Working from home? So is everyone else! At a time when face-to-face sales meetings are out of the question, you need ‘lead generating’ online webinars to keep your sales effort on-track.
For many business-to-business companies, it’s never been more important to keep sales moving forward by creating leads online. You know running online webinars is the answer. But if you don’t convert webinar attendees into prospects, then what’s the point?
You really can create sales opportunities from online webinars
The good news is you can make online webinars work effectively as lead generators for your business. Better still, when they work, online webinars create sales leads at much lower cost compared to face-to-face meetings – and you can reach a wider, and more demographically spread audience. Use of social media marketing and online social sites like LinkedIN mean you can be more targeted with your promotion of events than ever before.
What goes wrong?
Fundamentally, good sales-people accustomed to selling in face-to-face meetings seem to forget everything they’ve learned when left to run webinars. I’m talking about:
- Focusing your efforts on the most likely buying audience.
- Pitching to a prospect before qualifying what they were interested in.
- Presenting evidence of how the product or service brings value
- Leaving without agreeing a next action with the customer?
Some of the common reasons online webinars fail include:
- Poor audience targeting – the people on your webinar don’t influence the buying process.
- Poor audience listening/polling – you don’t take the time to know what participants are interested in and their buying situation.
- Not enough, or ineffective promotion – so too few people turn up.
- Next-steps aren’t clear or compelling and the webinar ends with a ‘thanks for attending’’ but not much more!
- Weak ‘give-aways’ to motivate a call-to-action to get people to your webinar resulting in low attendance.
- Webinar content or presenters is not up to the job, perhaps lacking ‘proof of value’.
Get results
READ OUR ULTIMATE GUIDE TO ONLINE WEBINARS
We’ve put together this step-by-step guide to help companies to learn how to turn their online webinars into REAL BUSINESS.
Check it out now, and if you need more help reach out to us. You can setup an online meeting with us if you need more help!
About the author
Ian Tomlin is CEO of Newton Day, the B2B marketing company, and helps technology, professional services, and staffing firms to tell their story and make conversation with their customers. Much of what the company does is about identifying the weak-points in sales and marketing processes and managing change.