Bridging the Gap Between Sales & Marketing With Webinars

As a marketer, your goal is to eventually funnel leads to your sales team. However, it’s important that both teams are aligned on goals in order to get the most out of your investment — and webinars are certainly no exception.

Webinars are a great way to engage with potential customers and generate leads. However, if you're not careful, you can easily create a disconnect between your marketing and sales efforts. This is because webinars are often geared toward the top of the funnel, while sales teams are more interested in bottom-of-the-funnel leads.

To bridge this gap, it's important to set clear goals for your webinars. Ask yourself: who is your target audience? What is your objective? What is the desired outcome of the webinar? Once you have answers to these questions, you can create a webinar that is aligned with your sales goals and will help to funnel leads to your sales team.

Defining the critical objectives for each department

Webinars are a powerful marketing and sales tool, but they only work if both departments are on the same page about their goals. Otherwise, it's easy for the two departments to get siloed and start working towards different objectives. That's why it's so important to define the key objectives for each department before planning a webinar.

Here are the key objectives for each department:

Marketing

The primary goal of marketing is to generate leads and awareness for the product or service. A successful webinar should attract a large number of leads and help to build brand awareness. Marketing and growth professionals should be geared towards getting the word out there for the webinar, to the right people.

To achieve these goals, the marketing team should focus on creating a catchy and attention-grabbing title for the webinar, as well as promoting it through various channels. They should also work on creating engaging content that will keep viewers interested throughout the duration of the webinar.

Sales

For sales, the goal of a webinar is usually to generate leads and close deals. This can be done by providing a detailed demonstration of the product or service and offering a special discount or other incentives for attendees who sign up.

It's essential to have a clear understanding of the goals of each department so that you can create a webinar that meets the needs of both. By doing so, you'll be able to maximize the success of your webinar and generate the most leads and sales possible.

Defining roles and their impact on the client at every stage of the funnel

The main intersection between the two teams is often lead generation. The channel or method of sourcing leads will determine which team takes on the load, however there will always be a crossover. Defining roles and responsibilities will help to ensure there's no stepping on toes, and no lead left unreached.

As the world of marketing and sales continues to evolve, the roles within those respective teams are changing. To better understand how these changes impact the client experience, it's crucial to first define the roles and their purpose within the team.

The buyer's journey is the process that buyers go through when making a purchase decision — it begins with awareness, moves on to consider, and then ends with a decision.

The marketing team aims to generate leads and awareness during the awareness stage. Meanwhile, the sales team's goal is to convert those leads into customers during the consideration and decision stages.

“The best starting point is ensuring that the teams have overlapping goals and metrics. When each member of the sales team is focused solely on achieving a personal sales quota while marketing team members are A/B testing an email, silos are inevitable. Members of both teams need to understand the connection between building brand awareness, generating warm leads and closing business opportunities.” - James Burn, BrandActive

Designing high-value content that moves leads through the funnel

Your marketing and sales teams have worked hard to create a high-value webinar that will attract and engage your target audience. But your work isn't done yet. To realize the full value of your webinar, you need to make sure that it is designed to move leads through your sales funnel.

The first step is to ensure that your webinar content is aligned with your marketing and sales goals. What are you hoping to achieve with this webinar? Are you looking to generate new leads, nurture existing ones, or close deals? Once you know your goals, you can design your webinar content accordingly.

Next, you need to make sure that your webinar is designed to capture leads. Marketing and sales should liaise to create registration forms and gather contact information to follow up with attendees after the webinar.

Finally, promote your webinar to the right people. Marketing should be focused on getting the word out through your email list, social media, and other marketing channels. Then, sales should be on hand to follow up with attendees after the webinar to see if they're ready to take the next step in the sales process.

By aligning your content with your sales goals, you can create a high-value webinar that will help you close more deals and grow your business. We’ve said before that “not many organisations realise just how important their sales team can be throughout the lifecycle of a webinar. In fact, your sales team should be involved in the webinar from the get-go.”

Fostering an understanding between two key teams

The marketing and sales teams at your company are the driving force behind your success, as they work tirelessly to promote your products and services and close deals with customers. With that, it's vital to foster a sense of understanding and appreciation between the teams so they can work together more effectively.

By bringing them together to discuss common goals and objectives, webinars can help build a stronger sense of unity and purpose. Inter-departmental brainstorming is a great way to align every member of the team from the get-go.

The bottom line is that your marketing and sales goals in webinars should work in tandem to achieve the overarching goals of your company. Therefore, you need to ensure that your marketing team and your sales team are both on board with your plans for the webinar and that they are working together to ensure that the webinar is successful.

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