Presentations are experience-based; lessons learned are valuable
Adult learners value their experiences and place a premium on leveraging other's lessons learned. Most live presentations include experiential anecdotes to balance the content and show personal involvement with the audience. Tens of thousands of presentations are given each year and unless captured in some format, this treasure-trove of experience is lost into the "ether" forever. Capturing presentations onto CD-ROM and the Web provides a highly scalable media for sharing the information to thousands of other people not present at the event.

No Fatigue
Adult learners tend to lose capacity to absorb information from live presentations within the first hour and a half. Ten minute breaks are required to refresh the mind and these breaks on average grow to about twenty minutes; valuable presenter time is lost and there's a delay for the audience to "get back into the learning groove". Capturing the presentation onto digital media allows post-review of information in a setting chosen by the learner. Searchable and book-markable, users can quickly find information and return to it at their own pace.

Education On-Demand
Imagine a library of CD-ROMs or a database of presentations available at your desktop - one could access years of experience at the click of a button. Time is our most precious resource today, beyond money or computing power. Motivated organizations are spearheading the capture and dissemination of their best presentations.

Continuing Education Credits (CME, CE, CU, CLU)
For markets where there's an on-going mandatory training requirement, like medicine and accounting, capturing live presentations provides organizations with a new channel of distributing continuing education. Continuing education credits are usually awarded through physical attendance at a conference or seminar. More recently, self-paced courses offer learners home or office-based study to achieve credit. Unfortunately, most courses require fifteen hours of developer time to create each hour of course content. This unbalance is why there are few, truly innovative courses on the market. Why not leverage the presenter's preparation and valuable experience, capture their talk onto CD-ROM, and then publish the audio, video, slides, notes, and other information quickly following the event? There's no difference between physically "being there" and most times there are so many presentations that no one can attend them all. Some of the leading medical societies are taking advantage of on-site capture and making live presentations available to their members through CD-ROM and the Internet.

Archival and Future Training
Archiving valuable presentations clearly has its merits, but is it cost-effective? Think of it this way. What is the cost of not capturing Einstein's complete lectures or Andy Grove's forthcoming tour of presentations where he will reveal the secrets to building Intel Corporation's computer chip empire? Given the affordability of the home PC and the Internet, it seems logical that not capturing presentations for future educators, learners, and peers, may prove to slow intellectual capital creation and archival.

Collapse the Sales Cycle
Traditional selling involves a myriad of mailings, telephone calls, demos, emails, and presentations; the most important aspect being face-to-face encounters. You can reduce the sales cycle by getting to the presentation sooner by sending out a CD-ROM or conferencing over the Internet. Seasoned sales people have "battle-tested" presentations that they use over and over again; the problem is personal bandwidth. There's only one of each of us, so getting face-to-face with the prospect to build rapport and credibility proves problematic if you have high sales goals. Solving the personal bandwidth problem is solved by forwarding interactive CD-ROMs and Internet-ready presentations to the right person. Qualifying prospects happens sooner in the sales cycle because they see your face, they hear your voice, and they get to see your visuals in a format comfortable to them. You also can place demonstration videos and animations that capture the mind-share of the prospect, as well as reduce travel and time expenses by not flying yourself and the prospect to a demo site. Additionally, you can use the demos in your face-to-face meetings if you so choose. Again, you're leveraging the digital medium to "compress time."

Speeds Product Introductions
Traditionally, new product launches meant six months of road-shows, press releases, trade-shows, on-site demonstrations, direct mailings, radio and TV announcements, and more. Some of these Marcom items can be included into a CD-ROM or Web page and be readily-available at lower cost. Holding large events as part of a long launch cycle for your best customers and prospects in the "era of convenience" is too costly; remember, time-compression for you and your customer is paramount - forcing people to attend event after event wears thin. Digital-era CD-ROMs and Internet-access command more and more attention from marketers operating under fixed-budgets and reduced product life cycles. Additionally, a great percentage of the digital content from disc to disc is reusable and makes fixed-budgets more effective.

Immediate and Quick
There's nothing like sending out a desktop-capable demo on CD-ROM to a new prospect on the other side of the globe. Everyone has a CD-ROM compatible PC, but not a VCR, so you take quick advantage of the user's work environment and get your message to them in a morning.

Saves T&E
No longer is it necessary to "carry a bag" to make a sale. Selling the customer on-line and through CD-ROMs takes the amount of travel to new, low levels. This effect is significant. When you travel, many costs are incurred - the cost of the tickets, the cost of the lodging, the cost of your absence from the office (which is a subject for another white paper!), the cost of no sales, and others. Your travel in the near term will be predicated on your best customer's needs, not all customer's needs. 7x24 travelling is no longer effective for businesses in highly competitive markets, the costs are too high. Interactive presentations on CD-ROMs and the 'Net are the only way to compete and interleave the personal side of building and maintaining profitable customers.

Extends Reach
With a CD-ROM or Internet presentation, you can communicate to hundreds (thousands) of customers in a day, with the same, un-ambiguous message. Once captured and compressed, the digital presentation is the same for everyone that receives it. You don't have to worry that reps in the field mis-communicate important messages, your can now rely on them to build the personal side of the relationship and make the messaging the easy part.