Andrew Spoeth

Last week I kicked off a three-part series titled: How to Manage Successful Webinar – A Checklist. In part 1, we walked through the steps we take leading up to a live event. In today’s post, I’d like to talk about the actual day of the webinar. What do we need to prepare and which steps are undertaken during the event itself to make it a successful one?

Live events can be great for lead generation and lead nurturing. But a big part of our strategy during the event is to change the webinar from being a one-to-many, to a many-to-many communications medium. Your webinar attendees likely have a lot in common, and they will get more out of your event if they can interact with each other.

For the purpose of this checklist, we’ll assume the event takes place at 10:00 a.m. Pacific...

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Thomas Edison

Do you consider grumpy customers a blessing or a curse? Thomas Edison brings up a good point that even B2B marketers struggle with today. When dissatisfied customers come knocking, do you shy away from the work it takes to not just resolve the situation but to make lemonade from those lemons, or do you look the other way and hope for a bucketful of new leads to even out the playing field?

There are few things more disheartening than grumpy customers. After the effort and time you put into generating sales leads and closing them, it’s only impactful to the bottom line if the customer remains a customer. Not only can a cranky customer puncture a hole in your enthusiasm, if the point of contention isn’t resolved they can quickly move from an un-happy customer to an ex-customer.

Today’s B2B marketing success revolves around the new spirit of collaboration between marketing and sales, and nowhere is this more important than the point where the sales cycle begins – defining the perfect sales lead.

There are myriads of technology choices and philosophies on how to generate, nurture and manage leads. However, any or all of these might end up futile if marketing and sales don’t agree on what defines a qualified lead prior to investing in lead generation activities.

Check out the following 4 tips for defining the perfect sales lead.

1.      Get sales and marketing on board at the start.

Trying to get two teams to agree on the definition of the perfect lead can...

How do we get an audience to show up for an event? How do we get the busy executive to attend, the person who barely has enough time to get through their most pressing daily tasks?

Webinars are a key piece in the B2B marketer’s toolkit. They are a great way to promote thought leadership and generate leads. We pick topics relevant to our audience, arrange for engaging speakers, build landing pages, develop email campaigns, and promote it all on social media.

Part of a webinar’s success depends on finding the right audience to promote it to. Using lead management and marketing automation systems, we can narrow our focus and choose a target audience based on industry, job role, and previous interest.

But registration doesn’t necessarily lead to attendance. We want people to attend, especially when we consider engagement as a way to build...