This blog includes posts on lead generation, eMarketing, Web Marketing, SEO and other leading edge marketing techniques.
-Alan Blume
All posts with the tag 'Web Seminars'
It’s All About Your Close Ratio
Posted on August 12th, 2010 by Alan Blume
Do you track the ratios of your prospects to presentations to proposals to closes? These simple ratios can offer tremendous insights into the health of your sales and marketing engine. Further, they can elucidate specific challenges in your business. For example, let’s say that you offer monthly web seminars which result in 100 registrants per month. Of these 100 registrants, 10 move further down your sales funnel (see blog entry called The Prospect Scorecard) and result in individual presentations (10%). Of these 10 presentations, five request proposals (50% of presentations or 5% of webinar registrants), and are deemed “proposal worthy” through your well defined Prospect Scorecard or other measuring system which your company has in place. Lastly, of these five proposals, two close, or 40% of proposals or 2% of the original 100 webinar registrants.
Now that you’ve established your ratios, are you happy with them? If you are, then you may want to increase webinar registrants, allowing more prospects to cascade down through your funnel. Or, perhaps you think that a 10% conversion rate from webinar registrants to individualized presentations is too low. You would then need to determine what should be done to influence that metric. For example, perhaps your webinars need a more compelling call to action, a special offer to move to an individualized presentation, or you could make it easier for the prospect to meet with you by offering an abbreviated one to one web meeting or conference call. There are actually many things you could try to refine your ratios, of course you have to have these in place to do so.
Your company now has simple and easily measurable metrics for your sales process. Extending these measurements to your marketing engine, in this particular case, can be as simple as measuring where webinar registrants arrived from (LinkedIn or other Social Network, ePublishing, eMail Marketing, Referral, etc.) and then tracking the resulting prospects through the sales funnel mentioned above. Many small businesses fail to measure these key metrics, which is really very simple to accomplish. We track all of these for our own sales and marketing efforts at StartUpSelling, Inc. You can read more about this on our website, or in my recently released book, Your Virtual Success: www.yourvirtualsuccess.net.
If Someone Hands You a Scalpel, It Doesn’t Make You a Surgeon – You Should Think of Web Marketing in the Same Way
Posted on June 19th, 2010 by Alan Blume
There are many powerful marketing tools now available, everything from eMarketing engines and Search Engine Optimization Tools to ePublishing and Web Seminar Software. Any of these tools can be very helpful to your business, but placed in the wrong hands, 
they can be extremely dangerous. Not long ago, a CEO mentioned to me that they were sending out tens of thousands of emails through their eMarketing “platform” and they could do so very inexpensively. Their platform (let’s call it an integrated web site and eMarketing system) could send out as many emails as they wanted. Their provider suggested they contact some email list brokers where they could buy tens of thousands of emails. They even had some sample emails from other companies they could use.
Unfortunately, their email “blasts” of tens of thousands of emails, purchased from a list broker, resulted in no response. Literally, nobody responded to their offer. This is a good example of placing the aforementioned scalpel in the hands of a layperson. Placing this type of technology in the hands of untrained individuals is a recipe for failure, regardless of the ease of use of the application. This example is laden with huge issues:
- The email list they purchased looked like a low quality list, with first name, middle initial and last name all merged into one field, resulting in problematic personalization.
- The company was trying to “sell” something in their email – always try to educate or enlighten
- The email was graphically rich (a definite issue for many spam filters)
- Large scale email blasts often result in your prospects blocking your email address or in some cases your domain.
- They already burned their first opportunity to make a positive impression with all of these potential prospects
So before you hit the button and blast out 10,000 or 20,000 emails, and before you decide to run some of your own webinars:
- Carefully study emails which you receive and like – why are they good – why did you open it
- Attend webinars which sound interesting and relevant to you – how long are they – did you stay
- Read a book about these new web marketing topics – read a few
- Seek advice and guidance from experts in the field – surgeons get training and so should you
Make your web marketing operation safe and successful by combining advanced tools with knowledge and training to ensure the health of your program initiatives.
We have set up 15 Web Meetings from our Seminar Attendee List!
Posted on March 1st, 2010 by Alan Blume
I received the message above in an email first thing this morning. Our New Jersey based insurance agency client was extremely happy with their web seminar results. 300 executives registered, 161 attended and they already set up web meetings with 15 of those attendees. These web meetings are important for several reasons:
• They help the insurance agency and business executive reciprocally determine if there is a match between needs and services
• The meeting venue is efficient for both parties (he Insurance Agency doesn’t need to hop in a car and drive 30 minutes each way to visit their prospective client)
• The Insurance Agency can review relevant materials via the web meeting, a more powerful opportunity than a mere conference call
Of course, they already have strong credibility level, these attendees were privy to an excellent, educationally oriented speaker. We had advised this agency client to leverage an industry expert – and they did – a legal expert. The content was impressive, current and educational. No selling took place in the web seminar. Web seminar goals should be to educate prospects and initiate a dialogue – it should never be about selling.
Good for GoToMeeting
Posted on February 17th, 2010 by Alan Blume
I can host unlimited conference calls, unlimited web meetings and unlimited web seminars for less than $3 per day. Let’s look at what this means to any business:
• Unlimited conference call #s are generated at the touch of a button (phone or PC based access)
• Unlimited Web Seminars (show anything on your PC to as many as 1,000 other people – anywhere in the world)
• Custom landing pages for your web seminar registration and virtual waiting room
• Automatic registration for your web seminar, selecting required or optional registration fields (name, email, phone might be required, but city, state and zip code are optional)
• Detailed registration and attendance reports
• Record the presentation and audio for training, future presentation use or load onto your web site for viewing
• Real time collaboration (sharing) of information – work on the same document at the same time – from anywhere in the world
• Ability to view other people’s PCs (they can show you anything they like on their PC)
That’s a lot of computing power for three dollars a day – perhaps too much? GoToMeeting recently sent an email that they were going to increase prices for companies requiring larger 500 and 1,000 attendees meetings – BUT – they were not going to increase prices for existing customers. That’s a good, customer oriented attitude that shows their loyalty to customer and earns the same in return. Cloud computing solutions like this are relatively new, but great customer service has been around for a long time, virtual or not, for those who understand the importance of customer loyalty. Good for GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar/Citrix – seems like they get it.
Partnering with your Virtual Clients
Posted on January 15th, 2010 by Alan Blume
Not long ago, we signed on a new client in California. I try to think of clients as partners, and my service team tries to help them, responding to their requests immediately, which in a virtual business, means the moment they call or within a few minutes of their call. Conversely, as a partner, I have no hesitation asking, from time to time, if they can help us too. A case in point revolves around an insurance agency client who needed a fairly significant amount of help in running a web seminar. As usual, we helped them with their email list, handled all the registration, webinar infrastructure and moderation. But we also spent a significant amount of time coaching their speakers, and ran an extra couple of practice sessions for them without hesitation.
They closed a million dollar client from their well rehearsed web seminar, a prospect who had up until that time, been unwilling to meet with them. That’s an impressive story, one which would be better told by our client than ourselves. So we asked them if they would be a guest speaker at one of our prospective client web seminars – and they readily agreed. We’ve never met our client, face to face, and probably never will. Nonetheless, we feel the same level of gratitude and appreciation as we would if they were located down the street. Though we may often be a great physical distance from our clients, in some ways, we feel closer to them today than in our haphazard, travel laden, brick and mortar days. www.alanblume.com www.startupseling.com