[Webinar Recap] Sales and Marketing Alignment in the World of Virtual Events

Webinar Recap

Banzai’s recent webinar, Sales and Marketing Alignment in the World of Virtual Events showcased how Director of Demand Generation Bryant Lau and Manager of Sales Development Paul Rosales work together to approach virtual events. They shared messaging strategies, communication methods, and the lessons they’ve learned over the past few months.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

The core principles of alignment haven’t changed, the tools we use have.

Core Principles:

1. One-team Mentality

• We’re all on the same team, with the same goal: drive revenue.

2. Assume the best intentions

• Every time you interact with someone, assume that they’re taking what they believe to be the best action for the company.

3. Over Communicate

• A text message can be read a dozen different ways and it’s helpful to be clear, concise, and instructional.

It’s like baking a cake: what we often think of as the smallest ingredient (baking soda) can have the biggest impact on your end product. Cross your Ts, dot your Is, add your baking soda-- that way there are few assumptions and (hopefully) no unexpected outcomes.

Pre-Event

There are a few things to take care of prior to the event.

First, have a communication plan. Zoom is huge right now (obviously) and being able to actually see your coworkers’ faces and expressions really adds a layer of accountability and personal connection. So ask people to turn on their cameras. Nobody cares about your hair and nobody cares what you’re wearing. We’re in this together.

Take advantage of screen share so your team has something to follow along with and consider using a tool like Slack for quick reminders, shoutouts, and asynchronous communications.  

When it comes to driving registrations for the event, it’s important for sales and marketing to work together to find the right attendees. That means suppressing accounts that you shouldn’t be emailing and targeting accounts you specifically want.

It also means working together to define your ideal customer profile--for any specific webinar--and deciding which personas from that ICP you want in attendance. You don’t just want registrations, you want the right people.

Banzai uses Reach to drive regs without taking time from our SDRs busy days.

Finally, be sure to prepare your SDR and marketing teams for the event. Familiarize SDRs with the content and make sure your marketing team has checked in with everyone, tested the equipment, and prepared a plan for the day.

Day of the Event

It’s event day--get excited!

It’s difficult to replicate the pre-webinar office buzz in a virtual world but you need to build team excitement. Who doesn’t love new leads? With a platform like Reach, SDRs don’t have to do any heavy lifting to drive registrants to the webinar, they just get a series of fresh leads.

Everyone wants to be a part of success. For an outbound SDR team like Banzai’s, webinars are like an early Christmas--leads presented on a silver platter. You might even consider capitalizing on your team’s competitive spirit by initiating a competition for most calls made, most demos booked, etc., as a result of the webinar.

People often go to events to network and it’s important to recreate those networking opportunities. You can try break-out rooms in Zoom meetings to allow your sales team to have conversations with prospects. You can also engage the audience via chat or email.

Once you’ve wrapped up your webinar, there’s still a bit of work to do. You should re-sync with your sales team to make sure they have what they need (data, notes, questions, etc.)

Also, be sure to write a recap email to share some of the success you and your team have built. Let people know how many registrations your webinar had, how many attendees, how many demo requests, etc.

Event Follow-Up

Now before you relax, it’s not all over when the webinar is over. There are a few things to do to ensure the webinar’s success.

As a marketing team, gather as much feedback as you can about the leads that the SDRs are following up on. You don’t want the marketing team just throwing MQLs to the SDRs and forgetting about them. You want to follow those leads through the sales process and get feedback from the SDRs about how those leads are performing.

It’s imperative to gather both quantitative and qualitative data on the webinar’s leads to support your future webinar strategy.

Key Takeaways

• The core principles of alignment haven’t changed, just the tools we’re using have.
• Over-communicate. Send that extra message and get everyone on the same page.
• Leverage data whenever possible. Try to make data-driven decisions around your sales and marketing alignment.

Hosting virtual events means lots of adapting. There’s no magic formula and no instruction manual. Aligning your sales and marketing teams will empower you to reach your leads from a distance and drive them through the pipeline.

And If you’re interested in learning more about virtual events or just event marketing in general, sign up for our webinar, The Evolution of Event Marketing: What’s changed, what’s staying the same, and where do we go next?