By Patrick Cahill

If you are a service firm looking to grow, online events will help. You know this. Unfortunately, there's a tremendous range of what these online events often are and what they can be.

All too often when I speak with prospective clients, they want to do demos of their services or products, exclusively. It's worked for them in the past, so why not continue? They've done them one–on-one so it makes sense to just do more and have larger versions of them.

Where Demos Fall Short

Sales presentations and demos are essential components to selling your service or technology. When prospects are ready to buy, they want to know all the details about what they are spending their hard-earned budgets on.

Not everyone that lands on your website is ready to buy. If all you offer is resources for purchase-ready prospects, all of your non-purchase-ready prospects are going to surf to the next site that does have valuable content.

You must offer value-based presentations to realize the full potential of marketing and business development efforts.

There are many reasons to pursue a thought leadership model to your presentations. Here are two:

1. Influence prospects decisions around what they will need, before they need it
   
   
2. Generate more leads and convert more of them into clients

A number of B2B research reports have found that only 25% of leads are short term. And even that is a loose definition of short term--it considers someone who buys within 180 days a short-term lead.

It usually takes a full two years for firms to realize the full potential of leads generated today. Many firms do not realize the full potential of their leads because there is no depth to their approach to developing relationships.

While only 25% of leads are short term, a large majority of the rest wants to learn how to improve themselves and their firm. By providing resources like white papers, articles, and webinars that are not purely sales oriented, you are able to generate more leads than if you just used a "learn about our services today" form. Your thought leadership will be welcoming, inviting prospects to leave their contact information.

Since many prospects are not close to buying, you have time to influence how they will evaluate their future service providers: What criteria are important? What should they consider? You get to set the tone of your market if you're the one educating the prospects.

The more quality, research driven content you provide, the more trusted your brand becomes and the more your competitors are compared to your standards when buyers are making purchase-time evaluations.

Prospects take months and years to make their decisions and you must be able to continuously reinforce your position of the trusted thought leader in your space. Sales pitch after sales pitch (or demo after demo offer) will not lead to positive relationships with leads twenty-four months from now. They will have forgotten about you because another firm is taking the time to educate them.

Getting Even Better

If your firm is profitable and it only speaks with prospects in a demo/sales oriented manner--there is so much untapped potential! Your firm is generating business from only the immediate, purchase-ready leads.

Focus on providing value-based content to your prospects. You'll generate more prospects and convert a significantly greater portion of them into clients over two years--the established time it takes to realize the full potential of your marketing and business development efforts in a B2B world.

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