Andreas Wahlman: Don't Wait for Perfect, Just Start

You've spent over three years at Intersolia now, first as a content creator and now leading the webinar program as a content manager. Now, chemical management is a niche technical field. What does your day-to-day look like? So, the thing with my day-to-day is no day are the same, basically. Because my role is, sure, I have days where I work 100% on webinars and crafting out the pipeline and talking to my small but mighty webinar team and getting topics set and everything. But then I also have days where I work with product development and my focus is on knowledge bases and instructional videos and so on. So, no day are the same. And that's kind of what I love about it as well. That's amazing. And as you were mentioning, you use your webinars to educate customers, right? Whereas most companies use webinars to generate leads, for example. How do you think about this distinction and does it change how you build and run your webinars? Well, in some ways, yes. But it's, sure, we have the focus on education. But I don't think that we should jump to the conclusion that we... Yeah. ...rule out the lead gen from it. Our focus is on education and to continue that lead. But with every data we get within the webinars, we know who watched what and what questions they were asking and so on. We can use that in step two as a lead. But since they're mostly... I say mostly our customers who watches our webinars, we use it as a customer satisfaction to lead them in a quite difficult topic otherwise. I mean, chemical management, it is kind of stiff sometimes, of course, but it's a serious subject. So it kind of needs to be. But with focusing on educational part, I believe that you earn the trust. And when you earn the trust from a customer, they will buy. But if you constantly focus on, oh, this is a webinar where we're going to sell something, I believe that an audience can smell a lead or someone trying to sell something. They can smell that a mile away. Yeah. So by focusing on the educational part, I believe, and what I've seen as well, the rest follows. Yeah. And you just talked about what you've seen, what you've perceived with your webinars, right? And I know you've seen a marked increase in viewership. So like with direct business results, as we were just discussing. What's changed and what drove that growth? Yeah. So I took over later. Late 2024. And I did some format changes. Before that, we mostly had the subject matter expert as the host as well. One person running the show. But the thing with experts is they're brilliant. Not often good hosts. You said it, not I. But my... Also, I can get away with other things since I'm not the expert. I am not there as a chemistry educated person. I get the permission to be a little less stiff. I can talk to the audience in a way that the expert who needs to be serious with this topic, I can do it in another way. And I think that I also try to ensure a better two-way communication with the audience. Because I can... I can use that in another way. Yeah. That's amazing. And talking about this two-way communication, that can be quite challenging when doing webinars, right? Because that can easily become a one-way broadcast that you have no idea of who is watching or considering the audience, right? So how do you build this genuine interactions into your webinars? And what tools in TwentyThree do you use for that? How does that make a difference? Well, I'd say it starts before the broadcast. Because we use all kinds of feedback we get from our customers. Even if it's through customer support with tickets that comes in on regularly asked questions or what customers ask about in demos with sales or whatever. We can take that and use that as a foundation to what topics we want to talk about. And then within the broadcast, I always, always start by making the audience feel seen. Because I know that I want to be seen when I watch whatever. And by starting, I ask them to use the chat all the time. Because I want to see some live action going on there. And I... You can just ask them the simplest questions. Where are you viewing from? Are you sitting alone or with your colleagues? Easy questions to ask and easy questions to answer as well. And then give them just a small feedback. Hi, George, I see you're joining us from Lithuania. Great to see you. Then they... Oh, he actually saw that I'm here. Use the chat. And also, I always have my colleague moderating the chat. So if there's anything she can help with in the chat, she's always there as well during the broadcast. And with other things within the TwentyThree platform, the polls, I mean, everybody knows that the human brain is not that great on focusing on one thing over long periods of time. So by putting a poll, say, in the middle of the chat, in the middle of the broadcast, then they get a split second of, oh, something happened there. They can shift focus slightly and just answer that poll. And then they can focus back on the webinar. And in the meantime, we get great data. Other than that, we also use a lot the ask a questions part. Because our customers are the kind that... They need the extra help. Since, as we already said, it's a complicated subject, chemical management. It's not that sexy, but it needs to be done. Someone's got to do it. Yeah. And by using the forums as a question, we get everything focused in one point. And we can easily get back to them as well. We always try to answer some questions late in the broadcast, which also makes the audience feel seen. Oh, they picked my questions. Nice. But we always, always get back to the customers via email as well. After the webinar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So everybody always gets answers on their questions. That's so cool. So it's always back and forth. And I must also say that we have amazing customers within the chat. Because it's not always that I or my colleagues in the chat that's talking to the customers, but the customers in between as well. Oh, okay. Yeah. So it's amazing to see like, oh, my audio isn't working. And then some other audience member, yeah, but it works for me. You should try to do this. And maybe... Love it. So it's amazing to see the community build up in that as well. This is so cool. I love that. And you were talking about potentially having someone from Lithuania or whatnot, right? So you were reaching specialists across several European markets. Yeah. And language could easily become a barrier. So how do you handle that? And how do TwentyThree's tools support you with this? Yeah, it can be a barrier. Yes. What we do at the moment is we broadcast in several different languages from the get-go. So Swedish, English, Danish, German. With different hosts? With different hosts. I'm hosting the Swedish and English ones. Yeah. But then we have our colleagues in Germany and in Denmark. They're hosting their own. Yeah. Yeah. So there we have the start. But every webinar that we put out, we also use the subtitles within TwentyThree. Yeah, the transcriptions. Yeah. To transcribe and to make it available for all our customers that speak whatever language. Yeah. So we always publish that in a number of different languages to make it more accessible to everyone. How does it happen with the different markets that you have? Like when you have one topic covered in one market, does that also feed the other topic in the different market? Or do you have different needs? How does it work? It depends. Yeah. Lovely answer, right? But since most of the regulations is on an EU level, it's mostly the same between countries within the EU, then of course. And when it's system-based webinars, then of course it's the same for everyone because the system is the same. So yeah, it kind of depends. Makes sense. And if you could say one thing to the person that's listening. To the person at TwentyThree Summit 2026 who is about to get back to the organization and push video forward or webinar forward as we've been saying, what would it be? Don't wait for perfect. Just start. Perfect. Thank you, Andreas. Thank you.