How one Innovative Software Company Reaches Employees More Effectively with Media Streaming and Podcasts
uStudio Staff | Customer Spotlight, Internal Communications, Podcasting
uStudio Staff | Customer Spotlight, Internal Communications, Podcasting
Before uStudio, Pega Software was communicating with their sales teams through a weekly webcast and hosted webinar-based training sessions. The trouble was that these webinars were live and occurred on fixed timeframes. It was always convenient for only a portion of employees and certainly not those based around the world and in different time zones.
Lauren Shanley, chief-of-staff on the Client Engagement team, decided to find a way to reach the sales team where they were, without diversions or an increase in dreaded e-mail traffic. She chose to offer people podcasts delivered across a private streaming network.
After looking at several vendors and even considering a move to build their own application, they elected to use uStudio’s market-leading platform. uStudio gave them the ability to deploy quickly while also ensuring enterprise privacy, information security, system integration and governance standards were maintained.
uStudio’s team sat down with Lauren to learn more about how and why Pega made the move to podcasting and where they continue to adapt the program to ensure growth in audience adoption and overall business impact.
Some of the highlights include:
At 3:25, Lauren talks about what prompted Pega to look at podcasting for internal comms: "We were getting tons and tons of emails sent to our salespeople. We were having content all over the place on our content portal. And we had really just this weekly 9:00 AM call every Friday called our sales excellence webinar. So as I came on board into this role, I was asked by my boss to really reevaluate how we were delivering content to the field and making it in a more streamlined manner."
At 6:10, Here’s what led Pega to uStudio? Lauren offered: "…we did a quite extensive vendor search to figure out who we would go with for private podcasting. And I've never in my sales career ever had competitors of anybody say, oh no, you need to go back to uStudio. We kept getting pointed back to uStudio. And that was quite a sign that uStudio would be able to fit all of the requirements we have."
At 11:27, On discussing program feedback from users, Lauren said: "…I think one of the things I learned is that if you hear something once it's something that you can balance pretty well and incorporate if you need to. If you're hearing things three or four or five times, it's definitely feedback you should incorporate, because a lot of times other people are thinking it, they're just not socializing it."
At 24:18, Lauren expands on adoption and analytics: "…we're pretty proud of our numbers, I think the big thing they show is that our users come back for more. They're not coming for one episode, they're coming and they're listening to five or six episodes at a time, which is just fantastic."
As always the full transcript is available for those who want to scan and for listeners, you can hear the entire webinar by clicking play.
Zoe:
Hi, everyone. I guess we'll go ahead and get started. It's Zoe from uStudio, and I'd like to welcome everyone to our first, Let's Get Podding Webinar, reaching employees more effectively with private podcasting hosted by our special guest Lauren Shanley from Pegasystems. This webinar will be recorded and we will be sending a follow-up link to all attendees this week with the recording link, or follow-up email, excuse me. We are offering Q&A. So if anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask them in the questions feature, it's located at the bottom of your screen, and we will get to that at the very end of the presentation. And if we don't get to your question live, we will be sure to reach out afterwards and answer via email. So again, we're so excited to have everyone here, excited to have Lauren here, and can't wait to get started. So, Lauren, are you ready?
Lauren Shanley:
I am indeed. And thank you, Zoe. I always think it's a little bit awkward to have somebody else introduce yourself. So I'm happy to tell everyone a little bit about me, but Lauren Shanley, I'm so happy to be here. I'm a part of Pegasystems. I'm currently the chief of staff for our president of global client engagement and really he's responsible for about half the company that deals with our sales and strategy and everything that we're going to talk about today. So a little bit about me while we get our first pull up here, because I'd love to learn a little bit about our participants out there, but I started my career at SAP. So I've been in software my entire career and have spent the last three years, actually just celebrated my three year anniversary at Pega on Friday, where I did a sales role for about 11 months and then I moved into a strategy role and then took this role about seven weeks ago now.And I wanted to start off with a funny poll because like all of you, I've been working from home the last 12 months and I actually wasn't living where I'm currently based, which is Chicago, Illinois. I was living closer to our headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and called my parents who live in downtown Chicago last March and said, hey, do you mind if I move in with you for two weeks? My cousin was getting married at the end of the month. I was worried about being able to make it back to Chicago, and that stay turned into about four and a half months. And so I'm so thrilled because my mom and my aunt are on this call. And my mom specifically heard me record a lot of podcasts as we had to shift our podcasting journey very early in its early stages to being remote and work from home.
So beat the rush on getting the podcast mics from Amazon before they completely sold out and needed to restock. But thank you mom and thank you Angela, for all your support and love you guys. So that being said, I really want to spend today going through what our journey was at Pegasystem. So I'm going to walk you through what was truly a really only 11 month journey. We had a lot of early success, which we'll talk about and what we learned about. And so I'm thrilled to be able to share some of those successes and also like Zoe said, answer some of your questions. But when I started in sales strategy, after spending time as a traveling person at Pega, one of the things that was really important to me was understanding how we could do a comms rehaul.
We were getting tons and tons of emails sent to our salespeople. We were having content all over the place on our content portal. And we had really just this weekly 9:00 AM call every Friday called our sales excellence webinar. So as I came on board into this role, I was asked by my boss to really reevaluate how we were delivering content to the field and making it in a more streamlined manner. So we quickly realized that we could create a newsletter to deal with the emails, we could organize our content portal, but we still struggled with that at 9:00 AM sales excellence webinar, because if you think about a global company at 9:00 AM, Eastern time, Asia Pacific, Japan, they're sleeping or they've almost even started their Saturday. Europe, they're trying to start their weekend.
And then if you look at the East Coast, that's a good time, you're starting work when you're based on the East Coast in the US. But if you're in Central Time zone like myself, or on the West Coast, it starts to get a little early. So we were trying to figure out ways that we could really deliver the content to our sales people and to our supporting staff in a way that made them available whenever and however they wanted to listen to. So this is actually a slide that we presented when we rolled this out to sales to explain to them why we ended up thinking podcasts might work. And if you think back pre-pandemic, when your traveling salespeople were on planes, trains and automobiles, we spent a lot of downtime, waiting to board a flight, or driving from client to client. And so we were thinking how we could take advantage of that downtime, and that was really important to our decision to move to podcasting.
The second thing was we really wanted to hear more about how we won. We're a culture of winning and there are two things that you can really focus on when it comes to a culture of winning. The first is where you've won before, repeating the success. And the second is really figuring out how you can beat your competitors, or what's happening in the industry and how you can counteract that with your own organization. So those were things we realized we needed to focus in on and got the highest SEW ratings every single week. And then the third, like I mentioned, is that flexibility of channeling timing. Do you want your content on Friday at lunch when you go out and walk your dog? Do you want it while you're doing your morning jog or your morning peloton? So being able to offer that to our sales people was really important to us and became even more important as we moved into a post-pandemic world.
So it was pretty obvious that we needed to change something when it came to delivering this auditory content. And I find it hilarious because we did a quite extensive vendor search to figure out who we would go with for private podcasting. And I've never in my sales career ever had competitors of anybody say, oh no, you need to go back to uStudio. We kept getting pointed back to uStudio. And that was quite a sign that uStudio would be able to fit all of the requirements we have. So what were those requirements? And Zoe, here's another fun poll, because I'm curious as to what people would vote as the most important to them. And while I divided this slide up into a need to have versus nice to have. The one thing that I find is hilarious is that all of these were really need to have for us.
And so what we started with was this connected. Pega is very much a culture of build it yourself. We don't do a whole lot of third party applications. We really try to see if we can do whatever our clients need, or whatever our internal Pega employees need on a one-to-one basis and really developing it in-house. It was the fastest meeting I've ever had at Pega to see if we could do what uStudio could do. In about three minutes our IT team said, you know what? I think you guys better go with uStudio. They seem pretty robust at this and that it wouldn't be worth the time or effort for Pega to try to replicate it. And I'm so glad that they came to that conclusion and very quickly.
The second was all around being protected. As I said, we're talking about a culture of winning. That's really our ID as Pega. And so we wanted to make sure that we were protecting that. So connecting in and protecting with that single sign on, or that SSO, so that as long as you had a Pega email address, you were good to access the content, but once you left, if you go on to another job, if we had to, unfortunately let someone go, we wanted to be sure they didn't have all of our competitive intelligence just downloaded on their phone, ready to play for a room full of ServiceNow, or salesforce.com, salespeople. So that was also really important and a need to have. And then these last two are a little bit dichotomous. We wanted it to be affordable and make sure that we weren't locked into a multi-year, multi-thousand seat contract act with our vendor in case this failed, in case the field tried to adopt it and said, you know what? This just isn't working.
And so we wanted to be sure that we weren't spending too much money on something that we didn't know would be successful. And then on the flip side, we wanted to be sure that it was scalable if everyone did love it. We bought an initial a thousand seats to scale for our sellers and our supporting staff. And so if it did have great adoption, we wanted to be sure it was pretty quick that we were able to scale and buy more seats or buy more channels, which we did end up doing. And I'll talk about in more depth a little bit later. And then on the right side of your screen, the nice to haves, we wanted it to be easy to use, even though our sellers sell really great technology that fixes really complex problems at organizations, we wanted to be sure that it was really easy to use. These are not digital natives in the most case, I'm a millennial, but not all our sellers are. And so we knew that we pretty much had one shot every single time they logged into the application to see if it worked.
And so that was really important that it was really easy to give instructions on how to use. And then finally it was a culture fit. I think this is the most important part of selling is you want to buy from people you like, and you want to build relationships with the vendors that you like. And that was a no-brainer for us with uStudio. Not only did they support us at every step of the way with best practices, but especially throughout a pandemic. And this was not something we knew when we were going through the process, but I think a different member of the uStudio team has checked in with me every six weeks or so throughout the last 12 months.
So just a fantastic relationship, and so happy that that was not necessarily a need to have, but it ended up working out. And I can't imagine going with anybody else. So moving quite along here, we eventually got to, if I click through, there we go, we got to our trial and our launch to field. And so again, once we made the decision to go podcasting, we definitely wanted to trial this before we rolled out to a thousand people. And so we worked to create, we were very, very fortunate that we had a built in podcasting, or recording studio in our Cambridge headquarters. And we also found a producer, our super producer, iron man, Dan, who, he, Dan Ford, he also has a podcast on the side and does in his free time and was more than willing to help get us up to speed, and then we've convinced him to never leave us. So he remains our super producer.
And so he helped us produce three initial episodes that we then set out to a team of about 25. And we gained pretty detailed feedback. I wanted to know everything from, if they liked the name of the podcast, if they liked the length of the podcast to really, if they understood the conversational tone, if we needed to talk slower, if we needed to talk faster, the content, if it related to the titles that we had developed. So pretty, I'd say almost an extensive 30 page survey for these 25 people that listen to them. And then we did incorporate that feedback. And I think one of the things I learned is that if you hear something once it's something that you can balance pretty well and incorporate if you need to. If you're hearing things three or four or five times, it's definitely feedback you should incorporate, because a lot of times other people are thinking it they're just not socializing it.
So we did make some significant changes to the outline of our shows and how we created our content. And then we were ready for a launch to the field. And this was back, again, pre-pandemic when we went offsite to do sales kickoffs, we brought about a thousand of our employees down to our sales kickoff in Orlando. And we were lucky to have an entire tech pavilion. So not only were we staffing the tech pavilion with social selling tools and other tools that our sellers use, but I have a booth myself called Pega Podcast, and we printed out postcards with instructions so they could scan the QR codes, download the app and log in and then stop by if they had questions about just rolling out the podcast. And this was a great way to do it because we also made it fun.
uStudio has the best analytics you'll ever see in your life. And so we were able to track, as people were downloading it and as people were listening to the podcast. And so what we did is we ran a competition to say, okay, if you downloaded it by the end of sales kickoff, you get one entry. And then if you listen to more than one episode, or at least one episode, you get a second entry and we raffled off a pair of Apple AirPods. So definitely got our first 500 users pretty quickly by motivating them to win a pair of AirPods. And it was a very successful launch and I think we'll share best practices, but I think a lot of that was just around this repetition that came from the comms rehaul back in April and lessons we had learned from streamlining, how we delivered content, not only across a newsletter, or email format, but also in the form of these webinars.
And I will say we did end up reducing the sales excellence webinar. It's now only once a month run by my colleague, Tiffany Fisher, who is the host of another one of our channels and my partner in crime on all of this. And she now is able to focus that content a lot more specific, have spent more time prepping with speakers and really encouraging that to be a great 60 minute production. And we freed up those other three weeks to now just have the podcast be that supplemental release schedule and where we used to have sales excellence webinars. So with that, I wanted to pause here before we talk about the expansion and talk a little bit about how we create our content and what we've created. So I know this is a busy slide and thank you to Alyssa Schmidt. I know she's listening, or she told me she was going to be listening today. She built these beautiful logos for us, which I think is so important for the branding of a podcast when you release it.
But our core shows are really where I want to focus my time on, because it comes back to that culture of winning and was really important for us to stick to what we knew our field team learned, which was how do you win deals? Where have we won them successfully before? And then how do we compete? Which is why we named our two channels, how I won that in competitive chat. And please do not let, How I Built That, which is a popular podcast. No, I don't need to get any cease and desist letters from them about the name of the title. We only use this internally at Pega, so please do not reveal our secret, but it gets a good chuckle out of longtime podcast fans who know where that comes from and that's the core channel I work with and that I build out.
And so I'll talk a little bit about my process here, because I think it's important for everyone to know that even if you've only taken one journalism class in college, you can host a podcast. It's something that will come naturally. And I think the more that it's a conversation and the more you take the onus off your talent, the more success you're going to end up having. It should sound like a phone call between friends, not anything formal, at least that's how we do it and how we've had a lot of success with adoption. So I basically source these from all over the place. I get calls from sales managers. I get emails from supporting team members. I find these deals myself. And what I'm always looking for is what's the one thing that everyone can take away from this episode that they can learn?
We have six core industries, we have three geographical regions covering multiple countries. And so I want, if a financial services account executive is on talking about his or her win in the United States, I want somebody who covers the government in Asia to learn something from the podcast and take away something. And I think that's always what I keep in mind. And there's sometimes some repetition with the one or two things I'm able to pull out and make them pretty specific with regards to the episode. But for the most part, we try to keep them pretty unique, or to have a unique take on them. So, that's how I source them. And then once I reach out I, like I said, taking the onus off your talent, I've now done almost a hundred episodes, but I have to remember sometimes that the talent we ask to be on the show has done zero.
And so being able to get them on a prep call and walk them through the process and say, I'm with you every step of the way, we don't have to take this in one take, it is something that puts them a little bit at ease and I will give everyone my secret, which is on the prep call, oftentimes I know already what the questions are, but it gives me an opportunity to figure out how my timing is. Some of our salespeople are talkers. And so I tend to ask them only five questions. Whereas some of them they keep their answers a little bit more concise and I'm able to ask more questions, but we always target to get our episodes between 10 to 20 minutes. That tends to be the sweet spot. And the closer to 10 minutes, the more they tend to listen to, or return back to them, because of something they've heard.
So during the prep, I'm essentially taking notes, asking them questions. Sometimes I want to record that prep session because it ends up being just as good as the actual podcast, but we don't, because again, we want to put the talent at ease. And then we're able to move to the actual recording. So I take my notes, turn them into questions. I do not ask any of our clients to, or excuse me, any of our talent to send me back their answers. Some of them do and write them out. But for the most part, I just want them to know what I'm going to ask and then I add level little during our recording based on their answers. And then it's just as simple as setting 30 minutes with them to record. And another secret of the trade, sometimes I do purposely mess up on my recording when I can tell they're a little nervous, just so to show them that we do edit those things out, we are going to make them sound good and we want this to be something they listen to.
And then after we're done recording, again, my producer, Dan, cleans it up, puts our music in our intro on it and does a really nice job of just packaging it all together. And we send it off to the talent so they can listen to it before we release it more broadly. I will say about 80% of the people don't listen to their episodes, they find it very awkward to listen to themselves, but we always, again, putting the talent at ease, we always want to give them the option to say, can you take this out? Can you tweak this? Which I think has only happened two times in the, almost a hundred episodes that I've created. So, that's a little bit about how I won that competitive chat is similarly created by Tiffany.
And then I wanted to talk a little bit just about we've expanded because we did very quickly. We found that there was a need for these industry win stories or industry insights. So we created a show around that. And then this ties into a little bit of guidance around how to best name your show and focus your show. There are topics that we want to talk about that are perfect for podcast that just didn't fit in one of those two buckets. And so we created a bonus material for things like social selling, or things like how to run a great discovery call that we fit into our bonus material. So those are the four shows really run by sales strategy. We then did have such interest in expanding out that we had our clients success team as well as our solution consultant team ask to get seats and create their own channels. So they're responsible for their content. And again, it's been a great experience where we just have a monthly call so we're all on the same page.
We've actually now moved that to a quarterly call because we all just know how it goes. And it's been a wonderful experience to be able to expand outwards. And so, like I said, from April when we first started thinking about this to March, when we had our first expansion and added more seats, more channels and video capabilities, I will say we have not taken advantage of the video capabilities yet, that's a distinction we make in our medium, but it is something that we do have the availability to do.
So what best practices have I learned? This feels like a lot of best practices, but I promise I'll group them together. One is always just come back to keeping your audience at mind. And I think I've said it multiple times on this call, that culture of winning was always allowing us to figure out those two things, where have we won before and how do we beat our competitors at it? And so I think having that definition allows you to really just keep a clear swim lane and say, no, a lot as this expands and as people find out, you have this medium, you get a lot of interest and being on a podcast, because as we all know, they've proliferated as has content throughout the pandemic. And so being able to really ensure that you're keeping your show coherent and the same and back to your tying into exactly what you want to accomplish is always very important. So that was by far and above the best practice I learned.
The second was putting, again, putting these governance rules in place and making sure you know which each show is trying to accomplish. And like I said, making sure your episodes are similar, but not too similar. So even if there are one or two things you're trying to accomplish in the episode, and you might have touched on one before, everyone will have a different opinion of how to handle this. A topic that comes to mind is executive briefings, how one person does that might be different than another. So I think that's always important to think about how you want to distinguish, but keep the show so that the listener knows what to expect every time you release it.
The third is my favorite, and my mom's probably laughing at this because everybody in our household knew it was podcast Tuesdays. We chose Tuesday as a day to release, not because there was any science behind it, but more so thinking about holidays and three day weekends, and we didn't want to change our release date every single month based on holidays. And so we chose Tuesdays and we release on the second and third Tuesday of every month. And they just know that we are able to remind them the first Friday of every month when we do our SEW that there's new ones coming out. And we do see a massive spike every Tuesday when new episodes are released because they get the notification from the uStudio app that they're new episodes. Hugely important. And just having that expectation of what's coming from your listeners is really important.
And then these last two I'll group together, but one is to measure your results frequently. Like I said, uStudio's analytics are incredibly impressive, and will tell you absolutely anything you want to know about your listenership and then gaining feedback. So if you think about the analytics as the quantitative part of it, the qualitative part is just as important. We've iterated a few times based on what we're hearing from our field teams and what they want to hear more of, and obviously letting them self nominate, or nominate their peers to be on the show is hugely important. So definitely great best practices and things that we will continue to do as we continue to roll out podcasts. So, oops, I skipped a poll Zoe, I'm so sorry, but I'll go ahead because I know I'm running long.
Just wanted to share some of our success to date, and I did put this in gold because I think at this point in the pandemic, some people would rather listen to my voice on a podcast than their spouse's. So I'm giving myself a little gold medal about that, but in all seriousness, these were incredibly impressive numbers for us given that how we initially thought podcasts were going to be used in that downtime of traveling was taken away from us. And now, the travel time is really from the fridge and to the laundry room and back. So we're pretty proud of our numbers, I think the big thing they show is that our users come back for more. They're not coming for one episode they're coming and they're listening to five or six episodes at a time, which is just fantastic.
And like I said, it helped us learn not only how to roll out comms and how people learn and what they wanted to learn, but it also gave our sellers more time to sell by reducing the amount of hours that they're spending on enablement, or spending learning about these things or trying to hunt these things down. They can always return to the content. We don't archive any of our content. So being able to just have that living repository of, oh, I'm going to take 10 minutes to remind myself how I do this is really important. And then finally, it's fun. I've really enjoyed it. I know my team has really enjoyed it, and it's actually something that when I started my new role, I took with me because both my old boss and my current boss knew how passionate I was and how much I enjoy doing these.
So my final takeaways before I open it up to questions, basically not everything needs to be a podcast. There are several things that we said no to turning into podcasts. So, in the spirit of could have been an email, just assess if this medium is right for you. I think that 10 to 20 minute mark is exactly where you should be. And if there's just consistent material for that, it's a great medium to approach, and just something that people take too naturally given the proliferation of podcasting.
The second is that uStudio is the most fantastic vendor I've ever worked with. They have tons of experience from how you set up your IT infrastructure to allow for single sign on all the way to, how do I best work with a producer to produce my episodes? So tons of experience there, I know I can ping them about absolutely anything. And then finally create content you want to listen to. I think this is the most important part because we're all human. And if you force these conversations and you force this content and it's something that you wouldn't even want to listen to on your free time, it's hard to convince an audience to listen to it. So those are my three takeaways. I know we've got a lot of questions. So Zoe, I will pause for a moment and turn it right back over to you.
Zoe:
Yeah, no, there's a ton of great questions. The first one, let's see. What were some of the analytic dashboards that you used that you felt were the most valuable?
Lauren Shanley:
Yeah, absolutely. It depends on what you're looking for, but the ones I always look at is what, especially early was what day they were listening on. Again, there was no science behind choosing Tuesday. So I wanted to be sure that we chose the right day and then that we were seeing spikes based on some of the proactive internal PR campaigns we were doing. And then the other I listen to is really just, or the other I look at is what's getting the most listens. We actually do a top 10 episodes post a few, or at the end of the year. And it was really interesting to see which ones people kept going back to. So those are the two I use most frequently, but you guys have pretty much a dashboard for everything. So I've used a lot of other just depending on what I need.
Zoe:
Awesome. Another question is, someone's wondering if there was any pushback from employees to download a separate app?
Lauren Shanley:
A little bit. Yes. And that's part of the reason we made such a push for it when we live and in person down at our company sales kickoff and especially because they're so used to doing everything through Pega. We were aware of that. And that's part of the reason we chose uStudio is because we knew it would be an easy app to download and get set up on their laptops, or excuse me, their cell phones. So we wanted to be sure that we were, that it was easy for them to do. So a little bit of pushback. I still get a ping every once in a while, I got a new phone. Can you send me the QR? We have made all of that readily available, but definitely something to be sensitive to.
Zoe:
Let's see. How often do you create podcast content and who at your company is responsible to make each episode? How do you manage the post production part to make sure it's pleasant to listen to?
Lauren Shanley:
Yeah, so we create podcast content every month. We tend to release, last year we were releasing between four and 10 episodes a month, which was a lot. And just, we wanted to get a baseline. This year we're only releasing between two to six episodes a month. And so we do create monthly. And in terms of the post-production part, I'm really lucky we had somebody on staff that had done it before and he does a great job at turning it around. So I know Zoe, I believe you guys have suggestions for how to do that and make it sound pleasant. But like I said, I got really lucky that I just get to do the fun part of recording and don't have to do all the cleanup.
Zoe:
Yeah. There are plenty of third party companies that we refer a lot of clients to that can quickly and inexpensively put a episode together for you. And we hear that some of our customers learn GarageBand from YouTube. And so it's not as scary as it might sound. Let's see, one last question. I know we're over time, but have you begun to measure the ROI of moving to a podcast medium and how might that be compared to any feedback of your monthly webinars and emails that you guys were doing pre-podcasting?
Lauren Shanley:
Yeah, in some ways. So we always have a net promoter score for the SEW, the sales excellence webinar that I mentioned. So we've been seeing an uptick in that just because we're allowing for more content to be delivered just in time. So, that can be more focused, that used to be 10 different topics in 60 minutes, and now it's two or three because some of the other content is being delivered through the podcasting medium. So we have seen an uptick in that. And in terms of the podcasting medium, we really just collect the qualitative feedback at this point. I wouldn't say we've got any financial ROI, but I would be definitely remiss if I didn't say how much time and energy it saved our sellers. And I think that's ultimately what we were looking to accomplish is how do we get faster time to value for not only our new sellers that we're trying to onboard with this content overload, but also how we get our existing customers things they've learned or new things to learn and get that information out to them quickly.
Zoe:
Okay. Thank you. Let's see. What are other types of content you think could be turned into a podcast?
Lauren Shanley:
It really depends. So it's easier almost for me to think now what shouldn't be turned into a podcast. So for example, we do a lot of technical demos to our audiences that require a lot of visuals, not a good podcast. My boss actually sends a biweekly email to the company, and we talked about turning that into a podcast, not good format for a podcast, pricing, anything with visuals or numbers. It's just hard for people to visualize. I know we all struggle with mental math. And so always a little bit difficult to turn that into a podcast. But I think the storytelling is always the biggest element of it. I'm, as a former seller, one of the things that I, and I should say as a former seller and somebody from a big family, storytelling is such an important skill when you're trying to communicate to people. And so thinking about how to tell a story in 10 to 20 minutes is, if you could think about that, that's the ideal podcasting content is what I would say.
Zoe:
Yeah, I guess I'll add on to that. First of all, for your demos, you could use uStudio's video podcasting for that. It does offer a nice visual, but I think more and more customers now, especially now that we're all remote, use uStudio a lot for hosting meeting recordings as well. So plenty of preexisting assets can be transformed into a podcast episode. Let's see. So, we answered this with the analytics dashboard, but as far as measuring engagement from the workforce, how are you capturing that? And can you elaborate a little bit on the metrics allowing you to measure employee engagement?
Lauren Shanley:
Yeah, absolutely. So uStudio has a ton of dashboards and can tell you at on an individual level where people are listening, but we actually tied that back into our sales reporting and show by team who's listening to episodes, how many they've listened to. We've used more carrot than stick at this point, because, again, how we initially thought people would be listening to podcasts changed drastically last March. So we have set reports out that show if they've listed a 70% of the mandatory, and we call them mandatory, actually, if I have any sales people on, all of them are mandatory, but we call how I won that and chat mandatory episodes to listen to. And so we really just track those by AE level, account executive level, and then their frontline sales manager.
And there were times that I would have them compete with each other and send to two managers like, hey, here's how your teams are listening. And you do see a spike when that happens. So I think using that competition is really important, especially because we didn't want to use stick at this point. Everyone's got enough on their plate. So we've been using more carrot as it comes to this medium and this communication strategy.
Zoe:
Yeah. Everyone loves some friendly competition.
Lauren Shanley:
Yes we do.
Zoe:
Okay. One last question. From start to finish long, would you say it takes to record, edit and launch an episode?
Lauren Shanley:
About a month, and it starts, if I'm emailing them in week one, I can set the prep up that week and then it's pretty, even if I'm recording next week, I try to give my producer about a week or so. This is an addition on to his multitude of daily job activities. And so I like to give him about a week and then I like to give the talent about a week to have the opportunity to listen to it before we release it. So could we turn it around? Yes. We've certainly turned episodes around in about 48 hours, but just to manage all of our workloads and not give us all heart attacks, we say the SLA is about a month.
Zoe:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much again for your time today. I think this was a great presentation. Again, to all attendees. This webinar was recorded and we will be sending a follow-up email to everyone with the recording link sometime this week. This recording will also be available on our website, under resources on the events page, as well as in our trial app in our Let's Get Podding Webinar series replay show. If you don't have a trial with uStudio and would like to view the replay, you can download our app for free in the Apple Store or Google Play. But yeah, I'd like to thank everyone for joining us. If you'd like to learn more about uStudio, you can visit our website at uStudio.com. But Lauren, thank you so much. And everyone have a great day [crosstalk 00:35:56].
Lauren Shanley:
Thank you Zoe and thank you uStudio. It was very fun.
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