Case Study: Using Webinar Marketing To Drive Sales

Case Study: Using Webinar Marketing To Drive Sales

Case Study: Using Webinar Marketing To Drive Sales

 A recent MarketingProfs article quantified the impact of COVID-19 on marketing budgets:  88% of marketers expect to decrease investment in in-person events & conferences with a corresponding increase in virtual events and webinars.  &Marketing recently helped a long time client manage this very dynamic to leverage their offering of a timely service.

Business Challenge Summary

Our client is a well known IT security provider with a knowledge base of experts who have created a proven solution to a pending regulatory requirement that impacts many businesses.  However, a lack of awareness and understanding of the regulatory change, including the timing, requirements, and approval process, surrounds the need to become certified. An extra level of complexity exists because the certification has a range of “levels” based on the nature of the business.

Since the coronavirus pandemic became a reality in the early spring of 2020, the government has been emphatic that the timing and rigidity of these certification requirements will remain unchanged. This has caused further chaos with many impacted companies scrambling to become certified while working remotely.   Fortunately, our client has a strong brand name within their industry, belongs to many trade associations, and has deep relationships that span decades.

Their aggressive sales goal has become even more challenging because the usual paths to prospects (networking events or in-person meetings) can’t be completed due to stay-at-home orders that were put in place due to COVID-19. The business leader turned to &Marketing to develop a lead generation strategy and plan, all while working from home.

&Marketing helped him solve some thorny issues, such as:

  • How he can leverage his company’s strong name and network to build awareness about their solution to this particular issue.

  • How they can add value without being overly salesy.

  • How they can establish themselves as thought leaders and the go-to solution for those in need of guidance.

  • How all of this could be accomplished while most of the country was self-quarantining.

&Marketing’s solution to these issues? A webinar pilot.

Because this was a pilot, the client’s senior management identified a success indicator of 10 engaged and qualified prospects on the webinar.

&Marketing’s Approach

Our team had a challenge ahead of them, given the circumstances. We needed to execute the pilot webinar within one month from project kickoff, from idea to execution. Our cross-functional team, including copywriting, creative, email marketing, and technology, executed a turnkey process for our client where & Marketing handled all the details, including:  

  • The webinar technology, along with a “dry run” to ensure everyone could manage the tech and platform seamlessly 

  • Coordinating the speakers, the presentation, and the delivery  

  • Prospect invitations, signups, reminders, and follow-ups

  • Developing the content —which was fragmented across their organization— into a cohesive story both online and in a presentation format, through a mix of document review and expert interviews. 

  • Aligning a disoriented client team who was adjusting to a remote working environment. This team included subject matter experts, speakers, and those with networks we wanted to leverage.

Results

We had 71 total webinar registrants and 50 qualified prospects attendees for the webinar. That’s 5x the original goal of 10 qualified leads. In addition to attendance, the engagement during the webinar and feedback upon conclusion were both strong. We saw:

  • 70% attendance rate, which is 2x the industry average.
  • An average score of 8.9 in the post-webinar survey, with no response below a 5.
  • 80% of survey respondents want to hear more from our client on this topic, paving the way for more activity.
  • 95% of attended who responded felt “somewhat” or “much more confident” navigating the regulatory change than they did prior to the webinar.

Most importantly, the client received inquiries from four attendees immediately after the webinar to potentially engage in their services. Several outstanding questions and potential future topics provided the sales team with plenty of follow-up opportunities.  Additionally, a plan is in process with another webinar, along with a comprehensive content plan that puts our client’s expertise front and center.

The &Marketing team did a great job organizing this and keeping our team on track to deliver this webinar successfully as a lead generator. If we had done this internally it wouldn’t have gone as quickly or as smoothly. We ended up getting 5x our goal in terms of attendees and several meetings as a result of this webinar!

DIRECTOR OF SALES AND OPERATIONS

Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’s growth goals? We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a webinar or webinar series could help take your organization to the next level.

Attendance Rate

Avg. Score on Post Webinar Survey

%

Want to Hear More From Our Client

%

Attendees Felt Confident Leaving the Webinar

Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?

We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.

About &Marketing:

&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.

Webinar Recap: Are You Taking Advantage of All The Ways LinkedIn Pages Can Help You Grow Your Business?

Webinar Recap: Are You Taking Advantage of All The Ways LinkedIn Pages Can Help You Grow Your Business?

Webinar Recap: Are You Taking Advantage of All The Ways LinkedIn Pages Can Help You Grow Your Business?

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Are you taking advantage of all the ways LinkedIn Pages can help you grow your business?

Your LinkedIn Page is the perfect place to get content in front of the audience that means the most to your business. LinkedIn enjoys a well-deserved reputation as the most useful social network for business owners and professionals, but many companies are not taking advantage of all that LinkedIn has to offer. 

LinkedIn expert Brynne Tillman and &Marketing’s Marketing Director, Amanda Cook, recently explored how you can take your business to the next level using LinkedIn. 

In this webinar, we covered how to:

  • Build brand awareness by perfecting your company profile
  • Establish your company as a thought leader in the eyes of key decision makers
  • Engage your employees and prospects to expand your reach
  • Publish and share content that enhances SEO
  • Drive high-quality leads through targeted ads and updates

If your LinkedIn page isn’t active and standing out, you’re missing opportunities to get your content in front of the audience that matters most to your business. 

Watch the full webinar here to learn powerful tips you can implement immediately to start growing your Page and engaging your followers.

For in-depth actionable tips for increasing and engaging your LinkedIn Company Page, download our eBook.

About Brynne Tillman

Brynne Tillman is the LinkedIn Whisperer and CEO of Social Sales Link. For over a decade she has been teaching Entrepreneurs, sales teams and business leaders how to leverage LinkedIn for social selling. 

 As a former sales trainer and personal producer, Brynne adopted all of the traditional sales techniques and adapted them to the new digital world. She guides professionals to establish a thought leader and subject matter expert brand, find and engage the right targeted market, and leverage clients and networking partners for warm introductions into qualified buyers. 

In addition, Brynne is the author of The LinkedIn Sales Playbook, a Tactical Guide to Social Selling.

About Amanda Cook 

Marketing Director Amanda Cook helps clients develop sophisticated marketing campaigns that drive brand leadership, increase sales and elevate the customer experience. With over 15 years of experience, Amanda has delivered successful campaigns with bootstrapped budgets to leading marketing organizations at $1B companies. Whether local or global, she enjoys the challenge of uncovering a client’s business objectives and helping them build a strategy to succeed.

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

Sales Ops Essentials

Sales Ops Essentials

Sales Ops Essentials

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Sales operations involve much more than just making cold calls, heading on a golf outing with prospects, and closing deals. In order for your company to maximize its sales potential, significant work has to occur behind the scenes.  This is especially true for companies with less developed sales and marketing teams, or those working in dynamic markets. The increased level of uncertainty can often be countered by having clear processes in place.  

In sports, teams don’t just show up on game day and play unprepared. Hours of film study, game planning, and practice take place to equip the players and increase their chances of winning. The same goes for the sales ops process. Gathering leads, organizing leads, initial lead calling, constant meetings, and much more go into closing a deal. Here are a few tips that can help improve your sales ops efficiency and increase the number of proposals you submit so you can up your chances of winning on game day: 

Define Your Sales Pipeline and Sales Ops Process

Understand the various stages of your sales process, which is different for every business. Ask yourself what the next step is after a lead becomes an opportunity. Is it a sales call? An in-person meeting? A qualification? Continue defining each stage until you get to the final step: closed deals. Once you define these stages, outline and align on what goes into each step. So, once a lead or prospect enters each stage in your sales pipeline, you won’t need to hesitate before knowing what needs to happen next. 

Keep Your Pipeline Organized

Keeping your pipeline organized is a daunting task, but necessary. Here are some simple strategies that can help you organize your ever-changing pipeline.

  1. Consistently clean-up the pipeline. Whether a lead “ghosted” you, decided not to use your service, or did not meet your qualifications, remove them. The more cluttered your pipeline is, the harder it is to remember and focus on the leads that can turn into customers.
  2. Stay on top of tracking a lead or prospect’s progression through the pipeline. Take time periodically — whether it 30 minutes or an hour each week – to update the stage, add any new information, or change the status of a lead that might have fluctuated during the week.
  3. Create tasks or reminders within your CRM to update information that needs to be adjusted. Set tasks for remembering to follow-up on certain leads. 

Automate Repetitive, Manual Tasks

Automation used to be only accessible for larger companies and bigger budgets but is now easily accessible to a company of any budget. &Marketing is a gold partner with SharpSpring, which has an integrated and easy to use Automation and CRM platform. Tools like these allow the automation of newsletters, emails, creation of task, and even automation for helping organize your pipeline. CRMs like this are becoming available for small to medium size companies that can desperately benefit from their automation capabilities. 

Personalize Your Lead Approach

Automation is great, but adding a personal touch to emails and outreach can really spark a lead’s interest. When trying to build a personal relationship, ensure that it is customized to that lead – how you may have met, common interests, the content they have downloaded, or ask questions that are specific to their wants and needs.

Don’t Get Ahead of Yourself 

Trying to reach out to 50 leads in one day is often overwhelming. This approach can make you feel rushed on each call, may increase the chance of losing track of leads (as some will inevitably fall through the cracks), and each person may feel your lack of attention and focus. Aim to reach out to 30-50 a week, but work at your own pace, which makes it easier to stay up to date with each prospect. You will be able to spend more time qualifying the leads when you aren’t worried about the other 50 calls you need to make. But make sure the other leads in your pipeline are not just sitting unattended by sending them information that keeps them informed on your business. 

As you can see, there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to running an effective sales operations program, just like they’re more that goes into winning a game. Hours of preparation, planning, execution, and prioritization are all involved in giving each team the best chance to win. Similarly, defining your personal sales pipeline, keeping it organized, adding a personal touch, and not running too fast are all ways to help make sure you succeed and win on your sales ops game day. 

Need help with planning and executing a thorough and efficient sales op process? Contact &Marketing for a free consultation with a sales operations expert.

About the Author:

As a Sales Operations Manager at &Marketing, Jeremy Woelfer helps the sales operations processes evolve and stay consistently up-to-date. Jeremy focuses on trying to find new and innovative ways to increase the efficiency and organization of the sales process both at &Marketing and for our clients. With past experience working for big corporate, he has seen what it’s like to grow a business behind the scenes. Jeremy graduated from Denison University with a major in Economics and a minor in Educational Studies.

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.