Sharat Sharan’s On24: Lead Generation Through WebCasting (Part 3)

SM: How big is the market? How do you calculate TAM? What is your business model?

SS: When looking at adoption of broadband worldwide, combined with the need for global communications, the TAM is large. Over the last few years, we have seen webcasting emerge as a key tactic for corporate marketing initiatives and lead generation. And with the emergence of video, we’ve seen even more customers wanting to add video to the mix. For us, how can you calculate this? There is no way to determine the possibility – it could be in the billions!

Now, from a business model perspective, we’re a hosted platform requiring no software downloads, plug ins or hardware installations. We take a top-level approach on how to provide companies with an end-to-end solution and tools for pre-event promotion, event delivery and post-event reporting and analytics.

SM: How do you charge?

SS: 2 Ways. We have a hosted self-service solution, which costs about $60k, and supports 25-30 events a year, each with 500-600 people. We also have a full-service solution which includes professional services, and costs 30-35% more. Our ASPs vary from small pilots under $10,000 to hundreds or thousands, and in some cases, we have million dollar deals.

SM: What are your top target segments?

SS: We focus on six core industries of publishing, technology, life sciences, government, continuing education and government.

SM: How did you penetrate the market and get early traction?

SS: After we got our first few reference customers (Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch) through direct selling, we systematically put together various categories of partnerships. Some of these include your corner production shop that’s doing a webinar video for Cisco, for example. All these marketing and production shops, once they’ve developed the content, need the infrastructure to actually deliver the webinars. This has been a very natural channel partner for us.

[to be continued]

[Part 1]
[Part 2]

This segment is part 3 in the series : Sharat Sharan’s On24: Lead Generation Through WebCasting
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