Up to this point, our blog has aimed to help marketers get the most out of their webinars. We’ve touched on everything from repurposing and designing your webinar content, to reviewing the stages of the sales cycle for your webinars. In this post, we’ll outline why incorporating your sales team within the workflow of your webinars can be beneficial.
We’ll also let you know exactly how to do it. Below, we’ll detail some background, action points, and an optimizer template to get you started.
Why Your Sales Team Needs Webinar Content
Maximizing communication between marketing and sales teams helps to support transparency, align metrics and share your organization’s goals and priorities. As most sales managers in the life sciences and food industry will tell you, a substantial amount of training is necessary for a rep to be knowledgeable enough to sell a product effectively.
Moreover, since these industries develop so quickly, sales teams need to be constantly learning about new trends.
Webinars are ideal pieces of content to fill that gap. They are an appealing source of content to a prospective client, and are often more clear and engaging than a lengthy article. They also provide more information than can be delivered in a typical lead-gen video.
Using Webinar Content to Build a Relationship with Your Prospects
As a salesperson working in the life science or food industry, you may be working with a prospective client for months before they’re ready to make a decision. During that time, webinars are a fantastic way to stay in contact with prospects. Sales teams need to keep momentum going throughout the year and should be building a digital relationship with their prospects as they progress through the buying cycle.
Sales people who use digital and social media as a way to build thought leadership may have a distinct advantage over those who don’t. According to one study, nearly 80% of sales people who use social media in their workflow are more successful than those who do not.
Marketers Should be Meeting with Sales Reps to Find What Works
Modern marketing teams are keen to cite KPIs like click-through and open rates to measure success, but fail to measure indicators found only in sales conversations with prospects.
Marketers should be setting up regular meetings with sales people with the aim of getting feedback to see how current marketing content has been working from a sales perspective. What gets a response? What doesn’t? What converts? From this knowledge, adapt your new webinars to suit your prospect’s needs.
Use These Action Points to Get the Collaborative Process Started
1. Obviously, get started with Xtalks.com to optimize webinar marketing and production processes.
2. Create a list of webinars that are relevant to prospective clients and when in the sales cycle they could be used as a source of content.
A. Certain prospects may not know much about your company – you may need a webinar that provides an introduction to the problem you are solving, as well as possible solutions. Find more on matching content to your sales cycle here.
B. Certain prospects may be very aware of your product or service but lack the necessary details needed to inform their decision making process. You’ll need to identify a webinar that covers more data about your offering. In this case, speaker selection can be especially important. Learn more about selecting an optimal speaker for your webinars, here.
3. Determine if your sales team are using webinars in their nurturing process, and if so, which webinars are working best? Rate them.
4. Determine where in your sales funnel the webinar should be used. Is this an early stage or later stage contact? Webinars are a good icebreaker and a good way of nurturing a lead.
5. Determine why a prospect would find a specific webinar beneficial.
6. Create a series of condensed bullet points that your sales team might find particularly useful. If applicable, create a “cheat sheet” for each webinar, outlining key statistics, ideas or trends introduced in the webinar. Create easy access to any other easily-digestible information from the webinar. Need ideas? Learn 5 ways to repurpose your webinar content here.
7. Let your sales team know where they can find access to your webinars.
8. Get your sales team to watch the live webinars (and even ask questions). Try implementing a “Learn-at-Lunch” or similar program.
9. If these steps seem like a lot of work, download our Smarketing Webinar Content Template at the bottom of the page, to streamline the process.
Hopefully you’re now better equipped to feed your sales team the valuable content they need during their lead nurturing process. For a more detailed discussion of specific content choices, webinar optimizations and marketing options, make sure to contact Xtalks.com to determine partnership opportunities.
Download our Smarketing Webinar Content Template by filling out this form subscribe to our Webinar Production Tips Blog! (We’ll send you an email to confirm your subscription.)
Join or login to leave a comment
JOIN LOGIN