Cats vs Dogs.

Marvel vs DC

Pineapple on Pizza Vs No Pineapple.

Marketing vs Sales.

These are just a few examples of what divides us, long running feuds where the origin is blurred but the emotion is raw.

We were excited to launch our first ever Virtual MarTech Spotlight event. ON24 would come on board to deliver a short insightful talk on Pipeline Generation, and it was fitting that it was them having been with us since the first ever Virtual MarTech Summit almost a year ago. But they decided to send a Marketing Director and a Sales Development Manager to present.

When ON24 went live on stage, we braced ourselves and had our fingers ready on the end live summit button and a we’re sorry for the expletives you heard email ready. However, it could not have gone any better! Aside from a few remarks, both speakers presented well to show how their department contributed to engaging leads and give their best practices.

ON24 often claims they can walk the walk and talk the talk and they rose to the occasion magnificently. There was no room for error as both speakers were appearing live to a multinational audience. Their 1-hour long session was not only informative but extremely well structured. After a quick intro, they delved straight in, breaking down their topic of converting webinar leads.

“Not a handover, it’s a partnership”. Simply put but extremely wise. Marketing and Sales have to work together to get the best results, it is not just Marketing running the webinar and passing off the leads to Sales after. Tim & Dylan broke this journey down to 3 main steps, Pre-Webinar, Live Webinar & Post-Webinar.

Pre-Webinar

• Build a great brief – share goals & KPIs, enable sales with great copy and get them involved with promotions.
• Prioritise registrants – Priority accounts, multiple registrants, and those with high lifetime engagement.

Live Webinar

• Interaction is key. Design your console to get attendees to engage with a Q&A widget, live poll questions, CTAs, resource list, the console is your oyster.
• Make sales & SDRs a part of the conversation – integrate a chatbot for real-time customer service. Do a live giveaway for urgency and it’ll also give a reason for sales to follow up.

Post-Webinar

• It’s not over yet. Follow up with your leads with personalised messages filled with engagement & intent. Remember to prioritise leads by engagement.
• Content may be king, but data is queen. Make the data accessible in tools already used by the Sales team. They’ll be able to see which leads are receptive, which have opportunities and which to probably not pursue

What do our audiences love the most? Interactive Q&A. We had 20 minutes of Q&A time, for our audience to drop their questions in, such as:

Do you have any techniques to encourage audience engagement on a live chat during a virtual event?

“Allowing for more time during the webinar, perhaps even start the session with some Q&A so that it can provoke questions throughout and not just towards the end. The producer/presenter has the responsibility to drive this and really engage the audience.”

– Tim Johnston, Marketing Director, APJ, ON24

SDR’s are typically very busy, so how long after the webinar should SDR’s follow up with emails or calls? When is it too late?

“It depends how big the event was, if it’s a small event there is no excuse for the SDR to not get through to leads within 24 hours. If it’s massive with thousands of leads then it is important to label them by highly engaged, no shows. If time is limited make sure you hit those highly engaged data first.”

– Dylan Verrier, Sales Development Manager, APJ, ON24

Overall, this session showed us 3 things:

• The launch of the Virtual MarTech Spotlight was a success (more to come!)
• The webinar itself is just a small step in the overall journey, think of the pre & post journey as well.
• Evidence that Marketing & Sales “can” and “must” work together (to an extent).

The entire session is now available on-demand for free where you can catch up on their insights as well as the full Q&A session.

Looking forward to more sessions of The Virtual MarTech Spotlight!

By Matthew Lin.