OK … your webinar came off without a hitch, and you’re experiencing a sense of relief. But right away you know there’s work to do around lead qualification and separating the 24 karat opportunities from the fool’s gold. The webinar “leads” are not qualified enough to be sent to the field. You also know some attendees are more qualified than others and require immediate contact—not just addition to email lists or entry in marketing automation programs.
The question arises: what are the best practices for following up on webinar attendees and registrants?
I’d like to share comments from a webinar …
Webinar Leads Demystified—Best Practices for Leveraging Both Webinar Registrants and Attendees
… my friend and colleague, Mac McIntosh, President, Mac McIntosh Inc., and I recently presented that identifies best webinar follow up practices.
Here are some of the recommendations:
1. Include all no-shows in follow up activity
With hectic schedules, a new priority may pop up and prevent attendance for a registrant. Send a follow up email with a link to the archived webinar, and include the no-show in follow up lead segmentation and lead qualification activity.
2. Segment and qualify attendees and registrants
Because some of the attendees are great prospects and some are not, it’s critical to build a segmentation and qualification model that identifies segments most likely to be qualified sales leads.
While a list of 1,000 target companies may generate a 5% lead rate, an analysis of results typically identifies segments with higher and lower lead rates. For example, let’s say there are five discrete segments of 200 companies each, and these segments have lead rates of 9%, 7%, 5%, 3% and 1% that—in total—average an overall 5% lead rate.
Following a webinar, we recommend enhancing attendee and registrant lists with data points like SIC code, revenue, employee size and growth rate. This added data helps segment the entire list into segments that range from “most likely” to “least likely” to buy. Test sample qualification calls validate the segments that have higher and lower lead rates.
Once segmented lead rates have been established through testing, a full court press should be deployed against the segments with the highest lead rates—thereby improving results and maximizing marketing dollars. Less expensive media are used to market to segments with lower lead rates, and periodic calls can be made into low priority samples to monitor buying trends.
3. Nurture, nurture, nurture
Mac noted during the webinar that about 25% of prospects bought solutions from his client companies within six months of engaging in the buying process. About 50% bought in seven to eighteen months, and about 25% bought more than 18 months out.
Lead nurturing and developing prospects have never been as important as they are now. As prospect leads move through the buying process, nurturing reinforces your working relationship, positions you as a trusted advisor, differentiates your offerings and builds a preference for your solutions.
Implementing a comprehensive lead nurturing methodology not only improves results—it assures highly compensated field resources are used efficiently and in a cost effective manner.
4. Think in multiples: multi-touch, multi-media, and multi-cycle contact
Results multiply when contact strategies are multiplied.
Multi-touch: Instead of three touches, think twelve or more contacts with a prospect. The optimal touchpoint frequency is higher than you think.
Multi-media: Successful follow up uses a smart mix of multiple media. Instead of just using the phone, integrate a number of outbound calls with voice mail messages, personalized email and direct mail.
Multi-cycle: With the largest portion of prospects buying at more than six months out, expand your planned contact from over a few days to over several weeks and several months.
5. Tailor your messaging to the reasons companies and people buy
Companies buy based on three conditions of need:
- Perceived risk of deterioration
- Opportunity to improve
- Fear of loss in their current situation
Individuals have different conditions of need:
- Recognition
- Financial gain
- Security
- Self actualization
Messaging to webinar prospect leads should vary based on what conditions of need they’re in. For example, a company perceives a risk of deteriorating conditions, and a decision maker there is acting out of a position of self actualization. This makes for a good selling opportunity as the decision maker wants to do the right thing to help the company and is willing to take a personal risk.
Vary messaging based on where prospects are with their company and personal conditions of need.
6. Match your sales effort to the prospect’s stage
There are five steps that must be sequentially addressed with prospects during the buying process:
- Find the pain
- Get agreement there is pain
- Agree to do something about the pain
- Agree to a generic solution
- Agree to a customized solution
Sales too frequently defaults to step five. Successful webinar follow up is based on confirming agreement on each step.
I’d like to invite you to share your best practices on following up on webinar prospects.
Note: The full webinar is archived and available for listening on the Target Marketing Magazine website via the hyperlinked title above.
Move The Needle, Close The Loop, And Deliver The Revenue: 15 Proven B-To-B Strategies For Sales Funnel Acceleration. It is a mouthful, yes. And it's also the rather compelling title of an upcoming webinar hosted by The Kern Organization.
I am pleased to be a part of this event, and I invite you to join us. We'll be discussing best practices in key areas related to closing the gap between marketing and sales—and driving revenue for your organization.
Speakers Russell Kern, president of The Kern Organization, will speak on how to boost your sales funnel and Denny Head, founder of eDemand Leads, will discuss successful lead management. I'll weigh in with my perspective surrounding the process of prospect development.
The webinar is Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 2:00 p.m. ET.
Here are a few key highlights that will be discussed:
- Why market segmentation is important and how to do it
- The best ways to integrate social media with traditional lead nurturing
- Why it's time to go beyond the white paper—new trends in B2B offer strategies
- Proven lead generation programs that work every time—guaranteed
- Why lead automation systems alone will not solve your closed-loop lead problems
- What the key steps are to getting real alignment with sales on lead quality and metrics
- ...and much, much more!
We hope you will join us!
For more information and to register, click here.
I'm pleased to announce that Don Gracy and I will host a webinar together on Thursday, March 18 at 2 p.m. EST. I hope you'll join us as we join forces to present actionable ideas and steps to take in your continuing quest to acquire clients. Don is a partner with NewLeaf, a leading sales productivity consulting firm that works with Cisco, IBM, Lilly and CSC, as well as other large, middle-market and entrepreneurial firms, offering results-oriented training and coaching services.
NewLeaf and PointClear have collaborated over the years, and have compiled best practices surrounding the finding and winning of new business. We're anxious to share them with you.
During the webinar, we'll cover:
- A sophisticated approach to segmentation that lets you identify characteristics of the most-likely-to-buy targets in your market—giving you more prospects for less spend.
- Keys to effective deployment of your sales resources—offering you unconventional ways of thinking about deployment that have more to do with the strengths of individuals, and less to do with things like territory demarcations.
- New insights into the drivers of that pesky gap between marketing and sales, and how to close it once and for all.
View the on-demand webinar (no registration required)