I was on the phone with Jim today, and he gets it.  He’s the chief sales training wizard at a company with 1500 sales people, and he described to me showing up to a presentation with lots of slides and not a lot of time.  Consider this:

I moderated a web seminar years ago for Jeffrey Gitomer, and he showed up to the gig with 109 slides.  For a 60 minute webinar presentation.  And he made it through with time to spare for questions.

Two BIG lessons:

One, Jeffrey knows sales people are ADHD.  Keep it moving.

Two, take the amount of time of time you spend on a slide and cut it in half.  Cut in half again, and then push the “next slide” button ahead of time.

Get my drift?

One more thing:  that was quite a number of years ago.

Today you must also engage.  MAYBE if you’re Seth Godin you can get by with not engaging the virtual audience , and even he is getting better over the last few webinars I’ve *seen* him in (with recent kudos to Duct Tape Marketing Listen here.).  To be totally fair, Godin and Jantsch get marketing, so you should read them and buy all their books.

But live presentations of any type are about audiences who paid a VERY high price to be there…their time.  Engage them, or apologize to them for making them put something on the calendar they could otherwise have listened to at a more convenient moment than 10 a.m. on a Tuesday.  (Direct responsers, take a Xanax – I know the value of a deadline, and to which I say, “webinar attendees are going to find YOU boring if you don’t make a live event live.)

Virtual + live = move ’em or lose ’em.  Be like Jim.