The Step-by-Step Process to Generating Leads from Webinars

Editor's Notes

• #2: Welcome to the LeadG2 webinar – The Step-by-Step Process for Generating Sales Leads from Webinars. Today’s webinar is being recorded and will be sent to all participants after the webinars is over.
• #3: My name is Laura MacPherson and I am the Blog Manager for both LeadG2 and The Center for Sales Strategy. 
• #4: And this is Jason Zimmermann, Inbound Marketing Specialist, who’s also on the call and will be helping us out with questions later on. Hey Jason. Before I tell you about our featured presenter, Brian Hasenbauer, I’ll tell you a little bit about LeadG2 and The Center for Sales Strategy. 
• #5: We work with B2B companies, with a specific focus on the media industry, implementing lead generation strategies for them. We wrote a book on B2B lead gen, and you can download a sample chapter of our book on B2B Lead Generation by going to the link here on the screen.
• #6: We’re also a HubSpot Platinum Partner — which means we are consistently renewing clients and getting them results. 
• #7: LeadG2 is a division of The Center for Sales Strategy, so we have a great understanding of the challenges that B2B sales organizations are facing and how the development of lead generation strategies can help overcome each of these challenges. Alright, now that you know a little bit about The Center for Sales Strategy and LeadG2, let’s meet our featured presenter today: Brian Hasenbauer
• #8: Brian Hasenbauer is an Inbound Marketing & Sales Consultant at LeadG2 and has worked in both marketing and sales roles, for over 10 years before joining the LeadG2 team. In addition to using this experience to help LeadG2 clients develop and implement lead generation strategies he also heads up LeadG2’s marketing efforts. Welcome Brian!  Thanks Laura! I'm excited to be here with all of you today talking about how to use webinars to generate sales leads. Before we get into discussing how to use webinars to create sales leads, lets take a step back and look at the current lead generation challenges companies are facing. 
• #9: So why are we here? More importantly – why are YOU here? If you are a Sales Manager and have taken the time to attend this webinar, it’s most likely because your sales are down or have flattened out and you need to explore new lead gen strategies before things get worse. Or maybe you have already seen the writing on the wall that the buying process has changed and you already understand that you need to change the way you are currently selling because it’s not working. If either of these scenarios sound like you, you are in the right place and we appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be here. 
• #10: Getting more qualified leads is a MAJOR challenge that EVERY single sales team is facing today. We know your salespeople are getting frustrated looking for leads and we understand it’s becoming more difficult every day to meet your revenue goals. Your current strategy to generate leads either doesn't exist or simply isn’t working. Presumably you are on this webinar because you want to change the way you are currently doing things and want to learn how webinars can help with creating sales leads. Because companies, possibly like yours, are having a more difficult time generating leads, it’s important to look at new ways to engage with prospects and to continue to grow your pipeline. Let’s get into the details of how WEBINARS can help generate sales leads.
• #11: All right… let’s get started. The goal of today’s webinar is to provide each of you with an action plan that you can use to start generating sales leads from webinars. In order to do so, today we will take a look at the 10 Steps for Generating Sales Leads from Webinars. 
• #12: Step 1 – Know Who Your Target Audience Is Before you decide that you are ready to host your first webinar, or begin any marketing or sales initiative, it’s important that you first determine if your target audience is interested in attending webinars in the first place. After all, if your target persona doesn’t have an interest in webinars or if they use other content formats to find solutions to their business challenges, you might want to consider another format. However, we are living in the digital age, and more than two-thirds of the B2B buying cycle is conducted online. So chances are… your target audience is online as well and would be very interested in attending a webinar if it’s a topic of interest. 
• #13: Step 2: Choosing Your Topic and TitleEvery successful webinar starts with a great topic and an even better title. What makes a great topic or a great title? If you did your homework in step 1 and have done a good job of defining who the audience is, you can then choose a topic that your audience would be interested in. Make sure to align your company’s goals with your audience’s interest. If you want to demonstrate your expertise on a topic, you’ll need it to match your service offerings. 
• #14: Throughout the presentation we are going to pause and take a moment to review Expert Tips that can help you overcome some of the challenges company’s have when putting together a webinar. These tips are also covered in our Step by Step Guide to Generating Sales Leads from Webinars which you can download by going to bit.ly/sales-leads-guide 
• #15: Here is our First Expert Tip: Aligning your topic / title with your persona’s needs and your needs for generating leads. If you know that your target audience would be interested in Mobile Marketing but you have no business reason to talk about Mobile Marketing since you don’t sell it, it’s probably not a very good topic. However, if you are hearing from your clients or prospects that they are having a difficult time understanding the benefits of one of your services or how something works that you sell (Like Mobile Messaging), that’s a perfect topic for a webinar.
• #16: While business webinars would never have a bad name like “NorthWest or “Apple”… you do want to take care when choosing your webinar’s name. It’s REALLY important to get it right! This is your BABY after all. At LeadG2 we recommend you choose a title that is 1) self explanatory 2) uses a numerical listing and 3) references the target audience.  Here are a few good ones that follow that naming convention. 7 Ways Sales Managers Can ….. 5 Steps Business Owners Can Take to …… 3 Challenges facing Women Owned Businesses …..
• #17: The next step in our 10 step process to generating sales leads from webinars is choosing the day and time to host the webinar. 
• #18: ClickMeeting.com recommends: Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday between the hours of 11am EST and 2pm EST. This coincides with when most people are in the office and while some are at lunch. If you are like me, you use your lunch time for continuing education and for watching webinars. When planning for this webinar, we wanted to take into consideration these best practices which is why today’s webinar is on a Thursday at 1pm Eastern time. While it’s important to choose a day and time that it’s convenient for your prospects, don’t forget that the webinar should be recorded so that those who can’t attend during that time can still watch it. Now that you have a Title, Day and Time… you can build a landing page that includes a sign up form for the webinar. This landing page will be the page that you want to be promoting over the next few weeks.
• #19: This next part of the 10 step process is probably the most time consuming. Developing The Presentation. Even though it is time consuming, the good news is that the actual process of creating a webinar presentation is no different than putting together a power point presentation to show in a meeting. It’s as simple as using Keynote or Powerpoint to develop your presentation which you will then share via Go to Webinar or another webinar software tool.
• #20: When putting your presentation together.. Make sure to use graphics that can tell your story as opposed to putting a lot of text on the screen and reading it. Even if you plan on using a script with your notes, which we recommend, nothing is more BORING then a PowerPoint with bullet points and lots of text that the presenter is reading. 
• #21: The next step, structuring your presentation is critical to the success of your webinar. It’s important that you keep your attendees in mind throughout this process and to continue to re-enforce your main points throughout the presentation. The structure for most webinars will follow a simple pattern of: Introduction, Overview of Webinar, Main Body, Summary and Q&A. Webinar presentations with solid structures help re-enforce your key points and make more of an impact. CLICK
• #22: One thing to keep in mind while developing your webinar presentation is that you want to focus on providing value to your webinar attendees and being educational rather continuously promoting a product or service. It’s okay to have a few points of the presentation where you mention a product or service but spend the majority of your time helping and educating. After all, your webinar attendees are there to learn something.. NOT BUY SOMETHING. If you do a good job of educating your attendees about your topic you will be seen as the expert and if they decide it’s the right time to make a purchase decision, your company will be on the top of the list. 
• #23: Who should your presenters be? Most webinars have two presenters, so when developing your presentation it’s important to format your presentation to account for that. Having two presenters—one we consider the “host” and the other the “featured presenter”—tends to work best. The host addresses the following during the presentation: Introducing the topic* Introducing the Featured Speaker Addressing Questions* Conclusion and Next Steps 
• #24: Besides your Host and Featured Presenter… you will also want someone to help with the Question and Answer portion since your presenters will be focused on providing the content of the presentation. 
• #25: While all of the steps in the process for generating leads from webinar is important, none is more important than promoting your webinar. This is why it’s important that after you have a title / day and time for your webinar you can start to promote it. You don’t have to wait until your presentation is completed and it’s HIGHLY recommended that you DON’T wait until your presentation is complete to start promoting your webinar. You want to get started on promoting the webinar as soon as you can so that you have enough time to talk about your upcoming webinar without having to only talk about your webinar. If you only give yourself a week to promote it.. That won’t nearly give you enough time to do it justice. A minimum of 4 weeks lead up time is good for starting to promote the webinar.
• #26: Because promoting your webinar is such an important part of generating leads from your webinar, we have two sections dedicated to promotions: The first section focuses on more traditional means of promoting a webinar and the second focuses on some more advanced methods of promotions. 3 traditional ways to promote your upcoming webinar include: Email Marketing: you will want to send several emails to prospects that you are currently marketing to, (typically 2 weeks out, 1 week out and 2 days before webinar) in addition to letting your clients know about the webinar if it could be beneficial to their business or a possible upsell. The second way to promote your webinar is by Blogging about it. By discussing issues that are related to your webinar topic you can introduce the topic to your blog readers, establish yourself as a thought leader and serve as an invitation to attend the webinar. The third way to promote your webinar is using Social Media. Posting your landing page and blog posts to social media can increase awareness of your webinar in addition providing important information about the reason why the topic is important.
• #27: If you don’t have much content to share and are are not blogging, use graphics that accentuate the challenges your webinar helps attendees overcome. 
• #28: Here are a few examples of how you can use graphics to promote your webinars. These should simply be teasers to get prospective webinar attendees to your webinar landing page.
• #29: Relying on just email, blogging and social media will not work for everyone. Especially for those that have a small marketing database and not a lot of social clout. If you don’t have thousands of email addresses in your email database or following you on social media, you may want to consider either ADVERTISING or CO-BRANDING your webinar with another company. Effective advertising can include placing ads on social media or placing ads with trade publications or trade websites. Co-branding your webinar is an option if you have a vendor or partner you can work together with and share marketing and other promotions since it will benefit both companies. Since we don’t have enough time today to go into this area too deeply, if you have questions about using advertising or co-branding to promote your webinar you should download the ebook - The Step-by-Step Guide to Generating Sales Leads from Webinar at bit.ly/sales-leads-guide 
• #30: The Day you have been waiting for is here…. It’s WEBINAR DAY!!! Hopefully you have worked as hard promoting the webinar as you have on your presentation and have a few dozen or more people signed up. Don’t be disappointed if the number of people logged on to the webinar is much lower than the actual number of people signed up. That’s very common and that’s why you will want to email the presentation to everyone that signed up. 
• #31: During your webinar it’s recommended that you only share one presenters screen and have that one presenter do all of the navigation during the presentation. This will decrease the possibility that something will go wrong during the switching of screens between presenters. It’s recommended that the host be the one doing the navigation as they won’t be doing as much speaking during the presentation and can be focused on that one task.
• #32: Another Expert Tip is that you will want to make sure to have some type of SPECIAL OFFER or Call to Action included in your presentation. What are you offering to your webinar attendees? How can you help nurture your webinar attendees to become clients? What additional value can you provide to them? That’s where the special offer comes in… and you want to make sure that the offer is somehow related to your company’s services or products. For instance a radio station wouldn’t want to talk to business owners about social media marketing for 30 minutes and how effective it can be and then offer free production on your webinar attendees next radio spot. Even though it’s a product you offer it doesn’t tie in with the webinar message. In this example – offer a free social media consultation or set up of 1 account. Make sure your special offer relates to the webinar.
• #33: Following up with webinar attendees and those that registered but didn’t attend is is almost as important as the previous 9 steps. If you don’t follow up appropriately and generate some new customers or clients from your efforts, your webinar might not be deemed a TOTAL success. Yes, you generated some new leads for your pipeline and established some thought leadership around the topic of the webinar, but at the end of the day… generating new sales is the goal of most sales sales and marketing efforts. So how do we recommend following up on webinar leads? 
• #34: Following up on your webinar leads can follow 3 steps and should be done with 48 hours of the completion of the webinar: The first step is: Create a landing page with the video recording and Slideshare of the presentation. The second step is to include a contact form or your previously mentioned special offer on that same landing page. This way you can send an email follow up a few days later and include a link to the landing page where attendees and those that signed up and didn’t attend, can watch the webinar, view and even share the Slideshare and see the special offer. Note that this landing page would be available to the public and is great for SEO and generating some additional leads. Third: Contact each person that signed up regardless if they attended or not. You can segment your approach based on who attended or not if you like. At a minimum you will want to send an email that contains a link to the landing page to each person that registered for the webinar. We recommend that you also call those leads that meet your definition of a marketing qualified lead. .
• #35: To recap the 10 Steps for Generating Sales Leads from Webinars we brought back David Letterman…. 
• #36: Thanks Brian.. That was great! So there it is, the ten steps to generating sales leads from webinars. If you want to learn more about generating sales leads from webinars and would like additional tips and details on launching your own lead generation effort using webinars, you can download our new ebook, which goes into some additional detail and give you an easy-to-use guide. The link is here on the screen.If you don’t think that your team has the resources to put something like this together, We can help with that as well. Just email inboundhelp@leadg2.com and we can find a time to discuss your lead generation needs. Let’s get on to Q&A now! … if you have a question you can post it in the question / chat area. Jason, do we have any yet so far?
• #38: On behalf of Brian, Jason and the entire LeadG2 team.. Thanks for attending the webinar today. Look for a follow up email soon with a link to the webinar recording, slide share and link to the ebook! Thanks Laura and Jason…. And everyone that attended! If we can help you in anyway with your lead generation strategy – let us know.