Webinars enable a financial planner to hold live presentations to many prospects at the same time. In fact, the largest webinar in the world was held by Hubspot in 2011 and had 31,100 registrants and 10,899 attendees. Imagine presenting your sales pitch to over to over 10,000 people at the same time.
Of course, you shouldn’t expect to present to that many people but presenting to 20, 40, 100 people is quite normal for many sales people who use webinars. The reason why webinars are so powerful is you are not selling one-on-one but one-to-many.
Webinars are online meetings where an attendee can see the presenter via a video, watch the presenter’s computer screen, ask and answer questions via a chat window and even speak to the presenter if the presenter directly takes them off mute.
The Power Of Webinars
Webinars are a unique selling tool because they can be used to attract new leads, nurture cold and warm leads to make them hot and used to convert those warm and hot leads into sales.
Webinars are so effective at converting prospects into clients en mass because:
- Trusted Advisor – A webinar can transform your business into the prospects trusted advisor if the presentation is created to educate and inform your audience. Once you have their trust the sales process becomes much smoother
- Sales Pitch – After that one hour of value, the prospect is happy to hear a sales pitch especially if it is closely linked to the content and even more so if it takes what they have learned to the next level
- Answers Questions – A good webinar will always have time for questions to be answered at the end. This is an important time as it is when prospects ask questions centred around a buying decision
What Makes A Successful Webinar
1. Promotion
Filling a webinar once is relatively easy. Filling a webinar every week on a consistent basis with new prospects is significantly harder. We recommend holding webinars weekly so they become a repeatable lead generation engine in your business.
It’s easy to promote a webinar once with an email to your list and fill it. But the next time you will have fewer registrants and the more you promote to your list the fewer attendees from that list will sign up as it becomes saturated.
To fill a webinar on a regular basis you need a lead source that is affordable and reliable. We find the best way to do this is through Facebook Ads. Yes, you heard it correctly. I know you are a financial advisor and yes I said Facebook. Facebook Ads are so good for financial advisers because they are scalable and automated lead generation.
2. Selling
The most important part of the webinar is the opportunity you have to sell your services. Many newbie webinar presenters make the following two mistakes:
- They don’t leave enough time for their pitch at the end so they rush it and do a poor job. They get so excited about giving value, they forget to sell. They then mess up the sales pitch at the end. People never buy because you educated them, they buy because they trust you and you make a great offer at the end. Don’t forget to leave enough time to make your offer at the end.
- They leave the sales pitch until the end. This is a big mistake, you should be selling all the way through. The right approach is to teach and sell, teach and sell, teach and sell. At the end, it is just an extension of what you have already been doing. When you teach and sell, the attendees don’t even notice the sales pitch if you do it well. The idea is to not do a hard sell but to sell nonetheless.
3. Presenting
What you say on a webinar is also vital to a successful webinar, but so many webinar presentations are not optimised for an online setting. Unlike in-person events, you can’t see how engaged an attendee is on a webinar. You can’t read their facial expressions and adjust your presentation accordingly.
There are a few keys to presenting a webinar that sells:
- Build in engagement points with questions to the audience, where you draw people’s attention back if their attention is not failing
- You also need to establish your credibility and authority quickly at the beginning so the attendees think you are worth listing to
- You need to teach them just enough content where they want more, but not too much where they feel they don’t need your services anymore
The Perfect Sales And Marketing Tool
Webinars are probably the most powerful sales and marketing tool because they are involved in all three parts of the sales cycle. We use them to attract, nurture and convert prospects into clients. There is no other tactic I know of that can be used in a such a way.
For example, on Facebook, we can place an add promoting a webinar and will get hundreds of new prospects registering over the life of a campaign.
We can then email the webinar to an email list of prospects being nurtured and will gain more registrations.
Finally, webinars are a great conversation tool and when done well will deliver new clients regularly.
Top 3 Tips For Successful Webinars
- Sell and teach – Don’t leave the sales pitch until the end. Sell while you are teaching so the transition to the sales pitch at the end is much smoother
- Engage the audience – Make the webinar interactive so you keep the attendees engaged. Ask questions, hold a poll, draw on your screen using pen to mix up the presentation to keep their attention
- Keep them until the end – The best way to keep people until the end of the webinar is to offer them something of high value at the end. You might say the best points are the last two, or you promise a link to a video or eBook they can download. Be upfront and tell them at the beginning of the webinar so they have an incentive to stay until the end