Case Study: ViewCentral Helps Xerox Get Serious About Webinars

You won't find the word "Webinar" in Webster’s, but you'll find it in the job descriptions at Xerox. Just ask Steve White. His title is manager of Webinars and technology development, working out of Xerox’s Global Conferencing and Media Services Group. That's how serious Xerox is about effectively using the Internet and streaming media for better communications, both externally and internally. From local meetings and demos to customer Webinars and employee distance learning classes, thousands of Xerox employees and customers, as well as dozens of corporate departments participate in about 3000 Xerox-sponsored Web conferences each year, White says. Corporate-wide Web-based events can go out to over 30,000 people—Xerox’s entire U.S. workforce.

One of White's latest projects used Web-based media to promote disc-based media. Specifically, White used Webinars (or Webcasts, as White prefers to call them) to launch a crucial sales training tool stored on an old-fashioned CD-ROM. Xerox had invested a lot of time and money to create this interactive CD-based training course, which was designed as a "competitive positioning tool for office products," White says. Content includes video shot in a special Xerox lab they call the Proving Grounds, where technicians demonstrated Xerox products going head-to-head against products from competing manufacturers. The intent is to give salespeople the kind of detailed, product-specific knowledge they'll need to be able to talk about how Xerox products stack up against the competition. The official title of the CD training project is The Xerox Proof Source Sales Tool.

The old way to try to get this important training/sales tool into the hands of salespeople would have been to send out a memo or email announcing it—something the company felt would be all too easy to ignore. "We didn't want to just mail it out," says White. "It needed an introduction, and we needed to make sure that people got that introduction." For motivational reasons, the CD also needed to be launched with more of a splash, and so Xerox decided to launch it with a special Webinar event. Also, "the people that produced the training felt strongly that attendance at a Webcast would greatly improve the ability of the sales reps to use the CD effectively," says White.

Because management felt this CD was such an important sales tool, they also decided to track the distribution of the CD, to ensure that it got to where it needed to go—to as many as possible of the company’s sales force of nearly 7000.