Webinar Wire

Business Expert Webinars Goes Live

Posted by Ken Molay May 14 2008 9:33 PM EST

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Business Expert Webinars recently started operations, with its first public webinars scheduled for next week. I ran across their website and was intrigued by the business model, so I contacted the CEO, Lee Salz, who was kind enough to speak with me about his venture.

Lee is an expert consultant and author in the field of sales and sales management. He runs a company called Sales Dodo (from the title of his book "Soar Despite Your Dodo Sales Manager"). When Lee wanted to cut down the amount of travel he was doing to deliver business education to clients, he decided to offer training sessions via web seminars. But he didn't want the hassle of selecting vendors for audio and web conferencing, doing the technical production on his sessions, marketing the events,and managing payments from attendees. He figured his contribution was the value of his content and his expertise as a speaker. Surely there was a company with the infrastructure in place that would let him offer his content under their umbrella?

It turns out there wasn't anything available that fit his criteria. It didn't take him long to realize there was a niche that wasn't being served in the business world. Thus, the birth of Business Expert Webinars.

The philosophy of the site is easy to understand. Lee has effectively created a virtual "community college" of business topics, taught by experts in their fields. Each course is 60 minutes long and costs a flat $79 to attend. You browse through the list of upcoming subjects, find whether the time fits your schedule, and sign up online.

Speakers share the enrolment revenues with Business Expert Webinars. They must agree to deliver real educational content and they are not allowed to promote their business or services during the event. Lee is adamant that these will not be thinly-veiled sales pitches, nor will they be high level overviews that are designed to tease the audience with simple concepts, urging them to buy additional services or materials to get "the real value."

Lee told me he automatically rejects topics such as "Ten Ways To Improve Your..." Sixty minutes is too short a time to give serious education on ten different subjects. He wants in-depth content that justifies concentration (and payment) from the students. He phrased it this way: "The speakers don't pay to participate, the audience does. That means the audience owns the session and they have the right to expect real business training rather than marketing messages."

Lee says he went from concept to live operations in less than five months. He used IT help to design the site and contracted with ConferTel to provide the audio and web conferencing along with registration, payment processing, and event production/moderation.

Even before the first session has been delivered, Lee says he has 150 speakers participating, with 750 webinars scheduled. He can run as many as 8 webinars per day, offering prospective attendees plenty of options for days, times, and topics.

Over the past year, I have seen several companies taking this tack of offering participatory content from outside presenters. KRM Information Services has a Virtual Roundtable offering that is much the same idea as Lee's venture, but is targeted at organizations and associations offering directed content to their members, typically at a higher price point than Business Expert Webinars. Insight24 is the offering that ON24 uses to publish and syndicate recorded webcasts from a variety of companies. And Brainshark recently launched their Brainshark Content Network featuring shorter recorded presentations from different authors (including yours truly).

I think these developments mark an exciting new direction in the delivery and availability of quality information for the public. I hope Business Expert Webinars is successful and continues to grow its offerings.