Webinars are great at building awareness, nurturing existing leads, and uncovering sales opportunities. However, we’ve found not all organizations see it this way.

They question whether webinars work as sales generating activities. Great for awareness. Super for positioning. But, they ask, where are the sales?

Marketing webinars that use thought leadership to generate registrations will not create immediate sales opportunities, especially if it's just one 45-minute presentation. They will, however, identify them.

If you implement the five steps outlined below, you will not only uncover more sales opportunities from your webinar efforts—you’ll start identifying many of them before each event has even ended.

Key Facts

The five steps for improving your webinars' sales impact are based on some assumptions (which we believe in enough to call them facts…):

1. People care about themselves more than your firm. Especially more than what you’re selling.
   
   
2. People do tend to feel some obligation to those who give them something valuable, for free.
   
   
3. People will increasingly forget about your webinar and why they registered as time passes.
   
   
4. People do want service and technology firms they trust and know they can turn to.
   
   
5. People who register for events fall into four categories: immediate opportunities (5%) and short-term leads (20%), long-term leads (50%), and perfectly nice people who will never buy related services (25%).

Hey! Recognize this buying process? It's full of people like you and me. Let’s go over the five tips to make sure we empower online events to identify when people, just like us, are ready to buy.

Step #1: Give and Reap the Reward

There are three kinds of webinars.

1. Educational events
   
   
2. Sales events
   
   
3. Bad events

The best events mix the first two, with an emphasis on educating the audience. By emphasizing education, you’re acknowledging (behind the scenes) that just a small portion of your attendees are ready to buy tomorrow (5%).

Your events should help develop relationships with and nurture the majority of prospects who want to learn about the topic at hand, but who also want to learn more about your firm. They are interested in what it does, how well it understands their needs, and if it’s going to be risky to contract with.

If your content is strong and you deliver benefits to attendees as promised, you will receive an eager (and perhaps) growing audience at each event.

When it’s time to have sales conversations with prospects—you’ll have shared your expertise, stories, and approach to their particular challenges. In return, you’ll have their trust, respect, and an edge over much of your competition.

Step #2: Engage and You Will Prosper

Sorry, it’s not enough to teach—future professor. How many of you have positive memories of sitting in a large lecture hall being spoken to as just one of many? Don’t be the corporate version of the weakest aspects of our collective collegiate experiences. Generate participation! Get out your lesson planning books and infuse your events with some dialogue and engagement. Some ideas we use that can get you started:

• Have reminder emails serve as "Request for Questions" from those who already registered.
  
  
• Poll early and poll often (but not too often).
  
  
• Proactively reach out to each registrant during the event, one on one.
  
  
• Have a real, live Q&A.
  
  
• Request feedback with exit surveys.

Doing all of the above will ensure that your registrants know this event is about them and about sharing ideas they’re interested in. And, by engaging your audience, you’re more likely to generate questions (try 4x the amount!), have a happier audience (as shown by exit survey results), and gather a whole lot more intelligence about what’s going on in their organization.

Make sure all activities each registrant participates in are collected and shared with the sales team so more relevant and targeted follow-up conversations can be conducted. By using the collected intelligence, your thoughtful and skilled business developers will be able to increase the number of sales meetings generated. This is especially the case because you engaged the attendees during your events.

Step #3: Ask, and You Shall Receive

Beyond having relevant, targeted conversations with each attendee, how do you know which leads are your hottest?

Ask them.

While the primary objective of these events (from your registrants' perspective) is to educate and share your expertise, it’s okay to blend a little bit of sales in there. It’s expected and understood.

At the end of the event, you’ll find that 5-20% of your audience will ask for immediate sales follow up if you poll the audience and simply ask “Who would like a sales-oriented follow-up call?” Talk about generating immediate sales conversations!

That poll question is a great way to wrap up that penultimate slide that’s all about your firm and services. And it’ll leave your sales team pretty excited—getting self-identified leads that just spent an hour soaking up your thought leaderships is even better than a "Contact Us" submission!

Of course, be sure to follow up with each qualified registrant. Reinforce the relationship that has begun to develop through your engaging online event.

Step #4: Follow Up, Immediately

Firm leader: “If they have an interest or need, they’ll call us.”

Me: “Oh. No. You didn’t.”

Once events are scheduled, make sure the sales team is given sufficient notice to block off an appropriate number of days to call registrants, beginning the day after the event.

You must strike while the iron is hot… Pow! Your prospects are busy and will find new items to stress/worry/obsess about if you don’t call while they still have your bullet points bouncing through their heads.

Call. Find the pain point. Schedule meeting.

You’ll want to make sure the calling is done in a manner that continues to carry and develop your company as a thought leader that can approach each prospect's challenge with thought and attention. Make sure the sales team does not launch into a hard sales pitch unless the prospect asked for it before the call.

If you or your team is new to following up like this, expect to call and email each registrant at least a combined seven times.

Step #5: Measure and the Results Will Materialize

Let’s get back to the fact that roughly 5% of the attendees at an individual event will be ready to buy immediately and roughly 20% will be ready to buy in six months or less.

When you’re working thousands of leads, you must track each individual webinar campaign to track the long-term influence of every event.

As you begin to track your events, registrations, and the subsequent sales, you’ll be able to discover the path your prospects take over their (ever lengthening) buying process and the significant impact your events are having on positively influencing them.

A Final Thought

You’d be surprised by how quickly the opportunities add up. We recently had a sales conversation with a soon-to-be client (sales optimism coming out a little). After several conversations with the prospect, we had solid numbers we could build projections from:

• Average initial project worth for prospect: $50,000
  
  
• Expected new, qualified registrants generated per event: 50
  
  
• Percentage of registrants who will buy related services
  in 24 months or less: 75%
  
  
• Number of events per year: 12
  
  
• Total opportunity generated: $22 million

Will this company close all $22 million? Nope. If they execute their events, they will certainly have a shot at an additional $22 million in sales as long as they:

• Share their expertise.
  
  
• Engage the audience.
  
  
• Ask for sales-ready leads to identify themselves.
  
  
• Immediately follow up with all qualified registrants.
  
  
• Track and measure.

Patrick R. Cahill is a principal at Rally Point Webinars who specializes in marketing, business operations, and CRMs. Click here to email Patrick.