As I work with clients, I often attend webinars to help them better understand customers & prospects, competitors, industry trends and related best practices.

B2B companies expend significant energy & resources to produce these webinars. If they are well attended by customer & prospects who stay engaged, these become excellent opportunities to communicate, engage & respond to customers and prospects

I am amazed by the way Q&A is handled during and after such webinars. There are several issues:

• Many webinars offer no Q&A at all
• Some we webinar use up 95% or more of the time presenting and end with “Perhaps we have time for one question” (they should devote 25-50% of the time to Q&A, that is where the real value is)
• Sometimes they host webinars with analysts at very high costs and the analyst refuse to answer live questions
• Host do not share the question that they are seeing, potentially asking the audience to vote on what they want answered next (this is valuable to any B2B Marketer)
• The most junior person in the marketing department picks and chooses the questions to be answered, where is the CMO in this equation, what would be a more valuable use of their time than this?
• The moderator always says: “Sorry we did not get to all the questions, we will follow up after the call with answers to all questions” This in fact never happens. BDR webinar follow up is rare and often of-out-context or ineffective. Most time the BDR has not even attended the webinar and has little or not know of the topic or the Q&A. Most marketers do not equip BRDs with Q&A help them in advance of follow up calls.
• Companies hosting webinar rarely compile Q&A and turn it into a content marketing asset, not only for the attendees but for all customers or prospects who likely have the same questions, this is a huge miss
• Finally, I have seen marketing departments take credit for webinar turn out when the job of marketing is partially done. The big win is to secure new new one-on-one meetings for sales after the webinar with customers & prospects
• Sales in many cases does not follow up effectively on webinar attendance
• Marketing often does not provide follow up or next steps in the sales process (for example, an insights or how-to piece following the webinar or the next in the webinar series or an offer to conduct a company-only webinar or onsite meeting with the same content)
• Marketing often view webinars a high pressure project to tick off and get done, I do understand the relief and the need to move along but not before the appropriate follow up is done.

The net effect is, webinars are a huge opportunity miss for B2B Marketers, thoughts?

Message me for additional help to increase webinar ROI program in 2019?
michael@gotomarketpros.com