Your most powerful tool for generating a steady flow of pre-sold leads is hands-down a lead generation webinar.
Nothing else gives you the ability to make a personal connection and bond with your prospective clients so cheaply.
You give a brief, problem-solving presentation. Then you invite attendees to book a strategy session or discovery call. And provided you don’t shoot yourself in the foot by making any of these 7 mistakes…
…You get a reliable flow of high-quality leads coming to you daily.
So let’s search and destroy those profit-killing mistakes.
1. Not Having a Lead Generating Webinar at All!
This is a serious, serious mistake, because otherwise, you’re dredging up leads by going to seminars, meetups, networking events, and all the other time-and-energy-consuming activities that are orders of magnitude WORSE at producing leads.
To put this in perspective, I did a facelift on my lead generation webinar in the spring of 2019.
Since then, that new webinar has put 17,797 new subscribers on my list.
4,372 of them attended my lead generating webinar, and 1,372 of them watched right to the end and booked a strategy session.
So think about it.
How many cold calls or cold emails would it take to haul in 1,372 leads, people who actually want to talk to you?
How long would it take to personally convey an hour’s worth of information to 4,372 potential prospects? That’s 182 days (including weekends), assuming you didn’t sleep, eat, or go to the bathroom!
And how many times do you want to answer the same irritating questions?
No wonder you can’t make any headway.
Not only is it costing you a fortune (both in actual expenses AND the money you’re NOT making), but prospects are repelled by your neediness and desperation.
But add a strategically crafted webinar and it’s almost like FREE traffic when you’re getting double, triple, even 10X the return on your ad spend.
Our new lead generating webinar acts like a traffic vortex, pulling in over 90,000 visitors to this website each and every month.
Yes, vast expanses of time suddenly open in front of you when you’re no longer cold calling, cold emailing, traveling all over hell and gone, churning out free content, commenting on social media, and glad-handing everyone you can think of.
Which brings me to the next common mistake …
2. Doing Your Lead Generation Webinar LIVE!
It’s true, webinars are a fabulous tool for up-close-and-personally connecting with your target audience, and doing it more intimately and cost-effectively than any other media.
But be forewarned, putting on LIVE webinars is grueling, time consuming, and will definitely sap your energy…
… Because it’s stressful to try to sound calm and authoritative when you’re scrambling behind the scenes and trying to keep all the balls in the air (watching comments in the chat box, getting the slides right in the PowerPoint, handling the tech issues that WILL come up, fielding calls from your JV partners).
Add to that, doing your webinar LIVE is ALWAYS fraught with unexpected problems, so the whole time you’re running around like a chicken with its head cut off…
… Which comes through in the presentation.
Not only that, advertising your lead generation webinar — which is how the aforementioned 1,372 leads were generated — is next to impossible if you’re doing your webinar live. You will go INSANE trying to juggle them balls.
The solution?
You can get your life back by using tools like EverWebinar that let you pre-record only your BEST efforts… then you set it and forget it and give people a choice as to when they want to attend.
Now here’s another squib move…
3. Death by PowerPoint (Even the Big Shots are Blowing This)…
As a coach, I get to see all the down-and-dirty mistakes entrepreneurs are making.
Because my new clients have to lay it all on the table or there’s no point in working together.
And screwing up PowerPoint is a big mistake that even the hot shot marketers (who should know better) are making.
The problem is twofold.
First, have you ever been on a webinar where the speaker throws up a PowerPoint slide full of copy and then drones on about it?
But… you’re also reading the slide, so your attention is split. You’re frustrated, and you only get a fraction of the important information.
The second problem is with that same static slide.
If you put it up and expound for 10 minutes, your audiences’ nano-attention span wanders because there’s no visual movement.
The solution to both of these mistakes is adding copy point-by-point to the slide in lock-step with what you’re saying as you present your persuasive arguments… so there’s always some activity that grabs the readers and pins them to their seats.
This webinar had 131 attendees and an average view time longer than the webinar itself. People stayed right to the end and 46 of the 131 booked a strategy session.
If you don’t do this, people bail on your webinar faster than corn through a goose.
It’s almost as bad as…
4. Not Having a Powerful Supporting Email Series…
Marketing is NOT a one-and-done affair.
It’s a perpetual process where you repeatedly re-engage your prospects, customers, and clients.
Think of it like a romantic relationship.
You meet, get to know each other, and gradually deepen the relationship until, if things are going well, there’s a long-term commitment.
But once that commitment is made, you better not start ignoring your partner and treating them like something smelly you stepped on…
… Or they’ll be on the next train out of town.
That’s why you need to continually re-engage with them before, during, and after the webinar.
Otherwise they won’t show up, or they’ll drift away during the webinar, or they never follow through afterward.
And all your expensive hard work goes right down the drain.
You need an automated, systematized process for contacting and grabbing those prospects every time they’re ready to bolt, and pulling them back into the sales process.
You do this with carefully choreographed, pre-written emails that protect your investment at predetermined points along the sales funnel.
As an example …
This webinar is pulling in stone-cold traffic, but the emails go out and warm things up to get almost 33% of registrants to actually show up.
A powerful email series can literally (and easily) double the number of leads your webinar generates.
5. Too Much, or Too Little “Meat!”
You know the drill.
First, you get excited by an ad promising some new business-saving information.
So you sign up for a webinar and show up on time with pen and paper in hand.
Then you wait… and wait… and wait for anything you can use in your business.
But it never comes, and by the time the webinar is over, you’re so pissed off you wouldn’t buy whatever they’re selling even if it were free!
At the opposite extreme, you get deluged by so much information you feel you can solve the problem yourself… without shelling out a dime.
It takes a delicate balance to get this right.
You provide enough “meat” to keep your audience engaged and satisfied with what they’re getting, but at the same time feeling like the headache they came to get relief from has turned into an open head injury.
When you hit the sweet spot, your calendar suddenly erupts with red-hot new leads who enroll in your programs in high numbers.
They’re READY to buy and they arrive at your strategy sessions or discovery calls with their wallets out.
6. Selling Past the Sale, or Pitching Too Early!
This is surprisingly important.
But if you think for a minute, timing is everything.
And it makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider what it means to “sell past the sale.”
It’s a term that pro salespeople use to describe overkill.
In other words, you’ve done a good job preparing your audience… first getting their attention… then getting them involved… then showing them how much and how fast their lives are going to improve.
And when you reach the point of fever pitch… the time you should start telling them about your strategy session or discovery call…
… You just keep selling… with more examples or reasons or testimonials.
And the result?
The excitement fades, they become distracted, and by the time you get to the point, they’re no longer interested.
It’s like firing more and more arrows after you’ve already hit the bull’s eye.
Of course, the opposite is just as bad.
Asking for a response too early, when your prospects are just getting warmed up.
They’ll feel flustered, confused, and even stupid because they’re not ready and they think they should be, or that they must have missed something.
And of course, now they’re gone.
Which is why another related mistake is…
7. Not Opening “The Loop” at the Beginning of the Webinar…
First of all, what’s a “loop?”
You may recognize it as an “open loop,” which is a critical ingredient in almost every piece of persuasion.
You’ve seen this done in webinars, sales letters, emails, blogs.
It’s when the presenter says something like this…
“I’ve got a big surprise that guarantees your lead generation mastery, but we’ll get to that in a minute.”
Then your audience has an expectation, which is like an app running in the background.
They may not be conscious of it, but that little bit of anticipation is like an itch that needs to be scratched. So it keeps them engaged.
But you have to DELIVER on that expectation fairly soon.
Otherwise “the loop” breaks because of an unmet promise.
The way you solve this is to open another loop before closing the first one, so they overlap like handing the baton to the next runner in a relay race…
… Or like a hand-off in the bucket brigade while putting out a fire 100 years ago.
Another example would be listing off the sections of your webinar with snappy, curiosity-inducing titles.
In other words, telling them what you’re going to tell them.
If your loops are strong enough, you’ll strap your audience into their seats for the duration.
You see the same thing done when writers create a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter, or when a Netflix series has you sitting on the edge of your seat and you go nuts waiting for the next installment.
You can even announce at the beginning of the webinar:
“And if you stick with me to the end, I’ve got a great gift as a reward for your steadfast attention and determination.”
Done correctly, you create a series of “loops”… like Russian nesting dolls… that carry your prospect all the way to booking a discovery call or strategy session at the end of the webinar.
So there you have it. 7 bad boys.
In conclusion…
Your LEAD GEN webinar will easily give you a 2X to 10X return on your investment of time, energy, and hard-earned cash.
It’s a traffic magnet that creates better, more plentiful, and easier-to-enroll leads and satisfied clients who’ll stick with you for the long haul.
And the best place to get help creating (or fixing) your webinar (including how to avoid the 7 Worst Lead Generation Webinar Mistakes)…
… Is to apply now for a FREE STRATEGY SESSION.
Now, this is a special scenario, so don’t delay if you want one of these sessions. We’ve set aside a couple days to deal specifically with helping as many of you as we can to get your lead gen webinar in gear.
We’ll analyze your existing lead gen webinar or give you the step-by-step skinny for getting one up and running… FAST!
Plus, you’ll see how to integrate the webinar into the grand scheme of your marketing, so you maximize all those leads and they don’t slip through the cracks.
Let’s talk soon!
Leave a Reply