Is Your Inefficiency Costing You Business?

Yes, it is.

Last week I signed up for a webinar for a training I needed to complete. The signup form was a Google Form which is okay, but there was no confirmation email or a link for the webinar. So, I figured they’d just send an email to confirm the day before with the login details.

Then the evening before I get a link that says I have signed up for the webinar but I actually just signed up to sign up for the webinar. “Please click here and sign up AGAIN.”

Dude. This is not awesome. Even better? There was only a start time on the webinar originally. And it’s not an hour it’s 90 minutes (WHHHYYYYY???) and I have a client call at the 1 hour mark so I missed the last half hour of the webinar.

And then of COURSE the webinar starts late (Side rant: when you are late for an event or webinar do you expect that everyone will wait for you? I sure don’t, if I’m late I’ll just jump in and catch up – so WHY OH WHY do people do this?!?!)

If you are running a webinar or ANYTHING you need people to sign up for in advance – do yourself a favor and don’t annoy them before you start. Here’s what I recommend:

• Include the start AND end time of your event.
• START ON TIME. This is a huge pet peeve of mine. I budgeted the 30/60/90 minutes for your event and we were all told when it starts. I arrived on time and it’s not my fault that someone else had a call go long. They knew they were late and expect to catch up – your lack of planning doesn’t constitute an emergency on my end.
• END on time – yes you can stick around for questions but be respectful of people’s time and what you PROMISED them.
• Don’t be redundant. There was ZERO reason for me to have to register twice for the webinar. And my guess is that about 50% of the people who first registered will not re-register or attend the webinar. You’re losing people when you do this.

We all know I thrive on efficiency and streamlined processes so this rant shouldn’t come as a surprise. This was just a good reminder to me to ensure that I have the most efficient processes in place in my business so that I’m not wasting clients (or prospects) time with redundancies.

What redundancies in your business do you need to review?