BTI #109: Increase Your Sales with Webinars with Casey Zeman

And I think that's really important for how you present yourself. You know, you want them to know that you have an awesome opportunity that's going to transform their life, that's going to get them results that they've been thirsting for, that they haven't gotten yet. And they've been banging their head up against a wall trying to get it.

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I get to chat with a good.

Friend named Casey Zieman. And Casey is the founder of Easy Webinar. And what we are going to be talking about on today's interview is how to leverage webinars for client onboarding for your sales process as well as for client retention. Webinars are such an effective tool. We've been using webinars for years in regards to selling our conferences, selling our.

Programs, selling our high ticket offers.

And we are going to discuss the strategies on how you can implement webinars into your current lead generation efforts. So without further ado, here's my interview with Casey Zieman.

All right, listeners, I'm super excited. I get to chat with Casey Zieman who is the CEO of Easy Webinar. And we're going to be diving into not only his own journey as an entrepreneur because we know all of you guys listening, you are the entrepreneur and we want to support your journey, but also we're going to be talking about the integration of using and leveraging webinars in your own marketing and sales channels. And super excited to have this conversation. Casey. How's it going?

Sir James, it's going awesome. Thank you for having me on your podcast.

Oh, so excited we can have this conversation. So I want to dive in a little bit about your own journey. You and I, we had met, it was actually a couple years ago through a mutual contact of ours, Chris Harder. But I'm curious because I know you had worked, you had mentioned before we started recording that you had worked as a consultant and you went to course creation before you got into creating your own software platform. What was it that kind of gave you that, that idea that you wanted to move forward, moving from working from someone else to kind of creating really your own brand or your own company?

Yeah. So, you know, and first off, I want to preface this that I am in a vacation home with a bunch of kids. So if you hear people in the background, that's just the kids all around.

So good problems to have.

Yeah. So, but it's like, it's what, it's what we're doing right now, right? Homeschooling and everything else all out of the house. So basically, you know when, and this is interesting because we have a blog article that's going out this week from the Easy Webinar Blog which is all about moving your side hustle. Right. Going and pivoting into working full time on your side hustle or pivoting into A career that you've maybe been firmly in for a long time that's not serving you and migrating into one of a more passionate sort of business that you may be doing. So this kind of goes in line with that. But for me, I started off as I was in real estate and this was way back in, you know, when the recession hit, which is very similar to where we're at right now, obviously, where there's a lot of change and uncertainty, right? And so the same situation was happening then. And so I went from a job in real estate. I was a mortgage broker where I was doing about $250,000 a year. And I remember in like 2009, 2010, went from 250 to 15,000 the next year. And I had a house that had a mortgage on it that was like $5,500. And I had to figure something out, right? And I remember that time, it was just like we really didn't want to go into foreclosure. We didn't want to get rid of our home. So I started looking online to build leads online. And that got me down this whole rabbit hole of online marketing. That was my first experience basically about 2011 or so. Actually 2010 is when I first started looking at it. And then, you know, I took a journey from going from real estate into learning more about online marketing. And then I had a friend of mine at one point when I was looking at this online marketing thing, it just took me down this rabbit hole, lead generation. I realized I didn't even want to do real estate anymore. And I then pivoted into wanting to do online marketing. So, you know, my friend told me, listen, if you're gonna do this, you have to choose one thing. And so my One thing became YouTube. So I put all my energy into learning about YouTube, strategizing how to use YouTube as a marketing tool. And that was what I did. And so I pivoted from being a mortgage broker, an unsuccessful one at that, to now being a YouTube consultant. And I was doing that, you know, I learned about YouTube. And then three months later, you know, or six months later, I started applying the strategies and acquiring clients, right? And so I, I, you know, I did all the things that for retainer business based business, right? I had contracts built up and I had decks, you know, that were built nicely about my new agency that I had. And so I was running an agency basically. And it wasn't, you know, I was, it was, and it was not a very successful one. I mean, I was, I had maybe Four clients total, you know, each paying me a couple grand a piece. When I first started out, I mean, I was even lucky enough to do that. I thought it was great because I was struggling for such a long time. So I was able to at least supplement my income, pay for my mortgage. And while I was doing all of that, I knew that I, you know, after having learned about online marketing and sat now learning about product creation, I realized I wanted to create something that had legs, that could be something that I could sell, often where my time was not directly tied to the money I was making. So I went from being a consultant into a course creator. But it wasn't overnight. I spent six months building a course all about YouTube because I knew that I wanted eventually move away from doing consulting. So I spent six months building this course all about YouTube and when I finally opened it up, turned it, you know, launched it, I could not sell it at all. I was still doing consulting and I just could not figure out how to sell this thing. I didn't have lead generation going in the business. I just, I just didn't have those skills. I knew how to get found on YouTube and get in the first page of Google and I was building leads for my clients. And so one day I had this like brain epiphany, which, I mean, I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but I started, I created a video in YouTube to drive people to a webinar. And on the webinar I started to offer free content, no pitch content all about YouTube. And that started to build my email list. So I was building my email list through this process of like these free no pitch workshops. I was scared about selling at that point, right? I was terrified. I thought selling was like, you know, like snake oil, blah, blah, blah, you know, I just didn't feel, I didn't resonate with selling. So I didn't sell. I was paranoid. So I just gave value, value, value, value. Eventually after a while I had people saying, well, can I buy something? Do you have something? And in the, in the process of this, I was finished. I was finishing my, building my YouTube course, which took me, as I said, six months. I built a, I wrote a 240 page ebook all about YouTube as well, which, you know, I'm talking about overkill. It was just overkill. I was, I was just giving, you know, I was paranoid about selling and wanted to provide so much value that I built this massive course. And finally, when I finally launched it, I sold it at like 1:97. Because I was terrified about selling it for more than that. But even then, I started webinars earlier than that. I started doing these free webinars earlier than that because I saw people doing webinars and I was like, okay, maybe I'll try those. And I tried them. You know, I was doing gotowebinar webinars and I was getting very few people on my webinars, right? But I did them consistently weekly. So I'd get, you know, 20 people here, 30 people here, 40 people here, 50 people here, 60 people here, right? So I was getting people on my webinars and then eventually people asked, you know, is there something to buy? And that's when I started to offer a pitch. That's when I started to pitch my program, when I started saying, yeah, it's 197 and I have people just buying at that point, really soft sell stuff, right? But I had them buying, going through it, telling me what they thought, you know, finding out more information, having people buy it, you know, some people loving it, some people saying, hey, it needs this or that. You know, just getting clear on, on how it serves people. And then eventually I started leveraging partnerships and business relationships to do affiliate marketing. And then I had people that wanted to promote my webinar of my program. So again, though, the webinar was the only way I was ever able to sell my, my course online. And so I had to, I took a ton of time building a webinar. And again, my first webinars were terrible. I sucked at webinars. They were, I even shared this with you, if you remember, a couple of years ago, I think, you know, I was, I was just like, I was an over, I'm an oversharer, I was a stutterer, just all the things, right? So, but you know, I remember a very distinct moment when I did a webinar for an affiliate, you know, a partner, and where they got 50% of the sale of all the sales, right? And they promoted it to their email list. And so they promoted it and we had 400, 500 people registered for the webinar. And I thought, well, this is huge because this is the biggest I've ever had of registrants. So I ran this live webinar and it was in the, I remember it was in the dead of winter and it was at my, my wife's parents farmhouse in Iowa and it was in the back trailer and it was, you know, the heater was blaring and I was using a busted up PC and you Know, I. The Internet was cutting in and out. I just used the onboard mic from the computer. And so there was just like really terrible sound. And I shared my PowerPoint. I had one screen, right? I shared my PowerPoint. And that webinar went for three hours just of me just sharing over, sharing, sharing, sharing, sharing. All said and done, we had about 200, 200 people at the webinar. And I sold $2,000 worth of sales. So 10 sales at 197, which is not that great, to be honest with you. It's not that great. But the reason I actually even sold anything was because webinars just create that inherent know, like, and trust. Even if you are terrible at it, like I was, it doesn't really ultimately matter. I mean, they, you know, it really takes two things. It's sincerity and value. And if you have, you know, me being just the awkward, weird person I was, you know, and then sharing abundance of value, that's just what spurned people to buy. Now, if I knew now what I knew then, obviously I probably could have made, you know, 20,000 and not 10,000 or not 2,000, but 20,000 just from understanding sales and understanding, you know, pivoting over to a pitch and how, you know, and how to position more on a webinar now. But back in the day, back in the day, that was just proof of concept for me to know that I was doing the right thing. So, yeah, that was the start. And then in that year, in 2012 was my first year as a product course creator. I did about, you know, I supplemented my income the same amount that I did in real estate. So I was at about $245,000 in 2012. And that's what just started my online course business. Online education, online software business. So software came after that. A year later, I met with some developers and asked them about building out a WordPress webinar tool for WordPress, because obviously I was like, well, webinars work, so maybe I can do more of this. So that started that process and journey. And that's when we launched Easy Webinar plugin in 2014. And then 2015, we had a. We pivoted over to EasyWebinar.com and started to migrate away from WordPress as a platform and became a full SaaS platform, probably in more like 2016, 2017, and relaunched ourselves brand new actually in 2018. So we did a lot of different interesting things through the years, but it's always been around webinars as that, you know, as the highest level of engagement, one can have to build an audience. And then how do you scale that up? That's why we built Easy Webinar Plugin or Easy Webinar back in the day as an automated webinar tool. So we wanted, I wanted to scale up being able to do webinars more on an almost consistent, you know, daily basis, but not have to be there all the time. And so that's, that's when we built that tool. And it started off as an automated webinar tool. And then, you know, Easy webinar became not only, you know, the best automated webinar platform out there, but also a live stream platform and live tool. So now that's what we are. We're both a kind of a holistic webinar platform built for sales and marketing, doing high definition, no latency streaming, and also automated and evergreen webinars as well, that are, that's, that can scale up your marketing.

What I appreciate so much about this is, you know, as you're talking, I'm kind of taking notes, just making sure I'm tracking everything. And there's such a beautiful parallel between your own journey as an entrepreneur. You know, from, you know, 2010, when you got into online marketing and you started doing some consulting work to circa 2010 to 2012, now you're starting to create these courses and you're really leaning into and leveraging the use of webinars as a value drive. You know, you mentioned that the two monikers are Sincerity and Value. You're building trust, you're getting people to know who you are, you're getting them to know what you do, and you're getting really them to know why you matter within the context of their lives, how you're helping them solve their problems. And that just organically evolved into you being able to sell. And admittedly, as you said, you know, your first sales were not, were not as great as you thought they could have been. But as we know, sales is a muscle. And the more we exercise that muscle, the better we get at sales. But I see that trajectory into what you have, and then I see really the growth of Easy webinar, which is, it started as really just this tool plugin that people are able to integrate. And then all of a sudden in 2015, it became its own dot com, and then in 2016, 2017, it became its own SaaS company, its own standalone company to show up and serve for the audience. So much like you evolved into how you show up, you, you've been able to manage easy Webinar and how it has evolved and shown up for your audience as well. And I think that's really interesting.

Ah, that's an interesting parallel that you, that you, that you applied. Yeah, that's. It is true. I mean, we're always evolving, right? I mean that's, it's. The journey is what we have to focus on. Not, not necessarily, you know, you know, rushing to try to get to the outcome because the outcome changes all the time.

Yeah. I'm curious, what have you noticed as really the moniker for why webinars are such an effective marketing tool, an effective sales tool, and then also to add to that question, how have you noticed that change really within the last few months as so many people have been forced to pivot, work from home and create new ways to bring revenue into their households as well as their businesses?

Yeah, well, you know, I mean, obviously you can't replace in person experience, right? That's the thing. It's like the in person experience is the top level of intimate moments where you know, and in business it's all about relationships. So. And you know, there's two pieces of sales, right? There's the people buy because of their, they relate on a heart level and they understand from a logical perspective. And so, you know, to have those two pieces represented, the great thing, the webinar is great. And you know, meeting online is great because, you know, if you can't meet, you know, in person, then obviously nowadays with what's been going on, everyone's been meeting online. So obviously webinars are the next best thing, right? Live, in person, online meetings are the next best thing, right. They're the virtual handshakes. But it's a question of, it's a question of taking that same experience and duplicating it as a sales process, right. And so, you know, the reason I think webinars work so well and obviously, you know, interpersonal connection is that you're taking the concept of the one on one interpersonal connection experience, the virtual handshake, and you're applying education and a journey, right? And that's the power of a webinar. When you have a good webinar that, that really represents and talks about the pain and the solution that your audience is requiring the pain, you know, really helps them to reveal the pain and understand the pain that they're experiencing and also then understand and reveal the solution and especially an uncommon solution that becomes your program or your product, you start to peel away, not only building a know like and trust, but an aha moment A transformation from the person watching. And when you can get those two pieces together, that's really what is like a secret sauce for increasing your sales. Right. And so by having a presentation like that, whether you do it live or whether you're doing an automated webinar experience, you touch on those two pieces, the heart. You connect with your story on a heart level and you relate to. You talk about your story and the pain you felt and how it relates to them and the solution you found and how it relates to them. And then you talk about the logic of, you know, now the uncommon solution. This is what it is. This is my program. And let me share with you why my program is going to be a value and solve your problems. Right. From a logical perspective. Right. Not just heart perspective. Right. And so those two pieces combined just become the winning sauce for marketing better or selling better, creating more of an experience using webinars. So, yeah, I'd say webinars just allow you to have that virtual handshake build that know like and trust and actually sell better because you are there, you know, in the best way possible without having to be in person with them. But yeah, I, you know, it's, it's a combination of a sales presentation with, with an intimate conversation. Right. And I think that's the, that's. Those are the two pieces that are, are important.

What would you say you've seen as effective strategies to blend that really those, those two contrasting approaches, which is this is the sales presentation, but then also this is a platform to, to forge that connection and have that digital handshake.

Yeah. So that's where I think stories come into play a lot. I mean, this was my fear, James. I was totally terrified of selling back in the day. And because I was so scared of selling, I did these. No selling, no pitch, just webinars were straight value. And often I would have myself in, in on, in the camera. Well, actually gotowebinar, back in the day, I couldn't put myself on camera and share a presentation at the same time. So I was mostly doing all just presentation work. But then I pivoted, I think, to Google hangouts where I was doing just like me in front of a camera. Right. And it's almost like those two things combined became that winning sauce for me. And so with easy webinar and what I like to do now is I like to have myself in front of the camera and meeting and greeting people when they first come to my webinar, just like connecting with them, saying, hey, Jane, Hey, Austin, hey, Rebecca. Hey, Sam. Hey, da da, da. You know, like, just really connecting with them, right? When they get to the webinar with my video camera on. And then, you know, if I have a presentation pivoting over to my presentation, right? And then, and then understanding that the presentation, like, it's all about creating an expectation of what they're going to be getting. So if I have a pitch at the end, I always say in the beginning, hey, I have an opportunity for you guys. By the end of this, there's going to be some awesome opportunities for you to go further in this, right? Because then it's not me saying I please buy my stuff. It's me saying I have something that's going to change your life. I have something that's going to transform your business. And you have to first believe that that is the case. You have to trust your product so much that you know it's going to transform someone's business or transforms someone, it's going to give them that transformation. It's going to get them the result they want. So if you can't get the results yet, you need to go back and try to get results for somebody and then you'll feel like you, you'll come to the table more with, you know, like, that it's that the narrative has changed, right? You're in the power position at that point. It's not the other way around. And I think that's really important for, for how you present yourself. You know, you want them to know that you have an awesome opportunity that's going to transform their life, that's going to get them results that they've been thirsting for that they haven't gotten yet. And they've been banging their head up against a wall trying to get it right. So then you do, you know, then you do your presentation and, you know, your story is a great icebreaker. It's a great way to build that know, like, and trust and then have people resonate with you, resonate with what you've gone through and how you came upon your uncommon solution, right? The solution that you are now using that a lot of people aren't using. And you talk about the things that, the common solutions that other people have tried that haven't served them or that you tried and that didn't serve you. And then that's when you were held up. You finally, after all of your pain and struggle, you figured out something that finally worked. If you tell your story and it relates to, to their own story, then to them, you're already halfway there to sell them, right? Because all you're doing is you're painting the picture on what they relate to, right? And so by the time you get to the point where you're like, and hey, here's the uncommon solution and here's my offer for you, which is like, you can get access to my easy webinar software. You can get access to my elite webinar mastery webinar course, where, you know, I pulled out all the stops and created an A to Z webinar program that will teach you everything you want to know about success with webinars, right? If you want to sell better, market better, here's the program. And then you, you know, talk about your program and you reveal, you know, the investment and, you know, you tell people the results they can expect from it or what they can achieve with it by sharing case studies and things like that. So, you know, webinars, just, those are the, those are the fundamental pieces that will first off, allow you to just do better with a webinar. But that's also what creates, makes it a better differentiator than just like, you know, a sales funnel alone, right? Or a sales page or even a sales video. Like a sales video. You know, if someone comes to a vsl, right, A video sales letter, you know, they can, they can possibly fast forward or rewind it. Just, they don't, they don't, it doesn't have the same level of commitment as like, say, registering for a webinar, showing up to the webinar, getting webinar notes, you know, you potentially even building your authority with them before the webinar starts by preceding content. So like, you know, maybe you have a webinar in a week, well, start to get people registered and then send them content before that webinar to have them get to know, like, and trust you before showing up to the webinar. And so by the time they come to the webinar, they're more interested in coming to the webinar. They know you a bit more and so they listen more, right? Sometimes going straight to a video sales letter, it doesn't give people the same customer journey. And we want experiences. We don't want just sales funnels. We want sales experiences. So that's why I think webinars are just at the top of the food chain.

I love that you brought up the consumer journey because that's integral part of why webinars work, which is one, they have to become aware of you. They have to know you exist. But then they have to continue to pay attention to you. It's not enough that someone knows who you are and knows what you do. They have to know why it matters to them and the best way to break through that resistance. Because we as consumers want to be resistant to advertising. We want to be resistant to sales. But when you start to give us value, inherent value, I'm here to support you. I've yet to ask for anything in return. This is my free guide. This is my free tutorial. This is my free resources or my free workshop or my free webinar. Now I'm showing that I'm investing the time and energy into you as a consumer before I ever ask for anything in return. It creates that great opportunity for reciprocity. And that's one of the effective things about leveraging webinars. I'll ask this have you noticed there.

Being.

A benefit to doing, let's just say, live webinars over a prerecorded or an evergreen webinar? Or is a mix of both appropriate or does it just depend really on what industry you're in?

I don't think it's about the industry because any industry can use live webinars and pre recorded automated evergreen webinars because they're just used in different ways. You create systems out of both. Right. As an example, running a live weekly webinar is a great idea for keeping people top of mind and for a SaaS platform or for a recurring revenue program, you know, doing weekly live webinars can. To acquire new customers and also keep churn down in your business is a great way to just keep in, you know, actively in people's minds while at the same time creating an evergreen or automated. Different automated webinar funnels which are, you know, where you can drive traffic via Facebook ads or various advertisement platforms. Right. You have more intention on lead generation that way. Right. So as an example, like we have a lot of our customers, they'll do like Facebook ads and drive Facebook ads directly to a webinar registration page and then take them through the process of going to a webinar and then selling. So we have some of the customers and clients who can generate, you know, millions a month just using their webinar funnels. Right? Their automated webinar funnels. And that's a scalability factor. They can, you know, they can always put money into it for ads and then just test the cost per acquisition for the customer. Right. So in that regard it's more of a. Where you use it. But you know, we have customers like, like Aweber, you know or ConvertKit who will use easy webinars, easy webinar automated webinars as workshops for after someone becomes a customer. Right. So they'll use it to bring churn down, right? To use it as like support webinars. Right. Or hey, after someone becomes a client they automatically be auto registered for this webinar starting soon. And that can be the automated webinar that helps them with their support journey. You'll see that some people will use it just as a way to keep their customers happy. Again we have a lot of people that use it in their onboarding basically. So it could be used in onboarding. It can also be used in paid advertisement and funnels and scalability. So it's more so when you use them. But and you know I, there is no industry where I would say an automated webinar won't apply. There's no industry that I would say a live webinar won't apply. Especially nowadays where you know, we are all having to do stuff online. I mean it's a, it's. And you know we went, when Covid hit, you know, we had people that started to come to use our system to do showroom, you know, like to like we had a, a high end boating company that used it to show their, the sales of their yachts. Right. So they would have sales meetings and do demos of their yachts like walk the yachts basically. Right. And do these like live experiences like that. So there are so many different uses for it now especially where you know, people aren't just going to put webinars or put live stream tools like Zoom like us on the back burner. They're going to put it at the front, you know, they're going to put it on the front burner I think because obviously now we are in a point in our life lives where you know, this, this is the new reality and it doesn't seem like it's going away so well.

And even when it does go away, okay, so let's just say best case scenario a vaccine comes out late 2020, early 20, that does not immediately instill consumer confidence into going to a large event or a big convention. So this is something that has impacted my team and I very, very intimately which is a cornerstone of our marketing is hosting large in person conferences. And that has been taken from us. And it's been incumbent upon us that this is an opportunity to shift how we're showing up for our audience. And I know one of the things that you guys do is you kind of allude to it. So I'd love to dive more is how are companies integrating really this webinar technology into hosting summits or these hybrid events to still cultivate a new type of experience? And that's really what we're looking to do, is to cultivate a new type of experience for people who would normally fly across the country. In our case, we had attendees from all over the world to cram into a conference hall for three days. What are you seeing companies doing to really be innovative in how they're connecting with their audiences in a digital platform space?

Yeah, so we're seeing definitely obviously more people doing online conferences, scaling up with summits and having to do a lot of these pivots. I think at that point it's just about creating schedules and getting commitments because we obviously, we all are familiar with using tools like this. But I mean, obviously here's the thing, we were doing online summits for a long time and people were using easy webinar for online summits and also, you know, online, you know, one time big events and things like that. So. And you know, the cool thing is like what we've, what we've been doing with our platform is we have, we have the capacity for going over 2,000 attendees, right. So we've had requests from people all over the world for events of like 10,000 attendees. Right. And you know, what we've always seen is that we've always played with this because we've been having these requests since 2014. So we've always had stuff ready to go for running bigger events like that. Conferences and, or one day workshops, two day workshops, summits, Right. I remember one time, you know, I used our own, my own platform to host an online event that was all day long, but I had an in person audience. So I had like 25 people in my office and then we streamed it to like 200 people. But it was a paid event so everybody had to pay to be there for the day. Right. And it was a great combination of doing both, which I think is what most people need to start doing more of, frankly. But in regards to what we can do with something like that, we can have up to 10,000 attendees because we have with our system with easy webinar, we have right now limits of 2,000 attendees in our with with our livestream tool. But we also allow people to use Vimeo or YouTube Live which can have an unlimited number of attendees. So scalability factor becomes really doable with our system at that point. And so we've we've had requests about that. We've had partnerships that have been requested of, of different portable studios that want to partner with us to offer services like this where let's say you want to run a live event well, you know, and you wanted to do it where you know, you didn't have, you had minimum Covid footprint, right? Where like you were really thinking about those things. You know, you'd have a mobile studio that would drive up and you could then set up a live stream experience, you know, studio, studio level experience, quality studio level experience where you know, you had multiple cameras and you know, mics and all and you know, all the, all the awesome, you know, studio, you know, high level studio stuff for not too expensive and then take that and then stream that, that same experience to, you know, a large scalable number of people, like 10,000 attendees. So we've seen more of those business relationships and requests like that. And we have those business relationships now that we're probably going to start to roll out and we've been doing it more so not say front facing from our website, but soon we'll maybe offer that up more and more. It's more been conversations with enterprise level people and what they want to do.

Right. So yeah, yeah, I absolutely love that you're speaking my language right now because really, this beat has come up often on this show, which is we are just faced with an opportunity to shift and we have two choices. We can pivot and we can shift and we can show up how our audience is needing us to show up now because consumer behand dictatorship, consumer behavior dictates everything. All right? And I've seen this as a photographer. I saw that when I became a photographer in my career. It was right at the forefront of the digital technology revolution. And professional photographers would scream saying no professional photographer will ever use digital technology. Real pros use film. All right, well, consumer behavior needed digital assets. Digital photography won. I saw it again with social media where photographers were saying real clients will never hire pro photographers because of at the time, MySpace, because of a MySpace page. Well, what happened? Consumer behavior dictated that consumers wanted to find the individuals they were going to work with, leveraging social media channels. And if you didn't adapt, you became irrelevant. We saw it again in 2008, which is, I saw so many photographers just complaining that the industry is being destroyed by the economy or by new photographers entering into the marketplace that are ruining the rates because they're undercharging everything. No, consumers are shifting how they want to work with this industry. And we have the opportunity to shift. Well, everything that's happened with the quarantine and with COVID is shifting. Things that I honestly believe would have shifted eventually anyway. It would have been much harder in coming years to encourage people to get on a plane and fly across the country to sit in an auditorium for three days. Days. That is a big ask. And it's a big expense on top of the cost of the ticket. It's the plane flight, it's the hotel, it's the expenditures and all the meals. This is a giant ask asking people to invest a few hours, jumping on a virtual call or attending a virtual summit. Does it have all the elements of an in person experience?

No.

But if consumers are wanting this anyway, it is important. Important that we as entrepreneurs are figuring out how can we cultivate what consumers are asking for right now so that we're not the person standing at the edge of the world waving our arms, asking the world not to change as it rolls right over us. So I'm curious, like, obviously you've seen a massive surge in users of this technology. A lot of people clamoring to get into this technology not just to create new income streams for themselves, but also to show up for clients to create these new hybrid event experiences. Understand that some of this will be a flash in the pan because a lot will want to rush back to the way they used to do things, even though that might not work. But what do you see coming up in the remainder of this year, maybe even into next year, about how entrepreneurs are going to be leveraging technologies like webinars in new and innovative ways for how they're connecting with their audiences.

Well, that's interesting. You know, I see that there's going to be more of a push for duplicating the sort of online conference experience. Like literally, I've been seeing software out there which integrates with Zoom right now where, you know, they have little. You can have a little avatar and that avatar can walk into a conference room, right? Or walk through a building and then walk into conference room A, and then meet people and listen to an experience that's happening and see comments and. And then they can do a. They can leave or they can, you know, break out into a session, like a one on one session with someone in the room, right? These networking events, basically it's like having virtual networking events which are going to be very conference driven, but using technology like Zoom or like our tool as these breakout rooms internally. So we're probably going to start to just keep an eye out on people that are doing this, that have software like this, that aren't necessarily the tool that they have. They don't have the live stream tools, but they have the, the technology, the architecture for, you know, the conferences and they're more networking based tools. So I'm seeing more of that and that's going to be more of a thing, but I think also there's going to be more platforms. You know, obviously Facebook, you know, saw what Zoom was doing, Google saw what Zoom was doing and they just rushed to creating their own solutions. Right. So, yeah, so we're going to see more of that while at the same time, you know, for us, we also have some things that are rolling out very soon where, you know, bigger meetings can happen, more people. There's something that maybe next year it might be on the, you know, roadmap, but maybe a year away or next year or we have 25 people all on camera. Right. So right now we have the capacity up to six people on camera for easy webinar, which, you know, as we were kind of staying in our lane as a webinar, tool, but we may open it up to having a meeting, meeting room options as well. So there's a, there's a lot that, you know, that, that I think are going to be opening up where this is just going to be a more normalized thing, you know, and, and it's, you know, obviously people were, you know, Zoom had like servers crashed with how many people were signing up for them. Right. So, so yeah, I think, I think there is just going to be more. I think, I think there's going to be a habit in the future where a live stream is going to be, you know, that now, now the floodgates are open. Right. Everybody knows about it. It's just going to be something that's now going to be used regularly. I think schools, we're trying to still figure that out. You know, there's just going to be so much more with livestream, whether, you know, from the aspect of communities, meetings, etc. Etc. So, yeah, security is going to be another one that is a big one.

And that has been so front and center for so many of these, these companies and just with Zoom kind of coming under the crosshairs, especially within the media, whether they did something wrong or just did something ignorantly, but that right there allowed so many others to step up to say, oh no, we're doing things differently.

Exactly. I mean, we've, you know, we've obviously started to, we've already done the process of, of adding security measures to our system. And so there was already security measures added, but we've just, they were under the crosshairs, so we had to, we learned from their mistake. Right. And I think that's another piece that we're also seeing as well.

And really what this circles around is this is giving us as entrepreneurs the opportunity to lower the barrier for entry, to have these intimate conversations, the intimate connections with our audience. And you know, you think about, you know, go back in time to win so many of these. I'll say I'll use high ticket sales as an example, like high ticket coaching sales. You had to get a bunch of people into a hotel conference room for a one day seminar. So you can, you can pitch your book or you can pitch your program or you can pitch your, your, your course for individuals to take.

Well, that was a barrier of entry.

For a lot of people to invest that amount of time or to be in that place physically. But now we've lowered this barrier of entry to allow more people access to our message, more people access to our information, more people access to the products or services that can solve their problems. And I see this as opportunity, I see this as tremendous potential. And I'm really excited to see what very innovative and what very creative entrepreneurs are going to be doing in this time right now because that will set the foundation for how we are operating, how we are connecting in the, in the coming year.

Yeah. And I think there's going to be. A lot of people are. This is when innovation happens. Right. The recession is with a slew of innovation happened then and we're seeing it now as well. So a lot of people are going to, you know, if you can stay, if you can stay agile and you can pivot and you can, you know, just have a little fluidity and imagination, you could probably do quite well during this time.

Absolutely. Casey, I want to thank you so much. One of the things I appreciate so much about you is how much you invest your time and energy into helping others. And it's something that really resonates with me. You show up, you give, and I just want to thank you for that. Where can listeners go to either connect with you personally, learn more about you and your journey as an entrepreneur, or also learn more about your platform. Easy Webinar.

Yeah, thanks, James. Well, you can go to easywebinar.com we have some free masterclasses right on the homepage. You can also go to the Easy Webinar blog, which is easywebinar.com blog where there's actually going to be published at the time that I'm doing this interview with you, we have an article going out all about. I think your side hustle, I think is what it is turning your hobby into a business. So maybe an opportune time to read something like that. And if you want to just read my own story, you can go to Caseyzieman.com and check out my blog or find me on Instagram @caseyzieman.

Perfect. And I'll make sure all those links are listed in the show notes. Casey, thank you so much for this conversation. I love talking tech, but I also love talking really just strata. And you were able to edify both of those and just really appreciate your time.

Oh, thank you, James, for having me. I appreciate it. Thank you for listening to beyond the Image. For more information on James Patrick's work and live events, please visit jamespatrick.com or jamespatrickworkshops.com.