Dept. Heads Making Primary Webconferencing Decisions

One year after last September's terrorist attacks threw the spotlight on the possibilities of Webconferencing as a method of travel avoidance, the technology has become a noticeable cog in many corporate meeting operations. However, the decision to employ Webconferencing technology is rarely that of the corporate travel or meeting manager.

Usually, corporations that use Webconferencing to cut travel do so at the individual department level, with the technology seldom a part of an integrated policy, though some corporations have taken steps to standardize solutions.

"The first decision maker is the head of the department that would experience the benefit," said Carolyn Bradfield, senior vice president of sales and marketing of Louisville, Colo.-based Webconferencer Raindance Communications. "If it's for sales meetings, it's the vice president of sales. If I believe the organization has the opportunity to use Webconferencing to touch their marketplace more effectively, it's the vice president of marketing. For training opportunities, it might be the heads of human resources, sales or marketing. If it's enterprisewide, it might be the chief information officer."

Nowhere on that list is a corporate travel or meetings department head, and that is not an oversight. "Oftentimes, corporate travel departments report to finance, but we do not typically go directly there," Bradfield said.

"We have been selling to corporations in two ways," said David Rosenberg, executive vice president of Montpellier, France-based Genesys Conferencing. "We sell enterprisewide, which includes telecommunications, information technology and procurement departments, to companies that already use conferencing solutions or have identified that as a need. We also have pocket sales that we build at a user level, in which we may sell to a vice president of sales to conduct weekly meetings."

The 100 largest companies typically have developed a conferencing strategy and may have as many as six vendors, Genesys' Rosenberg said, although some are making an effort to scale back to one or two vendors. "There are some companies that have issued formal requests for proposals among their current vendors or industrywide," he said. However, in a majority of cases, the travel or meetings department is not one of the areas that are included in sales efforts.

"Not specifically," Rosenberg said. "Travel managers are not the decision makers in a lot of enterprise sales situations, but they are fully aware because of the pressure to control travel budgets. We may not be the best friend of the travel and meetings departments, but they have to do more with less, because no organization now is allowing free travel regardless of policies and procedures."

Genesys claims more than 18,000 customers worldwide, from Fortune 100 companies to regional accounts. Some of those clients, Rosenberg said, are attempting to manage Webconferencing procedures to a higher degree, including creating policies governing its use.

"There are companies trying to formalize this," Rosenberg said. "They are trying to facilitate enterprisewide decision making and adoption. One Fortune 100 insurance company has mandated Genesys as a single source for conferencing."

Genesys customer Fairchild Semiconductor of South Portland, Maine, began using the service late last year, after the company required travel cuts due to a slowing economy.

"We have been pressured to reduce costs, like a lot of other companies, and find alternative ways to travel," said Fairchild information technology project manager John Houser. "We have immediate needs for one-day training sessions in Europe, and wanted to do it another way besides travel, but videoconferencing wouldn't let us show presentations. We cut costs and conserved money with Webconferencing, and now we're rippling it out to different things."

Fairchild has not mandated Webconferencing use in its travel policy. "We haven't gotten that far," Houser said. "Our travel policy is wide, and has us travel only when absolutely necessary, so we have to make do."

The Fairchild corporate travel department was not involved in the decision to use Webconferencing, Houser said, as each corporate department is responsible for reducing its own travel budget.

Raindance customer Cargill Consulting Group, a Marina del Rey, Calif.-based firm that works with corporate clients to improve sales performance, began moving some training sessions it offers clients to the Web late last year as a method of travel avoidance, according to president Gil Cargill. "The platforms had advanced to the point where we thought it could work," Cargill said. "It flowed well with our technology and increased productivity."

Cargill's personal travel was cut by about 15 flights per month, he said, but added that it is unwise simply to install a Webconferencing system without ensuring employees' comfort with the technology. "You need to train the audience on how to do a Webconference," Cargill said. "There's a learning curve—you have to have them turn down their cell phones and speaker phones, avoid rustling papers or moving things around on their desks, take their dogs out of the room. But they love it. The cost of working with me has closed dramatically, the ability to respond quickly has gone up, and I can carry more clients."

Cargill fits the profile of corporations that have employed Webconferencing technology, Raindance's Bradfield said.

"Since Sept. 11, our company has grown tremendously," Bradfield said. "Our typical user profile is the mobile professional and 80 percent of our customers are road warriors, including salespeople, consultants and engineers."