Peatix Works: Project Management and collaboration across remote teams Featuring Akifumi Takashima, Peatix Solution Partner

The other day, our team released the "見逃し配信支援オプション/On-Demand Lead Generation program", a service to support BtoB lead acquisition using seminar recordings. We chat with Peatix Solution Partner team Akifumi Takashima, who led the project, on how it was devised and carried out by the team.

Peatix Solution Partner team Akifumi Takashima joined Peatix Japan in January 2022, following his four and a half years stint in corporate and municipal sales.

Q:Thank you very much for joining us today! First of all, could you tell us more about the aim of this program and what it strives to do?

The objective of this project is to drive lead acquisition (gathering potential customers) while making the archived distribution of seminars more easily available in the market. Ultimately, this should help us achieve more sales among clients who seek to gain leads via the online distribution of archived content.

Q: How did the project start and what were the challenges up to that point?

I think the project was set up to address issues from three main perspectives: from an internal perspective, from the perspective of the companies that use the service to gain customers, and from the perspective of the participants attending the seminars.

From an internal perspective, we’ve observed that Marketing spend were shrinking in the market as a whole, especially from SaaS customers, and the number of B-to-B online seminar events has also been slowing declining on the platform.. The sales team at Peatix had relied on helping organizers attract more attendees to the live online events, and the decline in online events simply means a decline in sales, so we knew this would grow to become a problem.

On the other hand, from a business perspective, we understand that our clients, despite a slashed budget, are still expected to gain leads, and thus, the onus fell onto us to introduce a more cost-effective approach that would address their needs.

And lastly, from the attendees’ perspective, Covid has brought about a surge of live, online seminars which attendees may or may not have been able to participate in as a result of its fleeting nature. With that, working together with the content providers and our clients, we thought there would be some opportunities here to re-distribute the archived content while helping our clients to gain new leads.

Q: Sounds like a project that benefits several parties!

Definitely. This concept was mutually beneficial in multiple aspects. While it was initially borne with the aim of protecting a revenue stream, it ultimately became something that would also impact our end users. With this, we also hope to introduce more recorded webinars on the platform, dispelling a common misconception that online events are typically live.

Should this become more popular, we would have expanded on an existing revenue stream, simply by leveraging resources that were already available to us, while providing more value to our attendees simultaneously.

Q: Are there many archived events on Peatix?

Archived eventss are increasing and becoming a trend. However, not many companies use this content as a lead-generation tool which is why we are here to help.

Q: Can you tell us a little more about the project was set up and how you proceeded from there?

For this project, we wanted to spread word of the archive distribution not only to existing clients that the sales team are connected with but also to companies acquiring leads. This meant that we would need to work with multiple business teams, , including PR, digital marketing, Community Partnerships (a team that makes proposals to event organisers, supports community activities, etc.), Organiser Success (a team that provides support to organisers) and Peatix University (a team that manages the Peatix University guide)

We had to first explain the importance of this project, the impact it would bring and also why this was an idea that could benefit the multiple stakeholders that we served. The other teams had some questions as to why we could not limit this offering to live events and we had to address these questions and aligned perspectives.

The PR team had agreed that if we were planning for a broad market approach, it’s best to position it with an easy-to-understand message. This is why we decided to keep the name of the offering simple and straightforward, naming it the "On-Demand Lead Generation program" (directly translated from Japanese), which basically summarises what the program strives to do and the channel used to achieve the aim.

Q: With Peatix being a mostly remote-based organization, what were your experiences leading this project cross-functionally online, across locales and languages?

The hardest thing was to convince the other teams of the feasibility of the concept and following that, get them enthusiastic and excited about the prospects the project may bring. If we had been working together in the office with face-to-face interactions, a lot of nuances would have been understood. Still, with a project that was carried out entirely online, it was sometimes challenging to communicate differences. Also, this was a project that required the partnership of teams with different expertise which also led to the added challenge.

In order to align understanding and expectations, the team actually started by drafting a press release that was intended for internal distribution but written in a manner that was designed for public release. This allowed us to work towards a common understanding, and through this process, we addressed questions, clarified doubts, tweaked the language and tone of how it’s intended to be marketed, and with a clear understanding of the program, this also helped to gain further buy-ins from the other teams.

Q: Writing a press release designed for public distribution but intended only for internal circulation is pretty interesting.

I think that putting down the concept in writing, with the intention of making it easily understood was really effective in bringing about common understanding.

Also, with this project spanning across multiple teams, we were not able to have everyone present in all the meetings and discussions, hence the press release was also effective in keeping all members informed and up-to-date with what we were working to achieve.

Q: Was writing the release tedious? a long process of writing the release Was it difficult working on the release? I see. Was the press release completed fairly soon after you started the project?

Not exactly, in fact, shortly about a month after the initial concept was borne, we drafted the first version of it and after working through more details, we circulated it internally barely another month later.

Q: That's pretty quick. Can you share more about the process?

There were quite a few tasks associated with sending out the press release, but I think we were able to get it all done within two months.

I started with planning the different content needed to articulate what the program was about. From there, I created some initial drafts and shared them with various project members. I thought it would be more efficient to start something, somewhere before gathering inputs. That way we’d already have something to work on and could proceed in a faster manner.

Also, prior to the initial meetings, I made sure to approach the respective team leads to brief them on the project, and left it to them to decide who from their respective teams may be assigned to work on this. Also by then, the respective assigned member should have some basic knowledge of the project, hence, the initial meetings spent very little time on background information and explanations, and we were able to get the actual execution going quite quickly.

Q: The press release sounds like it was also part of that introductory process, where you first shared something that had already been created, and sought further inputs from there.

Yes, I believe you can't move forward without at least having created something from scratch, and you can't move forward with a team by dictating what you’ve decided. Creating a base point as a basis for more collaboration, it helps everyone to get involved with a lowered barrier and I also hope for more participation and opinions in this process.

Q: Sounds like a good learning experience.

Again, because the project involved the expertise and interests of various teams, I also had to be mindful of their perspectives and take into account their feedback.

For example, from the sales team's point of view, their objective was primarily to increase sales; for the PR team, the On-Demand Lead Generation program is something that’s only relevant to specific business clients, so we have to be clear with the communication strategies. For the Organiser Success team who manages ‘Peatix University’, the portal is designed as a learning hub to provide useful information to all event organizers, so it was difficult to write an article that’s suited only for a particular segment of users. Every team brings unique perspectives so I was conscious of also trying to see things in their light, rather than pushing our way through.

I think having this awareness is extremely important when working on cross-team projects and I’d like to think that the project has gone smoothly, partly because of this mutual understanding.

Q: Lastly, can you tell us more about this newly released On-Demand Lead Generation program?

The On-Demand Lead Generation program is an added, optional service for existing clients of Peatix Boost - our proprietary in-house marketing solution. This new program uses existing recorded and archived online content to attract more viewers, which will in turn form leads. When choosing this add-on option, the event page for the registration to view the online content will be created and managed for you, which also means, clients can now acquire additional leads without having to cater additional marketing spend or resources needed to manage the campaign. We’ve also gotten data to prove that despite the re-distribution of content that had been broadcasted before, there have been cases where the new viewers brought about almost 6x more leads as compared to the initial broadcast, and this is why we are confident that this will be a solution that can further help our clients achieve their lead-gen goals.

For more information on the newly released On-Demand Lead Generation program, click here.