If you’ve ever sat through a sales webinar, you’re well aware of how tedious they can be. To keep participants engaged and produce new leads, marketers and salespeople must plan ahead, choose a topical topic, and deliver a highly compelling presentation.
In your customer relationship management (CRM) system, you may have a lot of non-customer connections. Those, however, are not leads. Although you know some of their personal information, they have not yet engaged with your brand.
When they interact with your business, they become leads, and sales webinars are a great method to turn those contacts into active leads if done correctly. According to research, 76 percent of marketers believe webinars help them reach more leads.
That’s why we compiled a list of 12 sales webinar best practices and suggestions to assist you in strategically planning, executing, and following up on your webinars in order to generate new leads.
Basics and recommended practises for webinars
Businesses conduct a variety of free webinars, ranging from lead generating sales webinars to customer retention webinars.
We’ll concentrate solely on sales and marketing webinars to create new leads in the sections below. But first, let’s go through some general guidelines that may be applied to every webinar.
Begin planning weeks ahead of time.
If you decide to cobble together a last-minute webinar, take a few weeks to prepare. Why?
To increase attendance, initial invitations should be sent weeks in advance, with follow-up reminders.
Second, four or five days isn’t enough time to examine your target audience’s needs and create a webinar that addresses those needs.
Third, you’d be squandering crucial time hurrying to plan and ignoring other priorities, just to wind up with seven guests and no consumers.
Always perform a test run.
Hold a practice run a few days before the webinar with everyone who will be participating in the actual webinar. This guarantees that presenters who are unfamiliar with your webinar tool understand how to use it. A practice run drastically minimises the chances of encountering a technical issue during the presentation.
Include a webinar administrator who works behind the scenes.
If despite having conducted a trial run, you come across a technical difficulty, having an administrator behind the scenes allows the presenters to continue while the problem is fixed in the background.
Maintain a positive attitude.
You’ll be able to set the correct speed and tone with practice—keep it energetic, personable, and professional. Respect your audience’s time and keep them engaged by jamming new and helpful information into every sound bite. To demonstrate your major arguments, tell a compelling narrative.
12 excellent techniques for generating more qualified leads through webinars
Sales webinars aren’t supposed to be salesy. It may seem counterintuitive, but you should speak to contacts who are just beginning to engage with you the same way you speak to leads who have recently entered the funnel.
Instead of thinking of it as a “sales webinar,” think of it as a marketing webinar that drives sales. Here are 12 excellent practices to assist you to come up with your own success formula:
1. Inform readers about a situation they were unaware of.
This is the catchphrase. Attendees to a webinar may be unaware that they are missing a crucial tool or are unaware of a significant trend. Your goal is to make them aware of the problem’s prevalence.
Explain that a large number of your clients have had difficulty with X, Y, or Z. And that it’s a problem that many people in their field face. Your webinar participants will begin to consider how this affects their own businesses. It will elicit anxiety and a sense of impending doom.
It’s not about instilling fear, but rather about imparting facts that will assist them in succeeding. Those that fail to keep up with developing trends and technology will be left behind by those who surf the wave of the future. We don’t gain clients’ loyalty or prospects’ trust by making them fearful. We achieve this by teaching, motivating, and inspiring people.
2. Describe the significance of resolving that issue.
Use real-life examples to demonstrate the repercussions of not resolving the issue. Tell a story of a company that had that issue and chose to disregard it. Don’t divulge any names just yet since you’ve got their attention and need to exploit it to keep the tension and sense of urgency going.
3. Tell a factual tale about a company that faced the same issue.
In marketing, storytelling is a tremendously successful approach to catch the attention of your target audience—as long as you can tell a compelling narrative. There will be no rambling.
Tell a story about a company with which you were intimately engaged that had this issue. You’ll reveal that that company was one of your clients later, but not yet.
Allow your audience to speculate on how that company solved the problem instead. Which strategies did they employ, and how did they employ them to solve their problem?
Stop for a few moments at the point where the company in question is in crisis and, no matter how hard they try, they can’t find a solution. Allow everything to soak in.
4. Provide a solution to the issue.
It’s still too early to bring up your company’s name. You’ve continued to tell your story. Reassure your audience, however, that there is a solution to this difficulty, which you will discuss later.
You gave them a reason to be concerned in the first place. Then you assuaged their fears by assuring them that there is a solution and that you have seen it in action.
At this stage, you’re beginning to acquire their trust.
Reiterate that you directly know the company executives who were affected by this issue. Now you inform the audience what the answer was: you used the product or service you provide to solve the problem (continue to refrain from mentioning your brand or product).
Finally, describe the solution to the problem and the enormously positive influence it had on the company’s growth.
5. Now is the time to let the cat out of the bag.
You admit that the corporation in question was — and still is — a client of yours at this moment. Describe how you and your company assisted the company in resolving the issue. Now you can start talking about your product or service and how it helped with the solution.
If at all feasible, include a client testimonial to back up your claim. Better yet, ask the client if they’re okay with just saying a few words and answering a few questions throughout the webinar.
Attendees will be fascinated once they hear a peer discuss how important your brand and product were in fixing their problem. Attendees will become more engaged, and they will begin to see your company in a more favourable light.
6. Incorporate interactive elements into your webinars.
Create a webinar that isn’t just a slide deck with a lot of busy, distracting slides and a presenter reciting the content on the slides.
Instead, make use of the interactive elements provided by your webinar software.
Use polls to gather valuable data on your prospects’ requirements, difficulties, goals, and pain areas throughout your webinar.
Instead of making visitors wait until the Q&A session following the presentation, consider allowing them to raise their hands and ask questions during the presentation.
Interaction during webinars enhances engagement, improves customer experience, and raises attendees’ willingness to learn more about your company and engage with you further.
7. In order to increase involvement, employ strategic methods.
Most of us have gone through a business meeting when someone presented a text-heavy PowerPoint slide deck. The slides are read to you by the presenter. They’ll lose your attention faster than Usain Bolt can sprint 100 metres.
With a sales webinar, your goal is to captivate attendees, hold their attention, and provide significant takeaways that will benefit them in their daily lives or jobs.
Here are some suggestions for increasing sales webinar participation:
- Reduce the amount of text on each slide. Instead, utilise additional visuals, such as graphs or images, to demonstrate your point without distracting the audience. Attendees should pay attention to you rather than reading 15 bullet points aloud when your presenter reads them to them.
- After the webinar, provide the presentation to the attendees. Tell guests right away that the slides or recording will be sent to them after the webinar, so they won’t have to take notes and can concentrate more on what you’re saying.
- Practise, practise, practise. To present an interesting sales webinar, you must be well-versed in the subject. Then, rather than reading pre-prepared talking points to the audience, you can chat through each slide in a conversational style.
- During the presentation, ask questions. Include polls, provide a question, and invite people to “raise their hand” (i.e. click the Raise Hand button) to respond. That person’s mute is removed by your backstage admin, allowing them to respond. Allow them to chime in one at a time if more individuals raise their hands, even if it means skipping a few slides.
8. Design a standout registration landing page.
Many individuals underestimate the importance of a sales webinar registration landing page. It has the power to determine whether or not someone registers. Follow these guidelines to make a fantastic registration page:
- Make your webinar title and description interesting while yet being straightforward.
- Use succinct copy to convey as much information as feasible in as few words as possible.
Once you have this data, you can utilise it in email marketing campaigns that offer more valuable content that is only accessible through forms with extra fields, allowing you to construct their profile over time.
PRO TIP: Make it clear that they will receive a confirmation email with all of the information they need to log in and attend after registering. This decreases the chances of their entering a bogus email address.
9. Don’t forget to make the confirmation page as good as possible.
The confirmation page is an excellent place to keep prospects engaged. Include a call to action for a useful piece of the material linked to the webinar’s theme. When they see it, they’ll undoubtedly think to themselves, “Why not?”
This increases the number of time visitors spend on your site and, as a result, the likelihood that they will become clients.
10. Send numerous email reminders
People sign up for activities just to forget about them afterwards. It happens on a regular basis. So, one week, one day, and/or a few hours before the webinar, send a reminder email. Include calendar files so that they can save the event to their work calendar and get reminders from there.
Send two different reminder emails each time—one to registrants and another to those you invited but never registered—as a bonus tip. Many people intend to register but never do so because they are too busy.
You’d be shocked how many people sign up for a webinar just a few hours before it starts. According to data from a prominent webinar application developer, encouraging customers to register a few hours before the webinar results in a 20 percent boost in enrolment.
11. Make contact with everyone who has been invited.
It’s crucial to follow up since it shows that you’re truly interested in seeing your customers succeed. Follow up with attendees, attendees who requested questions that were not answered, no-shows, and invitees who did not register using these three strategies.
Attendees: Send a follow-up email thanking them for attending and, as promised, presenting them with the presentation slides.
Those that came with unresolved questions: Reach out to everyone who has posed a question that has not been answered. Directly contact them by phone or email. Apologize and explain that you were unable to respond to their query due to a lack of time. Give a thorough response and, if possible, any resources that will help them learn more about the subject of their question.
No-shows and non-registered invitees: Send a follow-up email to this group with a replay of the live webinar. This is a wonderful expression of goodwill, and it may be enough to convert a contact into an active lead.
12. Select the most appropriate webinar platform for your requirements.
Remember to choose the most appropriate webinar hosting solution for your requirements. Make a list of your requirements and compare different possibilities until you discover the one that ticks the most boxes on your list.
Are you ready to host your own sales webinars?
To organise a successful sales webinar that creates high-quality leads who are more likely to convert into clients, follow this step-by-step guide.
Request a demo to learn more about RisePath‘s sales and marketing platform.
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