A webinar series can be a great demand generation tool for your sales team. A savvy marketing department can properly qualify leads, segment them and move them down the sale funnel all with a well targeted and executed webinar.

However, there are several transition points in the webinar process that often lead to dropped prospects and mishandled opportunities. If you think of your webinar process as a funnel that tries to move people from registration to attendance to interest and then ultimately to a closed deal, you can easily identify the potential gaps where a prospect might fall out.

Let’s look at each gap:

1. Registrant to Attendee: 50% of your registrants will attend. Attendees are more committed, more engaged and you can also get further information from attendees using polling features and chat. The more people you get to attend, the better you can qualify them for your sales team. At ReadyTalk, we find one reminder one day before the event, gives attendance a nice boost.
2. Attendee to Post Event: 15% of your attendees will fill out your post event survey if you have one. Obviously, attendees who fill this out are more engaged. At ReadyTalk, we find mailing a survey in the post event email is often a better way to go since attendees are usually closing out their browsers and moving on the minute the webinar end.
3. Handraisers: Let your registrants raise their hands at any point. We allow registrants to raise their hand on the registration page, again during the event through chat and finally at the end of the event in the post event survey.

It is process that prevents people from falling through the gaps and it is process that moves people from registrant to close. For a webinar to be successful, your content and your process have to be optimized. Here are several of the questions we ask internally to fine-tune our process:

1. Who conducts initial follow up to hand raisers?
2. Is there a pre-show call campaign to boost attendance?
3. Is there a post-show call campaign?
4. Are we sending anything to registrants before the webinar?
5. Are we sending anything post –event?
6. Are we adjusting lead score based upon attendance, chat or polling?
7. How should opportunities be marked by the sales team?

I would love to hear some of things your organization does to move prospects from attendance to close with your webinars.