Does the world really need another video conferencing platform? That was my honest thought when I first learned about Sessions.
Admittedly, part of my resistance may have come from the six months it took me to teach my retired parents how to “unmute” themselves on Zoom. The thought of doing that all over again with a new platform terrified me. However, after digging deeper, I learned that Sessions is actually nothing like Zoom—or any other video conferencing product currently on the market.
Sessions is designed for customer-facing teams (not my parents), and the Sessions website specifically targets sales professionals, marketers, and customer success professionals. Zoom works just fine for virtual family reunions, and if you like cat filters, they’ve got you covered.
However, when it comes to sales pitches, customer onboarding, focus groups, and other business use cases, Sessions is to video chat what Zoom is to old-school conference calls with speaker phones. Sessions is a natural evolution—the next stage in video conferencing.
Again, I was skeptical, but the software’s popularity on Product Hunt (#1 Product of the Day, 5-star rating, and nearly 200 positive reviews at the time of publication) convinced me to explore it with an open mind. After all, the technophiles in the Product Hunt community may be early adopters, but they won’t latch onto a new SaaS product just because it’s novel.
We’ve all been through a lot since March of 2020, when the pandemic made our work virtual and we learned to make do with the tech we had. Collaboration became more challenging without projectors and live PowerPoint presentations, but we somehow got used to conversations like this:
“Bob, can you go ahead and share your screen? No, we can’t see your screen. Oh, do I have to give you permission? Wait, no, I don’t have permission to give you permission. Ashley, can you give Bob permission to share his screen? Ashley, we can’t hear you…”
What the Sessions’ creators have built is a video conferencing SaaS platform that does all the things we took for granted about live pre-pandemic business meetings. Sessions places the meeting agenda front-and-center for all attendees to see and follow along, it makes sharing slides and videos painless, and it’s simple to embed files that everyone can access.
Admittedly, it may be hard to visualize how all this works by reading about it, but any reasonably tech-savvy person can master these features by poking around a bit. It really is that intuitive, and many Product Hunt reviews corroborate my experience.
All this functionality exists right in the platform, making it a one-stop shop for meeting management and execution. Plus, one of my favorite things about Sessions is that participants can easily share and modify embedded content, so nobody is dependent on the host’s mastery of the platform (or lack thereof).
The Sessions website clearly identifies their target audience: Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams.
Personally, I could see it becoming the go-to platform for internal meetings as well (thanks to its collaboration tools and overall ease of use). That said, it has clear advantages for those customer-facing teams because all three departments deal with interactive presentations, and their success rests on how well they communicate complex ideas to their audiences.
One final area where Sessions stands out is its proprietary cloud storage system, which they call Memory. Memory serves as a repository for meeting recordings, documents, and participant data (e.g., who attended each meeting).
In other words, attendees can hop onto Sessions months later and access documents covered during a meeting. Meanwhile, management can quickly determine who attended any given meeting, what was covered, and whether some sort of follow-up was required from the participants.
That means no more searching through messages in Outlook trying to find this or that attachment. If it was discussed in a meeting and you remember roughly when that meeting took place, accessing those documents becomes quick and painless.
Given the pace that business moves these days, and how much we’ve come to rely on virtual meetings, it was only a matter of time before someone developed a platform that simplified business collaboration.
Sessions is that platform. Based on my experience, there is no other video conferencing product on the market that serves customer-facing teams, and businesses in general, the way Sessions does. And sure, you can’t turn yourself into a cat using filters on Sessions, but as one attorney figured out when he accidentally turned himself into a cat during a deposition—that filter may be more of a bug than a feature.
Give Sessions a try here.