I’m not in inside sales, I’m a consultant, but 95% of my interaction with prospects and customers occurs over the phone and Internet, so I think I can bring some insight to inside sales pro’s, consultants and particularly SMB salespeople working from home.
In the past 18 months I have used Fuze, Webex, GotoMeeting, Adobe QuickConnect and Join.me, either as a tool provided by the company, or as a personal subscriber.
If you require fast screen-sharing and hassle-free, download-free interaction
with prospective clients and customers, then tools that require a downloadable client are sub-optimal. I don’t use a Webcam in my conferences, so I don’t need the higher-end video capabilities that come with Webex and Gotomeeting. If I want to do a face-face Web meeting I will use Skype, but the dynamic is usually social with a friend or acquaintance and the connection set up in advance.
Containing costs
Containing cost is important in a small business and the overhead of CRM, webconferencing, phones, survey software, marketing automation, and all of the other ancillary monthly subscriptions can quickly run into thousands of dollars a month. High cost and an intermittent usage profile that is what led me to explore alternatives to the conferencing heavyweights Gotomeeting and Webex I had used in the past. My subscription to gotomeeting when I cancelled was $39.00 per month. Join.me is free for up to remote 10 viewers.
“I’d like to share my screen with you now”
If you have a prospect on the phone and you determine that it is appropriate to show them a demonstration screen, report, visual confection or some form of sales aid, you need a tool that will in a matter of seconds, enable your prospect to view your screen, regardless of the browser, firewall or security settings on either computer. This is where Join.me shines. Join.me has evolved from LogMeIn, which you may have experienced if you have had a specialist provide remote support to diagnose a problem on your PC or Mac at some point. A brief story to illustrate.
Frustration
Have you ever had a Gotomeeting or Webex with an important prospective customer and you just couldn’t get both parties to communicate over the link? Well it happened to me. I had developed a one page visual confection to show the prospective customer how their sales team could tell their story on a one page visual, instead of using their traditional 10 slide PowerPoint sales deck.
The first 20 minutes of our scheduled 30 minute meeting were wasted as we tried multiple video conferencing tools and browsers….nothing worked, no visual communication through their firewall. This does not happen with Join.me, because there is no client download to install on the other end and there are no network or browser dependencies. The prospect is sharing your screen.
Resolution
Let’s continue our example. “Ms. Prospect, are you sitting in front of a computer? You are, great. I’d like to share my screen with you, to illustrate the point I would like to discuss. In your browser can you go to Join.me/rmarkgibson and I will start a session”. I click on the Join.me logo in my toolbar and a session starts and as soon as the client has arrived at my join me address they “knock” to request enter and I begin to share my screen.
If your client is on a tablet or smart phone, they will need to download a viewer, and this applies to all of the conferencing services.
Join.me is free for up to 10 users. I elected to use Join.me Pro and am paying less than $12 per month for a vanity URL (join.me/rmarkgibson) and it allows me to share my screen with up to 250 others. Audio is via VOIP or a non-toll free number.
Join.me does not have recording capabilities, but if I want to record my Webinars I use Screen-Flow to create them as my experience with the quality of recorded Webinars using high-end tools has been mixed.
Here are several reviews of Web conferencing tools that may be of interest.
http://web-conferencing.findthebest.com/compare/1-66/GoToMeeting-vs-join-me
http://web-conferencing.findthebest.com/compare/42-66/WebEx-Meeting-Center-vs-join-me
http://lifehacker.com/5878067/five-best-online-meeting-services
Good write up Mark. I’ve used every service you named and they all have a place. Today, I pay for webex, but I also use join.me. Why?
For reasons you stated above, “I’d like to share my screen with you now”, can instantly provide visual clarity to help close sales, provide support etc. This works great for unplanned call-in leads as well. The key is NO SOFTWARE to install etc.
The bad- with the free version, you’re sharing your entire screen. Better clean up before you let anyone see your screen! This also creates privacy issues if you’re going to have a more involved call and want to locate more documents on your screen or look up a password to login to a secure area. I understand the pro version has a little bit more security control ( share a window) but it does not let you choose to ‘share a single application’ for example. For that reason, join.me is not effective for more involved calls for me.
However, I think join.me is quickly adding differentiating features to the pro version that could further erode others market share. I also like the 10 users for free vs Webex pay for 8, and the pro version is a whopping 250 users. Gotta love the value of that.
I like join.me and I use it quite often. Apart from it, other web video conferencing tools which I use are WebEx, GoMeetNow, gotomeeting etc.