look, it even has a little ticker. You can show like how many people are supposedly in the webinar. He sets it up for me and I was like, all right, I got to do this.

It was a prerecorded webinar. We ran it for like two months and we had customers like, okay, A, your UI has changed. This is not correct.

And B, this is the same one I saw last time. This is exactly the same. So don't do that.

I don't recommend it. I don't recommend it.

[Dillon] (7:40 - 7:48)

That's a positive signal, though. They came back. They wanted to watch it a second time or they wanted more content, they thought.

[Rob] (7:49 - 9:22)

So a mix, a mix. So I think you're bringing up the right question though, right? Because there's a couple of things that I was trying to solve.

I was trying to solve not only bandwidth, but I was trying to solve adoption primarily and later on like retention and expansion. But there were some hard parts, right? It was really hard to get attendance up, to get engagement up, to get the customers to retain the information.

A lot of people, they'd just like join the actual webinars that we did later on. Like they would just join on their commute or something. They weren't paying attention or like while they were like getting their kids dressed or whatever.

I did learn that there are better webinars and there are worse webinars. Some of the better ones, the ones that are the ones that they're spicy, they're engaging, they are entertaining. They've got somebody like JP to lead if possible.

And they're gamified, which is fun too. Like they've got Q&A, right? Things that actually force the audience to engage.

So it's not just like a megaphone. And the biggest thing I learned is like, you know what I wasn't doing? I wasn't just stopping to ask my customers their preferred method of learning.

And that was really dumb. So like what I ended up finding was that a lot of them came from backgrounds. They were like, I wish we just had like a course we could just follow.

And I was like, oh, great. Instead of a webinar, I'll actually build like this learning management system. They had a course, they could get certification, stuff like that.

They could get quizzed. So there were a lot of ways that we leveled up from this like really terrible way that we started. But the key takeaway for me was like, just ask your customers how they like to learn.

So I'm curious just from the group or specifically Amanda, what you've seen to get people engaged.

[Amanda] (9:23 - 10:21)

That's so funny that you bring that up because with real estate agents, it's the opposite. Like they are on the road all the time. And so they don't want to sit at a course.

And so we found that if we offered these, even if they were driving, like they were at least showing up and coming. So that's why we've been doing a lot more of like short term videos that they can like watch on the go and these webinars. But the big thing for us is there were so many just random general questions being asked that we actually expanded it into doing office hours to a more intimate version and then the more formal webinar.

And so it was a really good time of experimentation. Like we have clients that really want to learn. They really want to be involved.

Our setup is different than a lot with smaller monthly payments. So we can't do a lot one on ones. And so this opened the door to like, how do we get this information to them in a way that isn't going to take too much bandwidth?

And so that's where we ran into the webinars and even some smaller office hours to do more of these group sessions.

[Dillon] (10:21 - 11:12)

I remember what my question was, and maybe you just mentioned it and I missed it. But are you saving these and then breaking them down into like micro videos to share in other ways or adding to your knowledge base? That's one strategy I've taken in the past is like, how can I take the old repurposing of content strategy?

How can I take a single effort recording this thing and turn it into multiple pieces of content that serve us in multiple ways? Not only that, but when it's micro, it's super easy to solve for Rob's problem where his UI kept changing. So you could any, if your button changed or the interface changed on one specific feature, it was very easy to swap that out versus an entire webinar like Rob had to do.

[Amanda] (11:12 - 11:55)

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a great question.

I think the micro is probably where we need to start looking and going. We do record them. So we record our webinars, the office hours.

We don't to keep that intimate to make sure come ask questions and not feel worried. But we do put it in our help center as an article so that we can reference and share those. And then our thought is like, we will rotate through those conversations every so often so that it always stays at least somewhat fresh, even if things have changed a little bit.

And we also include lots of links to guides and articles. So even though it is a long video, anything that was talked about in that webinar is going to have additional resources in that article so they can jump around or watch the whole thing.

[Dillon] (11:56 - 12:26)

Amanda, that is our time. I think this is fantastic. And I love the tips you gave, how it is you can get started with low impact and high value on the other end.

I would love for you to come back and tell us how this has evolved over time in a couple of months, how you're using it, or maybe some other strategies you've started to implement because it sounds like you like to innovate. So we are out of time for now, but please come back in the future and tell us more about it. For now, we do have to say goodbye.

[Amanda] (12:26 - 12:27)

Yes, thanks for having me.

[VO] (12:33 - 13:09)

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