My past includes setting up business development and technology demonstration meetings for high-stakes client prospects. It takes a lot of time, sweat, and a bit of luck to get meetings set up. When you finally get people's schedules coordinated for an online meeting, you want nothing to fail. The meeting needs to go like clockwork because you may have thirty to sixty minutes to make the business deal work.

For this post, I'm going to focus on some areas regarding setup of web conference meetings and how GoToMeeting proactively addresses Murphy's Law , which says that "if thing's can't go wrong, they will".

Steve's Three Favorite Murphy's Laws for Starting Online Meetings:

• Sales prospect says the day before the meeting that they don't have a firewall, but on the day of the meeting, they do - No problem. GoToMeeting works through firewalls.
  
• Sales prospect says that they installed the web conferencing client software before your online conference, but they didn't. Lose fifteen minutes of your valuable thirty-minute meeting waiting for them to install and work through the operating system hurdles ... GoToMeeting has no complicated software to install. Just a one-time applet plug-in to configure that is quick and secure.
• Day before the sales meeting you send out the email notifications to participants with the what seems like 250-some character web address indicating the bridge for the call. Recipients have lost the email notifications as they try to dial into the call so you have the go through complicated hoops to give each participant their unique web address. Lose fifteen minutes and potentially some participants ... With GoToMeeting, there's a nice tabbed control panel that allows you quickly give people webconference instructions via three ways: by phone, by email, or by copy & paste instructions.

GoToMeeting is brought to the world by Citrix, a name that one can trust. The pricing plan is great (comparison chart here), and it's great for both sales teams and everyday project teams because pricing is very affordable. Intro package covers up to 10 users (really great since many online providers try to get you on the margin between 4-6 users). Find out how it works, and start a free trial today!

Steve Shu