Our thoughts (a lot of the good and a little of the "bad") on ON24
January 25, 2018
Our thoughts (a lot of the good and a little of the "bad") on ON24
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ON24
We utilize webinars for educational seminars for our clients, advisors, and for prospecting. It allows us to reach a large group of people while having the analytics for each of our webinars. It's used by sales, marketing, and client support departments. But I am the point of contact that runs all the webinars taking place.
- Internal communications
- Lead generation
- Training
- The analytics is an obvious advantage of using ON24 for both live viewers and on-demand viewers.
- Salesforce integration saves users a lot of time that would otherwise be spent manually inputting data into Salesforce.
- On-demand experience is almost identical to the live experience.
- On24 has A LOT to it. There are several types of events it can run which allows us to get creative.
- Missing functionality for us is that ON24 is NOT ideal for one-on-one prospecting demos. We thought going into it that our sales team could use it on a call with a prospect while being able to speak to them on the conference call, while going through a slidedeck, and being able to screenshare, all while having the conversation recorded. Turns out this is not the case.
- The training was minimal. With a webinar "team" of one (aka me) at our company who is also responsible for a million other things outside of webinars, it would be nice to have a more in-depth training. I've watched several tutorials, read all the help pages, ON24 voice, etc. but we are barely able to scratch the surface with all the ON24 functionality because it does take time to learn and really understand. If I had a bigger team, I would love to dive deep and take advantage of all the awesome features/types of events/ etc.
- Every single event that takes place, there is at least one person that has technical difficulties. Whether it's the sound, a delay in slides, or other glitches. Hard to know if this is user error or on ON24's end, but it seems it's a mix of both for us.
We're currently on our way to integrating with Salesforce. Eventually, we would like to integrate with Salesforce Marketing Cloud (marketing automation), so I can't speak too much to it.
- We have absolutely increased engagement during our webinars with the ability to add the several widgets we have access to. We love that we can keep that engagement when someone watched the on-demand version of the webinar as well- the Q+A still works, they are still able to download the slidedeck, and so much more. This is invaluable for both current clients and prospects
- As retirement plan and financial advisors our sales cycle is extremely long, and apathy is magnified in our industry (ESP. compared to SAAS companies). We would never expect to close a deal with just a webinar because the decision to hire us goes (and should go) far beyond what we can cover in webinar format, but the analytics that we receive allows our lead generation team to easily build conversations with prospects around the resources they clicked, how long they attended the event, questions they asked, etc. And our attendees are generally very impressed with the software capabilities (when they don't encounter technical difficulties ~2-5 people/100 attendees)
- Per the last section of the last bullet, when viewers experience technical difficulties (slides won't load for them, audio stops, etc.) they get extremely frustrated. As mentioned before, this only happens to a handful of people for about every 100 attendees. They may not return and that may have lowered our credibility. For us, we were able to lower the number of people struggling by placing "Webinar Tech Tips" on the console using the Text widget (ie: push F5 to refresh your page if slides are delayed, make sure the audio is turned up on your computer, there is no call-in number, etc.)
ON24 offers a much deeper dive into webinar presentation with an "infinite" amount of features, widgets, applications, integrations, etc. It truly has impressed us - it goes far beyond a screenshare, which is what most of the other companies are doing. The analytics as well blow all other companies out of the water. We love the on-demand webinar experience and the attendee experience is really great.
There are only 2 things that these other companies do that ON24 doesn't:
There are only 2 things that these other companies do that ON24 doesn't:
- ON24 does not offer a real dial-in option. You will either need to use a phone bridge with an operator OR pay per minute that you use a phone bridge from ON24.
- ON24 cannot be used for a demo call with a prospect. I do not know how they did it during our calls with them while we were considering purchasing ON24, but we have never gotten a straight answer on how we can do this without a lag from HTML5/Flash, while recording the audio along with the presentation, or while doing screenshare.