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2 More Reasons why QR Codes Suck…

Posted on April 20, 2011 by in Dave Cole

I cruised past David Wach’s Cellit marketing blog and found his article 11 Reasons Why QR Codes Suck … It definitely struck a chord since the last couple weeks at the Social Media Mastermind Orange County (you know, the SMMOC) QR codes have come up again and again. I know it’s a real estate heavy room, but the interest in QR codes seems misplaced to me. Maybe it struck me when I logged in to Twitter earlier today and saw this tweet RT’d by Matt Gallizzi (@mgallizzi): “Whoa! New York Times Magazine!”

Source – 11 Reasons Why QR Codes Suck

11. QR Codes make receiving simple content very difficult

10. QR codes lack strong trackability compared to text messaging

9. QR Codes lack Follow-Up

8. QR codes require mobile devices to stop being mobile

7. QR Codes can’t “go viral”

6. QR Codes remove brand association

5. QR Codes only work on smart phones with cameras

4. QR Codes take up a lot of space.

3. There is no standard for 2D Bar Codes

2. You can’t use QR Codes in television or radio.

1. People don’t know what QR codes are!

To add 2 points to the debate here (of which I’m in complete agreement – QR codes SUCK)…

12… There’s no context to what the recipient will receive. Even on the web, there’s a tacit agreement that if I click on a link ending in .pdf file, I’ll receive a PDF file. If I visit YouTube.com I’ll know I’m about to watch a video. If I click on an @username I’ll probably be heading over to Twitter. QR codes, on the other hand, have no contextual specificity, and as such leaves the consumer no information about what they’re about to receive. Will I get a contact card for the person I’m interacting with? A video “welcome message”? A coupon? A map? Without context, the QR code leaves the recipient complete at the mercy of what the person using the code wants to share.

13… There’s no way to replicate a QR code without a digital device. You can’t draw a QR code by hand, or scribble it out on a cocktail napkin in the middle of a networking party. Nearly any other marketing channel can be conveyed and captured by hand if need be – a website URL, an phone number, a text marketing campaign, a physical address, a coupon code, etc. But the QR code is the bastard step-child of print marketing + engineers. Almost all 2D mobile ads suffer from the same problem – except the most ubiquitous 2D barcode of them all – the UPC barcode. They realized that adding a set of numbers to the barcode would ensure that at least if the red laser couldn’t get it, a human could interact with the information.

Mobile is definitely the new frontier for social + marketing, but I just don’t think (nor want to support!) QR codes are the right way to get things done with this new medium. It’s what happens when a marketing exec has too many tequila shots with the head of a printer company and then does Jaeger bombs with a bunch of engineers.

Oh, and this was gonna be a comment on your blog, David, but your Captcha code seems to be broken… Or, at least wouldn’t play nicely with me…

Infusionsoft Raises Prices – Blames the Victim for the Crime?

Posted on April 14, 2011 by in Dave Cole

Infusionsoft LogoRecently, we’ve heard a lot of chatter from our customers about a new policy at Infusionsoft requiring the purchase of additional services to get started. At first I thought it was just an idle “add-on” – but their “Quick Start Bundle” is now a required service to get started. Now, I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – Infusionsoft is one of the best CRM platforms out there for information marketers and small businesses seeking a one-stop-shop for their online CRM / sales / marketing management. But, the Quick Start Bundle in question runs the rather outrageous price of $2,000.00.

Yes, that’s the number “2″ with 3 “0″s after it.

Assuming most people buy in to the $299 / month package, that’s the equivalence of 6+ months of service – due up front at the time of purchase. This isn’t a modest price hurdle – this is a brick wall in the middle of the 405 freeway.

Looking a little deeper, the program that they’re offering is designed to help new customers get up and running with IS quickly, and includes “Success Coaching”, 2 Campaign Configurations, and “Flex Blocks” of additional training. As best I can tell, this is about 15 hours of coaching & support services (and honestly I think I’m being a little generous here) which puts the average hourly rate of the value they’re providing around $130/hr. Maybe MAYBE you could say you’re getting 20 hours of service, which is the modest rate of $100/hr. And that’s certainly an acceptable rate for high-level service and campaign management – but as a required service this seems pretty absurd. And here’s the crazy part – I’ve been to on-site training at Infusion. It’s great. They really can help you with your marketing campaigns and it’s ABSOLUTELY worth the investment. It just shouldn’t be required to get in the door.

Roll of MoneyUltimately, here’s my problem with the offer: This feels like the victim is getting blamed for the crime. Namely, that Infusionsoft is so complex and the user interface is so unintuitive that they really believe this is a required value-add to the average new customer. However, as a member of the IS “cottage” community of developers and solutions providers, not only does this take away opportunity from our table, but it makes it remarkably difficult to justify sending customers to their door. No longer can a new business say “Yeah, $300 a month is a little pricey, but the features are well worth the investment” – now the argument is to take $2,300 out of pocket to get the ball rolling. In most instances, our customers turn to us to help them implement their technology solution, so now we’re forced to evaluate a whole range of alternatives.

I really do like Infusionsoft. From a development standpoint, their API is sound, their functionality (for instance, the ability to arbitrarily POST data to client sites or set up robust Follow Up Sequences) is great. But compare $2,300.00 with $99/month for 1ShoppingCart + $15/month for MailChimp + FREE for EventBrite and it gets a lot harder to say that new customers are getting the right bang for the buck.

When I look at things, here’s what I wished they had done: Raise prices 5% for ALL CUSTOMERS. Let’s just say (and I’m pulling these numbers out of thin air) they’ve got 7,000 customers paying an average of $300 / month… That means they’d be pulling down about $2.1 million / month… A 5% increase would amount to $15 per account, but would amount to an additional $105,000 of revenue per month. Which I’d argue could immediately go to paying someone a few grand to work on user interface and improving the obviousness of the user experience. Make things more obvious and intuitive and less cryptic, and suddenly users won’t NEED 15-20 hours of coaching to use their platform. It’ll just work.

We’ll keep pushing our clients to Infusionsoft, and we’ll keep supporting their technology as a service & solutions provider. But I just hope they knock this shit off – go back to letting people buy the service as it stands. Bump the price a little for everyone if you really want to invest in improving the interface and making working with the software easier for everyone. You’ll have customer love and a whole crop of new buyers jumping on board. </RANT>

CRM Round-Up Part 4: Pipeline Deals

Posted on January 24, 2011 by in Dave Cole

In the continuing series of CRM systems that we’re reviewing, we’ve already covered some of the CRM basics, 37 Signals’ Highrise, and Salesforce.com. For this next installment, I wanted to talk about one of the lesser-known CRM’s that we’ve looked at, called Pipeline Deals. I liked Pipeline for several reasons, but it has some limitations as well.

Pipeline Deals LogoPipeline Deals follows many of the techniques of the Salesforce.com style CRM, at a much much lower price point (as of this writing, about $15/user with a 30-day free trial available as well). Simply put, Pipeline Deals provides the basic tools that you’ll need to organize your sales pipeline, and is customizable enough to be specific for your business. You can add custom fields on to just about any of the pages, and adding that customization is easy enough (their administration settings are easier to manage than most of the “larger” CRM platforms). However, the customization is notable specifically because the basic deployment of Pipeline is pretty limited – customer fields and sales funnels start out stripped of too many extras.

Pipeline Deals screenshotWhat does all this mean for a seminar / information products business? Well, Pipeline is really built to support sales teams, and to that extent it’s not specifically a marketing support tool. Most of the clients that we work with are looking for a single platform to manage leads, prospects, customers, and JV deals all under one roof. Adopting Pipeline Deals isn’t that bad of an idea – but it’s important to realize you’ll need to also setup an email management tool, probably an event management tool (such as EventBrite), and probably a customer service & support portal as well (perhaps ZenDesk or GetSatisfaction).

Pro’s of Pipeline Deals

  • Cost effective: At $15/user/month, you can run a 2-3 person sales / customer tool for less than Highrise and much less than Salesforce.com
  • Customizable: You can tweak & tune the platform to work how you want. That includes things like deal fields, customer fields, etc. It’s pretty easy to setup rules and things like that in the administration tool.
  • Clean User Interface: If you like the clean, uncluttered look of Highrise but want a lot greater definition of detail when it comes to deals in your funnel, Pipeline is a great solution. Very attractive and intuitive interface.

Cons of Pipeline Deals CRM

  • Sales-Specific: Pipeline Deals is unapologetically a sales tool. It doesn’t include marketing, ecommerce, mass mailing, landing pages, etc. in its feature set. However, for sophisticated users, you can tie leads to your online prospect gathering activities, but it does require some technical know-how.
  • Requires focused use: To get the most from a strong sales CRM, you need to be conscious of the way that sales funnels and pipelines work. If you don’t keep your system organized, it can get out of control very quickly. So, if you’re dedicated to managing your incoming data, then Pipeline is great. But if you’re not dedicated to organization and management of your system, you might lose track of many of your prospects or leads.
  • One-to-One sales process: If you have large data lists that need to get organized, Pipeline may not be the tool for you. It’s a great platform for one-to-one sales; but if you’re managing hundreds or thousands of customers per sales agent / customer service agent – it’s just not built for that application.

Bottom Line

The bottom line about Pipeline Deals is that if you’re looking for a very affordable, attractive, and reasonably powerful sales CRM platform, Pipeline may do the trick. With the 30-day trial offer, it’s worth setting up an account and trying it out with a few test accounts. They’re constantly making updates to the platform, so keep an eye open on their blog and customer updates to see how they evolve over time. However, if you’re handling large volumes of customer leads & prospects and don’t have sales people to actually get to those people, Pipeline may just not be the right tool for your needs.

Microsoft Pushes in to the Cloud

Posted on January 18, 2011 by in Dave Cole

I make it a point to stay abreast of some of the moving targets in the world of “cloud” computing – and some of you have been reading my posts about CRM solutions for the seminar event industry. One of the remarkably absent participants is Microsoft. Perhaps it’s because we’ve known to just accept them as the “desktop” company that they don’t show up on a lot of radars – but I think that’s all going to change this year.

Microsoft Office 365 LogoThere are two major pushes that Microsoft is making in to the cloud that I think are particularly worth noting. The first one is their new online version of their ultra-popular Office suite, called Office365 - which takes direct aim at Google’s increasingly pervasive Google Docs suite. What makes the Microsoft offering very unique (and personally, very attractive), is the fact that you can work not only online, but that you’ll also soon be able to buy Office on a per-user, monthly subscription basis; with updates rolling in automatically as they’re released. I think for the seminar industry – when most companies focus on keeping their staffing lean and need to be highly mobile – this is going to be a major advancement. Now you’ll be able to host your entire company on an internet-based office suite, as well as being able to download locally-run software at a pretty affordable rate (well, once it comes out of private Beta). Plans for small businesses will start as low as $6/user/month.

The other interesting news article that I stumbled on is an announcement that the cloud-version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM is officially coming out of Beta. Obviously, since I’m in the midst of writing a multi-part series on CRM options for the seminar industry, this piqued my interest immediately.

Microsoft Dynamics LogoMicrosoft Dynamics has typically been extremely limited in the sense that it’s an installed CRM solution, not to mention that it’s typically been priced out of reach for the typical small, mobile business (like we find ourselves so frequently in the seminar and events industry). But now, with a hosted solution coming to market, suddenly MS Dynamics may be worth considering. From a features & benefits standpoint, MS Dynamics shares quite a bit with Salesforce.com. One of the main benefits of Salesforce right now is the investment they’ve made in their Chatter “social” tools – so if you’re willing to forgo those features; MS Dynamics may be a reasonable option. Just realize, that just like with Salesforce, MS Dynamics has a steep learning curve to get rolling and fully functional. However, the current price tag – $34/user/month (introductory rate) might be a helluva reason to consider Dynamics versus the similarly-featured Salesforce solution at $65/user/month.

I’d suggest keeping an eye on the range of solutions Microsoft is bringing online this year. It seems like Redmond is finally catching on that we’re not tethered to our desks any more – and competition for Google and other “cloud” players will probably be a good thing for all of us!

Event & Sales CRM Round Up: Part 3 – Salesforce.com

Posted on January 10, 2011 by in Dave Cole

Last week, I started a series of blog posts (Intro Here, Highrise review here) on the topic of finding the right CRM for your seminar or information sales business. So, continuing the series, I wanted to jump from one end of the spectrum – Highrise – to the other – Salesforce.com. Salesforce is perhaps best known in the CRM world for moving things to “the cloud” – or in more technical geek terms running your CRM as SaaS -Software as a Service. Just like Highrise – and actually all of the CRM solutions that I’ll personally recommend or review – you don’t install the software on your computer desktop. You log in to a website, and your solution lives online.

Salesforce LogoSo, what does Salesforce.com provide? Depending on which edition you’ve purchased, pretty much everything and the kitchen sink. SF is a fully loaded sales CRM solution, with an emphasis on B2B sales. Let me start by breaking down the editions a little bit. Salesforce.com comes in many flavors, from Contact Manager to Professional to Enterprise and beyond. Obviously, as you step from one edition in to the next you add more features, but you also can jump radically in price in the process. SF charges on a “per user” basis – which makes a lot of sense for its core business model. As a sales CRM, it’s definitely worthwhile to pay $125/month per sales user, assuming that your sales agents are generating thousands or millions of dollars of revenues for your business. Of course, for small companies, even 3-4 employees large (like many of the seminar industry businesses tend to be) – those costs can be mighty prohibitive. $500/month for CRM software = $6,000 a year… Or, at least enough money to make the average owner to stop and pause. So, to that extent, from a pricing standpoint, it’s good to know what features & services you will need early on and plan out how to justify the costs over the long run.

Internally, Salesforce has built a very predictable CRM model that will be familiar to most B2B sales agents instantly. The challenge, while talking about the seminar & events business, is to identify how to use the platform for the event / B2C (business to consumer) side of the equation. In the simplest terms, Salesforce breaks “contact” down in to a couple of places. First off, you have a ton of functionality in “Leads”, which are the people who you’ve had some sort of interaction with, but you haven’t really had a conversation. To this end, it’s fairly straightforward to setup a website landing form to capture lead data, or import leads lists from Excel spreadsheets.

Once your salespeople have touched base with a lead, and consider them a potential prospect for revenues, then that lead is “converted” to the following: An Account, a Contact, and (optionally) an Opportunity. That’s the standard CRM framework, and as I walk through some other CRM’s you’ll see that same L=>A+C+O model again. Again, realize that Salesforce is built for B2B sales, and you’ll see this makes perfect sense. The Account is the company that the person works for or represents. The Contact is the actual human being. The Opportunity is the business / revenue opportunity that is being pursued. With that framework in mind, the model makes great sense. Accounts can have many Contacts within them. And many Opportunities may arise. You might be able to sell widget X one month, and then Widget R the next. And you may know the president, purchasing agent, and operations manager all at the same company.

So, does this model work for seminar & event sales management (primarily a Business to Consumer transaction)? It can, but to a certain extent it requires changing the way you use the software. The easiest method to exploit the L=ACO model is to simply have the “Account” be the person’s name, and leave the contact as an irrelevant side-effect of the process. The Opportunity can be defined with a product (that’s one of the advanced settings you’d need to configure – your product offering sheet) so that all the agents in your company can know what business opportunity you’re working on. When used in it’s simplest way, Salesforce can definitely be a useful tool. The task method and reporting is absolutely a great asset for analytical business managers, because you can rapidly snapshot your entire business & sales pipeline and see how things are progressing.

Let me break down what I perceive as the pro’s for running your seminar business on Salesforce.com:

  • Highly expandable platform – You can basically make Salesforce in to whatever you need it to be. You can customize virtually every view and screen, create specialized reports, and add custom fields to use all throughout your application.
  • Excellent Customer service, training, and support community – I say “community” because Salesforce is big enough, and has been around long enough to foster an entire cottage industry of training and education, as well as a powerful 3rd party developer community. You have a sales rep you can call, you can tap in to technical support, and that giant dev community is constantly building new applications that you can add on to your platform – further expanding its value.
  • Excellent resource for Sales-Floor management – This is really the rub: If you’re running a structure sales floor with reps hitting the phones and/or going to customer sites, this is probably as close to the de facto industry standard as you’ll find. Experienced salespeople will be comfortable with the platform and can immediately start hitting their leads. However, if you’re like most seminar events firms, sales is just one facet of your customer relationship management activities.

Which leads us in to some of our cons against Salesforce, especially from a seminar events standpoint:

  • Probably too much – Salesforce has a significant learning curve, a lot of features, and a lot of things to pay attention to. Again, if you’ve got a dedicated sales manager and sales is your business, then Salesforce may be the right tool for you. But for most seminar events companies the software can require too much training time, too much management time, and not enough results for small businesses.
  • Requires Attentive Users – When you’re a sales manager or business owner making decisions based on the reports that you’re pulling from your sales CRM, about the last thing you need is to second-guess your own data. But, if your sales agents & users aren’t paying attention to how to properly use the system, then you’ll end up spending more time checking your data than using the information at hand to make smart decisions. If you do adopt Salesforce, be very clear to your sales people how you expect them to use the system, and show them the various fields that are critical.
  • Can get expensive – If you’re running a 3-4 personal seminar company, bearing the cost of $2-3k quarterly bills for CRM software can hurt. One of the challenges of Salesforce is that you can’t have different employees with different degrees of usage. It’s all or nothing. So if you have 2 sales people who want the advanced features of the next best edition, all 5 of your employees have to come along for the ride.

All told, I’m a huge fan of Salesforce.com (you might not have caught that in this article, but it’s true). However, for this particular industry space, and for our average client size, and for the purposes of managing complex events and simple sales transactions – is SF right for you? My general guess is no. Seminar businesses need a B2C oriented platform, lower pricing, and an easier way to integrate with marketing & promotional activities.

Stay tuned for more updates on this series of articles, as well as some new topics that we’ll be sharing soon. Thanks for visiting Propel Point!

Event & Sales CRM Round Up, Part 2

Posted on January 7, 2011 by in Dave Cole

Yesterday, I posted about how we were going to walk through some of the options that you might be facing when deciding a CRM or customer management solution for your seminar business. Over the course of the next few days & weeks, I’m going to delve deeper in to some of those platforms. Today, I want to cover one that we use in house – but it’s probably not right for your seminar business – 37 Signals’ Highrise.

Highrise LogoHighrise is a straightforward CRM – taking out a lot of the fluff and leaving behind only a barebones set of resources to manage your client relationships. But, in keeping things simple, they’ve created a pretty remarkably easy to use platform to maintain a contact manager, track deals, and coordinate communications with clients & prospects.

The foundation of Highrise is the ease of use. It’s unbelievably easy to add a contact, write some notes, and save his or her contact details. It’s also easy to create a “deal”, add some details about it, and create notes as the deal progresses. The snapshot “activity” view when you log in is a handy resource and can make it easy to see the moving opportunities and discussions throughout the organization.

However, Highrise fails for complex CRM management precisely because it doesn’t do a lot of things. It’s ease of use and clean user interface also means that some very fundamental stuff is stripped out from the sales and customer management platform. Think of Highrise more like a company rolodex than a sales CRM platform.

A few notable features Highrise is lacking:

  • Inability to organize deals… Once you create a deal, it’s there. It can be pending, won, or lost, but other than that, there’s really no pipelining when it comes to deal management. You can’t say things like “Bob Jones’ contract is 50% closed” or “Show me our top prospects for the next 30 days only.” Reporting takes a back-seat to simplicity, and for most complex sales arrangements, that’s just not enough.
  • Creating lead forms for websites is more complex than it ought to be. There are a few companies that have created Highrise importers, but it’s not native to the platform. That’s a real shame, but I think in trying to avoid the technical service hassles they just chose not to adopt a lead-submit capability.
  • Highrise doesn’t natively manage / coordinate email campaigns. That means you have to go outside your CRM to create your campaigns – and even with “web 2.0″ emailers like MailChimp it’s more complex than just saying “here’s the login to my highrise account, let’s start mailing them…”

Here’s the thing. Even with all these shortcomings, Highrise is exceptionally popular, and something we use in-house. It’s important to note though that we probably only deal with a dozen active deals at any given time, and our contacts database is tiny compared to the average seminar manager. We use Highrise in coordination with our other tools precisely because it doesn’t require much time or attention. We can just update our contacts, BCC relevant emails to the system, and share notes when appropriate.

Highrise does have a few pretty nice features (also enhanced thanks to their most recent makeover of the platform):

  • Tagging is convenient and helps to organize groups on a casual basis. You can create unlimited tags for people, and then search your contacts for people / organizations with similar tags. Makes it a breeze to import small sets of data and keep things organized.
  • Straightforward task scheduling – you just tap in the to-do and when it’s due, and off you go. Nothing too fancy, which is perfect. Salespeople and business developers tend to want to just glance at who they’re talking to and what needs to get done – sorting through fields & details isn’t necessary for most B2B small-biz sales calls.
  • The Highrise iPhone app is extremely helpful. It doesn’t include the full product (like most 37Signals products, the zen-like emphasis is on minimalism and practicality), but it does include task lists and the complete contact library. This is great because from our iPhones, we don’t have to worry about having the right phone number or email address – just open up Highrise, search, and go.

So, for general purpose seminar industry customer relationship management, I would say Highrise isn’t a very good choice. It’s too minimal. Once you see some of the other alternatives (loaded with features, gizmos, and gadgets), you will however probably crave the simplicity of it.

CRM’s for Event & Sales Management: Part 1

Posted on January 6, 2011 by in Dave Cole

One of the most vital pieces of software that you can invest in is your CRM system. CRM, for those uninitiated, stands for Customer Relationship Management. A good CRM can absolutely revolutionize your business. A bad one can be an inescapable pain of life (and can actually hurt your ability to support your customers and build your business).

When I say CRM, many people have many different ideas emerge in their mind. Some CRM’s are focused on customer service issues. Others are sales pipeline management tools. Others integrate everything under the sun and the kitchen sink, including shopping carts, email management, event management, sales funnels, etc. Others just pick one activity or core capability and try to minimize the noise of the other business processes that you might employ.

Interconnected People CRM ConceptHere at Propel Point, we’ve not only evaluated several CRM platforms for our own needs, but we’ve also been brought in to support and troubleshoot the systems that our clients have deployed to solve all kinds of problems. It gives us a great perspective on the range of solutions that are available, so I’ll share those experiences on this post as well as many future ones. Like I said earlier, CRM’s may be the most powerful investment that you can make in your business – but they can also be incredibly complex. Making matters all the more serious is that a CRM decision can often be a one-way choice. Once you adopt a platform, you’re basically picking your religion. Sure, you can change deities down the road – but you’re going to have to bring all your followers along with you! The pain factor of changing a CRM can be anywhere from Tylenol-requiring aches to Jack Daniel’s-required pains. The bigger the client base, the bigger the headaches, but more often than not, it’s exactly when you’ve out-grown your first CRM that you realize how brutally painful it can be to step in to the next tier. So, don’t just think about the first week of use – think about the lifetime of use you’ll get out of your sales or customer management solution.

Software Design Joke

Scared yet? You shouldn’t be. In the next few days and weeks, we’ll take the scary out of the process of picking the right CRM, evaluating the features and functions, and even showing you some tricks & tips to get the most out of your platforms and solutions. Stay tuned to the blog and/or our twitter feed for new updates on this series of CRM articles.

4 Hot Technologies Seminar Pro’s Should Know

Posted on January 3, 2011 by in Dave Cole

Now that we’re in 2011 – shouldn’t technology be a major focus for your business? After all – we’re in the future now! The second decade of the 21st Century, and all. With that in mind, here are a few technologies that we’ve been keeping an eye on here at Propel Point:

  1. Litmus: This is a straightforward service that does one thing very well: Litmus helps make sure that your emails are being delivered to their recipients, and that they look as best as they can. Litmus LogoThere are basically two services built in to the product. First is an email appearance validator. It will show you what your email will look like in dozens of email clients, browsers, and devices. That alone is pretty handy when you want to make sure your technical formatting is working well. The second feature is probably the more attractive for our industry – the spam testing functions. It does a screen of your email against several spam services, and then tells you what gets flagged and what gets through. If you’re using Infusionsoft, there’s no built-in spam checking, so this is a great “add-on” service to get your emails out to more people!
  2. Eventbrite: Even if you’re using a CRM suite to manage your events, the simplicity and new features that they’ve rolled out in Eventbrite makes it easy to organize a small event. Eventbrite LogoIf you’re just getting started in the seminar space, one of the best features is the fact that Eventbrite will handle payments for you. Obviously if you’re an established industry professional, that feature isn’t quite as important, but for beginners without access to a merchant, this can be an easy way to create revenues from your small “feeder” events. Also worth noting is the inclusion of unique tracking links, as well as paid affiliate links (and reporting). And if you’re hosting a free event, Eventbrite is free to use as well.
  3. FuzeMeeting: If you’re looking for a newcomer with some hot features for your webinar events, take a good look at FuzeMeeting (now with Webinar features). Fuze LogoThis is a solid service for a couple reasons. For one, it works on many platforms, including in-browser support (doesn’t require a separate download like GoToWebinar) as well as iPad and iPhone support. On top of that, Fuze has a cool feature which will automatically dial-out to your registrants as the meeting begins. Add on the high-definition streaming video capabilities, and you’ve got the makings of a great new webinar service provider.
  4. Square Payments: While perhaps not the perfect product for a full-blown seminar, the Square Payments service & device for the iPhone could be a great resource for those of you with feeder products or entry-level solutions to offer. SquareUp LogoTheir payment device simply plugs in to the iPhone, allows you to process credit cards, and handles the whole transaction wirelessly and in real-time. So, if you’re selling a book on the go, or just want a way for your staff to be able to collect small transactional payments at your upcoming events, take a look at Square as one of your payment solution options.

So, there you have it. A few neat technologies that might make a big difference to your seminar business in the new year. Are you looking at some other technologies that we should be checking out? Let us know – post in the comments or drop us a line!