How To Create a Webinar That Your Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Teams Will Love

Most companies include webinars as part of their marketing playbook. Sadly, these webinars tend to follow the same, outdated formula: 

1. Nudging people into registering for a “free” webinar
2. Asking people to commit to an hour-long session 
3. Having one or more talking heads introduce a product

You want to showcase your product, thinking you’ll dazzle your audience with unique features and cool capabilities. But to your attendees, it’s just another boring, hour-long webinar that’s not worth their time. 

Long gone are the days of snooze-fest PowerPoint presentations and company-centered talks. Nobody gains any value from those non-conversational, infomercial-like video lectures masquerading as webinars. 

Successful webinars foster the perfect environment for two-way communication. It’s no longer about promoting your product; great webinars focus on: 

• Helping people identify their challenges 
• Providing results-driven solutions 
• Guiding people through their decision-making process
• Interacting live with the audience 
• Conducting active listening
• Answering questions

Effective webinars are built on strong engagement and will result in positive outcomes through two-way communication with the audience. 

We’re accustomed to viewing webinars as a marketing tool only. However, when designed correctly, they can serve your entire revenue team (marketing, sales, and customer success) at every consumer stage.

Power up Your RevOps With an Engagement Strategy

Over the past few years, more companies have moved away from silos to embrace team transversality. It’s become clear the compartmentalization of different departments frequently leads to a lack of transparency and alignment. 

Within this context, successful companies adopted the Revenue Operations (RevOps) framework. Built around revenue goals, RevOps involves the strategic integration of marketing, sales, and customer success teams to ensure alignment, transparency, and efficiency. 

Increasing revenue is not limited to acquiring leads or transforming them into customers but also involves monetizing and retaining them. So, companies are bringing marketing, sales, and CS professionals together to create micro teams focused exclusively on revenue.

Although these departments use different methodologies to achieve their revenue goals, all of them can benefit from an engagement strategy and two-way communication with your audience: 

• To connect with new leads, your marketing team has to initiate a conversation, listen, and answer their questions. 

• Your revenue depends on how much prospects trust your brand and product. This requires your sales professionals to lay the groundwork by addressing their doubts and establishing credibility for your brand. 

• Retaining your customers and later upselling or cross-selling your product depends on your CS professionals. To ensure the success of your existing customers, they need to leverage active communication and engagement. 

In sum, engagement and two-way communication should be at the center of your RevOps framework so your teams can achieve their desired results and generate high revenue. 

Webinars are great avenues for pursuing this. Moreover, they can power up your marketing, sales, and CS strategies. 

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Host Webinars To Supercharge Your Marketing Team

When executed correctly, webinar marketing will help your marketing team achieve multiple goals, such as: 

• Increasing brand awareness 
• Building brand trust
• Attracting high-quality leads
• Educating and nurturing leads 
• Transforming MQLs into SQLs
• Acquiring free trial users 

Webinar marketing has the ability to generate positive results across all stages of the emotional buyer’s journey. 

Engagement marketing is the cornerstone of successful webinars, offering a new model of interacting with audiences. Instead of treating attendees like passive recipients of a company’s marketing messages and campaigns, webinars put them at the center of their buying experience, guiding them towards their desired outcomes. 

Webinars for marketing teams can empower leads by: 

• Defining the challenges they experience
• Showcasing a wide variety of solutions 
• Explaining how to achieve a result 
• Enabling transformation by providing the right tools

Your team can run different marketing webinars to engage your audience and build trust, such as: 

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➡️ Educational Webinars

This type of session covers multiple educational subjects. It’s important to ensure the topics are industry- and audience-relevant. If you run educational webinars for SaaS marketers, you could cover topics related to the newest trends, strategies, and practices. 

For example, Banzai offers a series of educational webinars focused on events, engagement marketing, and two-way communication. 

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Also, we recently ran the “Beers and Webinar Fears” webinar, during which Ashley Levesque, our VP of Marketing, shared her knowledge on how to run engaging webinars guided by audience questions. 

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➡️ Thought Leadership Webinars

These events invite internal or external influencers or thought leaders to speak to attendees about a topic of their expertise. Compared to purely educational webinars, these sessions are built upon your guests’ extensive knowledge on specific matters. 

For example, Drift recently launched the GTM Lab, a virtual event series on go-to market strategies. In the first session, the company invited a powerful panel of known industry leaders. 

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➡️ Report Summary Webinars

During these sessions, company representatives share the knowledge and the insights they’ve collected by conducting research. The uniqueness of these webinars is the exclusive industry insights they provide that people can’t access anywhere else. 

For example, Intercom recently released the “2022 Customer Support Trends Report.” This was the perfect occasion to run a webinar and share the report insights with a wide audience. 

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➡️ Live Workshop Webinars

Show, don’t tell. This rule is the foundation of live workshops, as the organizers invite the webinar audience to submit real-life problems. The company reps then demonstrate a solution during the webinar, rather than simply talking about the product in broad terms. 

For example, Buffer runs live workshops to help users optimize their social channels for success.

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Launch Webinars To Support Your Sales Team

Whether you run a sales- or product-led company, sales webinars are key to transforming SQLs into paying customers. 

Your sales team can run webinars to: 

• Present different use cases
• Address objections people may have 
• Help attendees determine whether your product is a good fit
• Answer product-related questions 
• Convert prospects into paying customers 

Like with marketing webinars, you can choose between different sales webinar formats, such as: 

➡️ Demo Series 

Increasingly, companies are running demo webinars to showcase a solution. In some cases, brands offer weekly or monthly demos. In other cases, companies focus on creating unique demos that are both memorable and fun.

For example, Demio’s Game Show Demo provides an interactive introduction to the Demio platform and key features. Apart from the demo session, the attendees are invited to play games and win prizes.

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➡️ AMAs

These webinars are conversational to their core. They’re usually hosted by internal influencers and thought leaders who share their expertise with an audience. AMAs are narrow in terms of their subject matter, as they focus on showcasing the product or answering product-related questions. 

One example is DevTalk Product AMA by Demio. The session is built around answering people's questions about the product. Also, the webinar focuses on covering topics such as platform improvements and new features. 

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➡️ Case Study Webinars

Some companies invite clients to talk about their success using the product. Instead of blatantly promoting, these brands let the facts (and real customers) speak for themselves.

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Run Webinars To Assist Your Customer Success Team 

Customer success webinars are crucial to ensuring user engagement, and client engagement is crucial to your brand’s success. 

According to Twilio’s “State of Customer Engagement Report 2022,” “Companies that made moves to invest in digital customer engagement have seen their top-line revenues rise by an average of 70%. They expect that, by 2025, their investment in this key area will almost double, rising by 93.5%.”

This emphasizes the importance of incorporating webinars into customer success strategy. Your CS team can benefit greatly from running webinars by: 

• Scaling the onboarding process
• Answering questions and addressing doubts live
• Ensuring users achieve their intended goals 
• Introducing new features and products

Moreover, recurring webinars help your CS department build a trust-based relationship with your existing customers, which will subsequently lead to: 

• Higher retention rates (reduced churn)
• Successful customer advocacy campaigns 
• Increased upsell and cross-sell rates

Your CS team can choose between multiple webinar types to achieve these results, such as: 

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➡️ Onboarding Webinars

Some companies run recurring onboarding sessions for new customers. That’s an effective solution if you want to scale your onboarding experience. Slack is a good example of this, as the company offers recurring webinars called: 

• Slack 101: How to use Slack 
• Slack 102: Getting the most out of Slack 

 Both webinars are designed for new users and focus on elements such as: =

• A platform overview 
• The workspace 
• Tools 
• Notifications
• Apps
• And more

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➡️ Use Case Webinars

If you’ve developed a complex product that may help different audiences, make sure to run onboarding sessions for each of them. For example, Monday hosts a series of Advanced Use Case webinars that focus on different product features and are geared towards audiences working in areas such as human resources, operations, and customer Success. Monday also runs webinars on use cases related to project management and coordinating remote teams.

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➡️ New Feature Webinars

When introducing a new feature, nothing works better than a detailed webinar explaining how customers can make the most of it. For example the New at Intercom webinar offers users an overview of the new capabilities and features the company added to the platform. 

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➡️ Best Practices Webinars

To guarantee customers will achieve their desired results, you can follow Monday’s lead and create a Best Practices series. 

Run this type of webinar to demonstrate how your customers can leverage your product to achieve great results. It’s the perfect format for sharing tips and tricks people may overlook when using your product. 

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Your Remote Team Will Love Webinars

Webinars are especially great for remote teams and companies as well. They allow your marketing, sales, and CS teams to engage with leads, prospects, and customers no matter where they are. Moreover, webinars will help your remote team: 

• Remove geographical boundaries 
• Build connections with audiences on different continents ( offering webinars in different languages is especially powerful)
• Promote, sell, and provide customer support across the globe

Webinars should be part of your remote playbook as a key strategy for achieving your business goals. It’s the easiest and most efficient way to connect with a worldwide audience, regardless of your company’s location. 

Choosing the Right Tools for Audience Engagement

Regardless of the type, ensure your marketing, sales, or CS webinars encourage two-way communication. 

You can do that by choosing the right webinar platform. Demio, for example, offers a wide variety of engagement activities, including: 

• Live polls with stats — Ask your audience a question at any time and share the results publicly.

• Offers and CTAs — Link your audience to an offer, a sign-up page, or a URL during the webinar. 

• Handouts and gifts — Treat your audience to downloadable gifts, discounts, and documents.

• Private and public chat — Interact with your audience in a real-time chat. Switch between private and public chat modes to connect with admins behind the scenes or encourage attendees to participate in public conversations. 

• Mentions and emojis — Give your audience more ways to interact through emojis and the ability to @ mention other participants.

• Q&As — Enjoy dedicated features to manage Q&A sessions easily and answer questions live.

• Bring attendees to the stage — Give microphone or webcam permissions to any attendee so they can be front and center before the audience.

Demio is the only webinar platform that offers an engagement experience unlike anything you’ve seen before, helping your revenue team build strong relationships with audiences, leads, prospects, and customers.  

Recap 

Let’s stop seeing webinars as formulaic selling platforms. You’ll fall short of your goals if you run hour-long marketing webinars talking about a single product or use educational webinars to target bottom-of-the-funnel leads. Instead, you need to consider all stages of the revenue funnel and hone in on your audience’s needs. In other words, you have to extend the scope of webinars beyond the marketing playbook. 

Webinars can serve your full revenue team, enabling your sales and customer success departments to achieve better results. Engagement-centered webinars are highly efficient at building trust, connecting (for real) with an audience, and fostering long-lasting relationships.

Ensure your marketing, sales, and CS departments deploy a robust webinar strategy that includes holding conversations with leads, prospects, and existing clients. Each team should focus on creating different types of webinars based on their target audiences. 

Regardless of the webinar type, you must ensure a high level of audience engagement. You can accomplish that by choosing the right webinar platform. Check out Demio and access a wide variety of engagement activities, such as live polls, offers and CTAs, handouts, mentions, live chat, Q&As, and more to amplify your webinar strategy across your revenue team. 

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