Top 5 B2B Webinar Mistakes (and How to Fix Them) with Logan Lyles, DemandShift

0:00Hey, it's Dave. So Zoom Webinars and Events has made our recent Exit 5 Live sessions way more pro lately. But don't just take my word for it. Check this out. This is what Kelly B said. She said, I compare all other webinars now against Exit 5. I love that. And look, in a world of AI slop, we just want to make something that's actually worth going to. It's not easy to get an hour out of your day. I'm just the on-air talent though. So I'm going to kick it over to Marissa and Maria. This is our Exit 5 Live production team, our content team here at Exit 5, since they're the ones actually making this all happen.

0:29Marissa? I've been doing B2B content a long time. I know. It's hard to hold attention for more than 30 seconds, let alone a whole webinar. But Zoom webinars helps. Recently, we've had nearly 2 ,000 registrants, over 500 live, and hundreds of hours of watch time on our sessions. Maria, what would you say is driving that? It all starts with prep. We do up to seven hours per session. Choosing a topic, prep calls, building the run of show, and so much more. With Zoom webinars and events, everything's in one place. Registration, emails, polls, analytics. So it's simple to run that cycle every two weeks.

1:02At Showtime, I hand it back to Marissa in Zoom's production studio. With Zoom's production studio, I can set the scenes in advance. So on the big day, I just send them live with speakers and content already in place. Clean transitions, crystal clear audio and video. I feel like I'm running the big game back there. So this is why our webinars have been crushing it lately. Look, they just said we're spending seven hours per session on this. And don't just take our word for it. Come and see firsthand. We run these every other Friday. It's called Exit 5 Live, now powered by Zoom webinars and events.

1:32So come and check us out. See this whole thing live. And if you want to learn more about using Zoom at your company, check out zoom.com slash exit5. That's zoom.com slash exit5. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Convertive, a B2B marketing agency that helps enterprise teams build an AI-powered go-to-market strategy. Q4 is the time of year when having a great agency partner matters more than ever. If you're shopping for a new agency, Convertive is worth looking into. They work with marketing and operations leaders to help grow revenue across the business and AEO. One of the things I know you're thinking about right now is one of their specialties.

2:07Trusted by companies like DocuSign, Databank, and Constructor, Convertive builds on the search and marketing work you're already doing and helps optimize your site so more of your buyers find you and turn it into pipeline. Right now, they're offering Exit 5 listeners a free AI search review. They'll run the questions your buyers are actually asking through your Google and AI tools, show you how you stack up against competitors, and tell you what's worth fixing. If you're looking for a refresh of your AEO strategy in 2027, this AI search review with Convertive is a great place to start. Check it out.

2:38It's convertive.com slash Exit 5. That's convertive.com slash Exit 5. And you can also see the link in the show notes. You're listening to The Dave Gerrard Show.

3:02What's up? It's Dasha. And the episode that you're about to listen to is my conversation with Logan Lyles. Logan is the founder of a done for you webinar agency called Demand Shift. You might also recognize Logan's name because he previously won one of our Exit 5 live sessions. I had Logan on the show to talk about what he's learned running webinar programs for his clients. And we get into the five mistakes that a lot of marketers make when they're running their webinars. So today you'll hear us talk about how to reach new audiences, how to get people to book demos with your company before the webinar even happens, and how to make your follow-up after the webinar more useful than just sending the attendees a recording.

3:50So if you or your team have been putting a lot of work into your webinars, but you're not really seeing the pipeline return that you were expecting, I really hope that you leave this conversation with a few more things to try. Enjoy the pod. All right, we are live. Logan, what's up? Welcome to the pod. Hey, thank you so much for having me. It was a great time on Exit 5 Live, probably five, six weeks ago or whatever it was. And I appreciate you guys having me back. Yes. If you're listening, Logan came on one of the Exit 5 Lives and it was dedicated to making great webinars. Logan was the winner.

4:24Pull up your trophy. Still have it in front of you. Oh, I got it. I am displaying this Exit 5 Live trophy with pride on my bookshelf behind me, if you're just listening. My kids saw it in the mail after Maria and the team sent it to me. They're like, damn, what the heck is this? So it took some explaining, but I'm proud of it. I got a few eye rolls around the house, though, because, you know, my family's not as into B2B marketing as most of our families aren't. Right. Yes. No, but I think it's very cool. I messaged you right after that webinar was over because the people in the chat were revolting.

4:55If you're not familiar with the Exit 5 Live Blitz format, you get a few minutes to present. It's very fast paced. You don't get to go super deep, but you left the people wanting more. So I messaged you and I said, would you want to come on the pod and talk about webinars in depth? And so here you are. Let's get you introduced. Logan, who are you? What do you do? Yeah, absolutely. So Logan Lyles, I'm the founder of Demand Shift. We're a done-for-you webinar as a service agency, primarily for B2B brands. So if you're listening to this and you're a B2C marketer, my webinar mistakes and some of the fixes I've found won't necessarily be for you.

5:29But for the last 16 months, we've been running webinars for dozens of clients, all B2B, a lot in SaaS. And what we've found are some key learnings, five common mistakes. And we've basically developed a five-part framework that addresses each of those. Because I'll tell you, there's no one silver bullet to solving your webinar woes. But if you can find these certain dials and these certain areas to fix, man, they add up to some significant improvement to demand gen through webinars and B2B. I have a soft spot for entrepreneurs. So I I just have to ask, what made you want to go out on your own and start a service all around webinars?

6:09Are you a webinar junkie? Like, how did this happen? Yeah, so most people who know me in the Exit 5 community probably know me more as a podcast guy. I spent four years on the leadership team at a podcast production agency for B2B brands called Sweetfish. We actually were behind the scenes helping DG and DC with Seeking Wisdom way back in the day. Some great B2B podcasts from several years back, like Flip My Funnel with Terminus. and I kind of bounced around between agency side and in-house. And after I left Sweetfish, I spent two years as an in-house marketer at teamwork.com. And we ran webinars for two years.

6:45And when I looked back at the results, like we had some indirect influence to pipeline. We were running the webinars and the podcast. They still get people commenting on the content of the podcast. But when I looked at the direct attribution and the direct correlation to demand gen results, I was kind of disappointed. And so I started setting about to how could I do this better? And so after that, I spent about a year at another agency, ran webinars, implemented some of the things we're going to talk about today. And webinars became our second leading highest source of new clients. and I was like, hey, if this works here, I wonder if it would work for other B2B brands, both agencies and brands.

7:29And so far in the last 16 months, we've driven some really great results. So it came out of my own failure, is long story short, of running webinars and not seeing the results that I wanted. I love that. I wouldn't be a marketer if I didn't ask, what was the first source of good leads? Oh, it was referrals. You know, if you're in an agency, like word of mouth, you know, referrals are going to be pretty hard to beat, right? But right now, you know, it's been working on the other side for the in-house marketers. Like we just ran a webinar for one of our clients and we had about 250 signups and they booked 30 demos.

8:04So that's over a 10 % conversion rate. And from the survey that we ran earlier this year across B2B marketing teams, most teams, one, aren't tracking what's their conversion to demo or booked call from webinar signups. And if they are, it's more around 2%. So seeing that above 10 % has been really cool. That's awesome. I mean, there's no like real good way of increasing referrals. Like if your CEO comes to you as a marketer and he's or she is like, hey, referrals are the number one source of pipeline for us. How do you get more referrals? I think referrals is one of those things where like if you have a good service or a good product, you're going to get more referrals, but it's not one that you can really scale.

8:44Whereas webinars, like it's a scalable source. So what I'm hearing is that at the company that you were at, it was the number one actually scalable channel for you guys, which is awesome. I appreciate that credit there. Yeah, I'll take that. That's fine. Yeah. I'm a marketer. Okay. Today, what is your typical client look like? Like B2B SaaS? What team size? How many webinars are they running a year? Do they already have a webinar when they find you? Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah. So we've worked with both. We've worked with B2B brands that have existing webinar series, those that have maybe started and it kind of flopped for them and they thought about restarting it.

9:21A lot of our clients over the last year and a half have been very in team size from kind of early stage to more mid-market. But I would say oftentimes they're kind of small teams of up to maybe five, fewer than 10 usually marketers that have a lot on their plate, are stretched thin, have a lot of demands. hey, what are we doing about AEO? What are we doing with podcasting? What are we doing with LinkedIn? You know, the CEO wants to post on LinkedIn or you're trying to talk them into it like Jess Cook did over at Vector. And they're looking to get kind of more juice for the squeeze from a channel.

9:57And that's what we've been focused on helping them do is increase that conversion rate from webinar signups to whatever that next step is, whether that's a sales call, a demo, a free trial or whatever. and also have the webinar feed other things, again, to get more juice for the squeeze, right? Like I have one client where we looked at one of our top performing webinars and it was five steps to showing up in AI search. And we're like, well, repurposing a webinar doesn't have to be just grabbing clips out of it. Let's turn this into its own lead magnet because this could turn into an interactive template, those sorts of things.

10:32And that's just kind of one of the ways and we'll get into that and one of the mistakes a little later on. Let's get into it. Okay, so you work with so many clients and you mentioned, you know, there's five mistakes that you see a lot of teams make. Let's go through all five and deep dive each one. So first is only promoting to your own list. The second is having what I call a dead end signup flow. That's kind of what we talked about on Exit 5 Live. The third is not having a clear next step during the live show. Mistake number four is only splitting your follow-up into attended or not attended, which really isn't segmenting that audience very well.

11:14And then mistake number five is letting the webinar end when it ends. So that kind of touches on that different repurposing playbooks that you can run as we talked about earlier. So let's dive into number one, only promoting it to your own list. Now, I understand why a lot of people are doing this. They're kind of going with the tried and true thing, right? Email is actually, across all the data we see, the number one channel to drive webinar signups and registrations. Over organic social, over paid social, over any other channel, email is consistently the number one performer. However, if you're looking for a webinar to drive new leads and you're only emailing your own list, well, one, you're going to kind of burn them out.

11:56And two, you're not really reaching any new audience. And I'd say the other thing that I see a lot of people doing is they post on social, about it, but they're not looking at any other creative ways like, hey, this post actually took off. Can we boost it as a thought leader ad? What if we list the event as a LinkedIn event on our company page, not just do a straight post about it? So I've actually found that email and social do work really well. But in each of those buckets, there are kind of like three or four other plays that people typically aren't running. And we can get into some of those, but I'll pause and see kind of what questions you have for me and kind of the outset there, Dasha.

12:33Yeah, I want to know what we can, like, I am guilty, I think, of all five mistakes. This one included, but your point about blasting your own audience, like that audience is already familiar with you. That's why they're in a nurture newsletter kind of audience. So it makes sense. But yeah, I mean, tell us what should we do differently? What are the untapped ways of driving webinar attendees. Because when you're doing a webinar, I think for our team, for example, we'll spend so much time putting together the content for it. But then you actually have to do the second part, which is very hard, which is getting butts in seats.

13:08So yeah, I'm very interested in what you have to say here. Yeah. And I'd love to hear a little bit about like a peek behind the curtain at how you guys are running Exit 5 Live and any of the things that I share that you guys are already doing or things that I've left off my list because you guys run great webinars as we talked about on the open of this episode. So one, I would say email. Let's talk about email first and some other things you can do there. And then we'll talk about social and some other tactics you can run there. So email, one of the most effective things I've done lately, and this is great, especially for kind of small scrappy brands where you might not have a lot of paid budget to be able to put behind the webinar, is find partners, find industry influencers, find people with not a massive email list, but they've got a decent sized list, at least around the size of your database.

13:56And it overlaps with your ICP and approach them and just say, Hey, you guys want to do like an email swap. And basically the way I've done that is, you know, I might come to you, Josh, and say, Hey, exit five, you guys have a great newsletter. What if in the next iteration of the demand shift newsletter, I promote exit five live, you guys promote my webinar to your newsletter list. And I've done a few of those with no extra spend, just a little bit of back and forth and LinkedIn DMs or emails with folks. And it's been really, really effective because it's kind of a win-win, right? If you both have similar email size lists, it's kind of, you know, it's no big ask on anyone.

14:35You get to promote something to your list that has nothing to do with you. So you get to kind of just add value, no strings attached, and you get access to someone else's audience on a channel that is the highest converting channel for driving webinar registrants. So I really, really like that play. It can take a little work to find those right partnerships, but I would say, you know, look at the people you're connected with on LinkedIn, look at your partners, look at maybe your board, who are they connected with in the industry, who are maybe some of the creators in your space on LinkedIn that you could approach, something along those lines.

15:08And then that kind of leads naturally to the second play that's worked well with email. If you do have some budget is finding newsletters that already have an existing sponsorship model and just say, hey, what would it cost to run an ad? Because you'll often stand out because most people in B2B who are buying newsletter ads, it's a direct call to action, right? It's book a demo. It's try out our product. It's start a trial. And you stand out just offering content and offering webinars. you might actually see higher conversions and better return on that spend. And if you do what we talk about here in a few minutes with the two-step signup flow, it might actually lead to some of those direct conversions, even though you kind of bury that lead.

15:48So those are some thoughts on email. Curious how that channel has worked for you guys lately with your own webinars at Exit 5. Yeah, I think when it comes to Exit 5, Maria and Marissa on our team run that and they do a phenomenal job. So when I say that I have made some of these mistakes I'm talking about. So I'm the VP of marketing at a company called Proton AI, and I host this show as well. So our process there is different than the exit five at exit five. It is like a full on production. It is. I can tell you guys for sure. It's a full on production. I mean, you know, you participated in the exit five live.

16:23The webinar is being promoted across a number of channels that content is getting repurposed. For example, like this podcast, we're going to sit down and we're going to record. and then a few weeks from now, a newsletter will go out and we will repurpose some of the, repackage some of your wisdom from the show and it's going to go out to the Exit 5 newsletter. Some people are going to want to, you know, engage with you and ask you more questions and guess what? You're in the Exit 5 community. So it's like a flywheel. Exit 5 has just done such a great job and shout out to Marissa and Maria who run the show there.

16:57They do such a great job. A few questions for you. So one question on the swap, very rarely will you find someone that has like literally the exact same subscriber count as you. So what do you do when you're, let's say you're like the small fish and you're approaching a much larger newsletter and you want to do a swap, but it's not like a fair trade. Like let's say I have 10 ,000 subs and this other company has 50. For us to cross promote, it's not exactly the same thing. Any suggestions there? I actually had this come up just a few weeks ago, I approached another company with probably about 40 or 50 ,000 subs on their email list.

17:37We've got about 6k demand shift. And I was like, look, this isn't going to be an even trade. But I noticed you guys have a few things going on. The founder just released a book, you guys have this event coming up. And you guys haven't been super active on LinkedIn lately. So what if I email the list once about the book, once about your upcoming event, and maybe I could host a quick LinkedIn live, like AMA style with the founder. And so it's all about like, where do you have some leverage? Maybe you have a little bit more time. Maybe you have not as big an email list, but you've got a bigger following on LinkedIn, or they have something that they're really trying to promote.

18:14Hey, we could host you on the podcast because you've got a podcast and you need guests anyway, and you could do them a favor and kind of plug it there. So look for those other areas because the value doesn't have to be just subscriber count and send. You can find some other ways that are appealing to them. I love that. Yeah. Find something that the other company doesn't have. And time is one of those things. The other question I have that I think you might know, maybe not. If you're looking for a newsletter to sponsor, is there like a marketplace of some sort where you as a marketer can find like a newsletter that pairs well with the audience that you're trying to capture?

18:48Yeah, one, I haven't found anything that's just great for this yet. I'm thinking about, can I like vibe code a tool and start collecting people? See if I get this sort of response, like with your Slack community on vibe coding that kind of took off a few weeks ago. The closest thing I found is a company called Paved. I think it's just P-A-V-E-D.com. And they have a variety of newsletters and kind of like a newsletter marketplace that you can search based on your ICP, your niche. So that's the closest thing I've found so far. Sweet. Cool. Okay. What next? Should we talk about? Yeah, I would say the other thing, just real quick, a couple of our secret sauce and some of our tactics that not a lot of people are doing is with LinkedIn.

19:30So just to talk about the social bucket, one more, a little bit more on this mistake one and promo tactics that'll actually work. List your webinar as a LinkedIn event on your company page, add your speakers as speakers. And a lot of people don't realize this. Once you get added as a speaker and you go to that event page on LinkedIn, you can hit share. And instead of hitting like post or DM people, there's an invite button. And what that does is allow you, it pulls up all your first degree connections. You can even filter it by geo, by industry. I wish you could filter by like company size and a few other things, but it's pretty decent.

20:04And you can send up to a thousand invites a week per speaker to your event. Now pick, do you want to go volume? Do you want to go more quality with this, but it basically shows up. Like if I sent one to you, Dasha, it would be like, Hey, Logan is inviting you to this webinar, 30 AI agents, what we learned the hard way, which is one we're hosting in a week or so. And you'd have a little X and a little check, just like a connection request, but it's an event invite that doesn't show up as a DM. So it kind of shows up differently. So that's one hack I got from my buddy, Justin Rowe over at impactable.

20:37And then the second is look at what organic posts are performing well, promote those as thought leader ads. And if you put the link in the comment on the organic post, move that to the body of the actual post before you promote it, because now you're paying for reach, that link in the post isn't going to hurt your reach anyway. And promote that as a thought leader ad. We've seen that work really, really well in some campaigns too. So that's it for mistake one. We do that with our thought leader ads in general before we, I think it's a great strategy. It's worked really well for us, even outside of like webinar stuff.

21:11Just you have a post that does really well, whether it's your CEO's page or someone else on the leadership team, it pops off. The link doesn't exist in the body because the reason it popped off is because it wasn't promoting anything. And then we boost it and then we add a call to action link at the end. Yeah, that's great. Okay. The second mistake, one that might be familiar if you joined the Exit 5 Live, but we're going to go deeper this time. So take it away. Yeah. So the mistake is having a dead end signup flow. And what really kind of dawned on me a while back as I was kind of, like I said, kind of revisiting my webinar playbook was that only about 35 % of people who sign up for your webinar come to the live show, right?

21:52But 100 % of people see your thank you page, they fill out, you know, name and email or whatever you have on your webinar signup form, and they get a thank you message or they get redirected to a thank you page. And like I said, 100 % of people are seeing that. Where don't we love 100 % as marketers, right, Desha? But we're doing nothing with that. And if you think about it, I don't know if you're like me, but when I sign up for a webinar, I rarely look honestly at what day or time it is. If I'm interested in the topic, I just sign up. I know it'll go on my calendar. I'll go if I can make it. And if it's high enough priority for me, and if not, I'll get the recording, right?

22:25And so that's why only about 35 % of people show up live. But when we think about it, that's their most high intent moment. They are saying, this is for me. You're talking about a topic that I care about. I think you can help educate me on this. And it's at least enough for me to give you my email and maybe an hour of my time. And so what I started thinking about is what can we do with that? A thank you page instead. And what we've done now is implemented what we call our two-step signup flow. So someone will fill out a form on the landing page for the webinar. And instead of getting a thank you message, they'll get the start to a brief survey of usually like five to six questions.

23:03And what that survey is designed to do is to get more first party data from your audience, which can help influence the content that you create. It can also qualify them and see what sort of quality of leads are you getting, especially if you're a small team and you don't have a big budget for enrichment and you want to see, you know, get some first party data. What's the size of your team? How many marketers are on your team? Or how many people are on your IT team, if that's who you sell to, whatever the case is. And then the third thing it can do is kind of agitate the pain that they're feeling and put an offer in front of them to take a next step.

23:36And so I mentioned at the top of the episode where we had a client who booked about 30 demos on a webinar that didn't have a thousand registrants. It had less than 250. Two thirds of those, I think, booked those demos before the webinar even happened because they went through that two-step signup flow. We put an offer in front of them and they decided, hey, let's go ahead and do this now. Because like I said, you have that momentum. You have that intent. They're leaning forward and putting a survey in place of that thank you page can lead to some pretty cool results. I've had a lot of people ask like, hey, Logan, are my registrations going to fall off?

24:11And after running this for the last 16 months, the percentage of completion of this survey has held really steady at about 90%, which originally I was like, I can't believe this. And I've had clients say, I don't know if we believe you, Logan, even though you've been talking about this. Let's see. And then I had one client that came in at like 89.5%. And I was like, well, dang it, we missed the 90%. But I hope y 'all believe me now. Yeah, that's insane. I was just going to ask how many people actually take the time to fill this out on the page. So I think you brought an example. Show us what this can look like in practice.

24:45Because I think this is like such a no-brainer hack. It doesn't take that much time. And you're collecting valuable information. And those people might not show up to the webinar. So you got to get them all there hot. Yeah, exactly. So let me show you here real quick. We got a landing page here. Typical stuff, big form, just first, last name and email. That's all we need. But you can see the second step in my funnel is not a thank you page. It's this survey. So the first thing to know is that we kind of frame this as like a continuation of the registration process, right? And so I don't necessarily ask them like, hey, do you want to complete a quick survey?

25:21We just say, hey, complete your free webinar registration by answering a few questions here. If you're watching, you can see I have a hidden field here for email. And that's important. I call this a two-step signup flow because, you know, as marketers, it's like short form, more conversions, longer form, fewer conversions, but you get more info out of them. By separating this into two steps where the moment that they fill out that first form, they're actually registered and will get to the webinar. They just won't get the additional offer, but you pass their email over to the second page and into the survey.

25:55That way your CRM is recognizing them and you don't have to say, well, what's your email again? So it ties all their responses to the right person. The next thing I like to do is ask some really easy questions. So like, where are you located? Boom, just like multiple choice, right? What best describes you? I run a company, I work in a company. Because if they say I run a company, I'm actually going to skip the job title question because it's founder, it's CEO, it's something like that that I can just automate, right? Another one that's good for just kind of lead scoring and stuff, but it's an easy question to ask.

26:25How many people work at your company? Could you get this from enrichment? Maybe. And if you have that enrichment tool, then maybe skip this question. Don't ask any questions you're not going to use that aren't going to help you in some form or fashion. Now, this is where it gets interesting. You don't have to start this complex, but with this client's survey, we actually have two paths to go down. Because like I said earlier, I think I mentioned this client, Visto, is an AEO, GEO platform. And so as you can imagine, everybody's talking about AI search, both in-house marketers and agencies. So we actually ask a different set of questions if they say they're an agency.

26:58We take them down a different path of questioning versus they pick another industry we know they're an in-house marketer. So if they're an in-house marketer, how many people work on your marketing team? And then here's where we get to some of those pain agitation questions. How confident are you that your brand shows up when buyers ask LLMs about your category? When it comes to AI search, which area feels like your biggest gap? So when we ask those questions and then they get to the end and they get this question, unless they've been disqualified, based on your answers, you qualify for a free 40-page customized GEO plan tailored to your brand's current status in AI search.

27:34Would you like to schedule a quick call to get your free GEO plan? And so this is a way if they say yes, again, we don't put them on a dead end. We don't say, hey, we'll follow up because we know speed to lead is so important. So if they hit yes, they actually go to the very next page, which actually I didn't even think about. I can show you guys as well. Let's go to the schedule a meeting page, which is the next step that they would go to. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. If you want to know what AI agents can actually do for a marketing team, Optimizely is where I'd point you to right now for a real example.

28:08Last month, we ran an Exit 5 live session where a bunch of our members showed off their best AI agent use cases. And McKeel, director of AI innovation at Optimizely, actually won the whole session. He showed us how he used Optimizely's AI agent platform to run an ABM campaign that gave 2000 accounts, their own landing pages built from signals like job postings, press releases, and leadership changes. That's like the Holy grail of ABM, by the way, Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for you, the B2B marketer. You can build your own agents like McKeel did or pull from a directory of 50 plus prebuilt ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place.

28:44They also just launched virtual teammates. These are digital members of the team that learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your website optimized. If you're being asked to look into AI agents right now, Optimizely should be at the top of your list. Go and see how they can help you reclaim your time and build cool stuff just like McKeel did. Check them out at optimizely.com slash exit5. That's optimizely.com slash exit5. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Compound Growth Marketing. They're a full funnel demand gen agency that I've personally hired twice.

29:17Yep, before I was just the thought leader, I was a real marketer and CGM was one of the best agencies that I worked with. They help high growth software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use. They've helped an enterprise cybersecurity company grow pipeline 168 % year over year with full funnel media and an HR tech company grow 48 % through paid search. And they can do the same for you. They offer a combination of full funnel paid advertising strategy and execution, AEO, and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team.

29:49Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured, and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you. And this works because they were started by an actual former VP of marketing who really gets this space that you work in in B2B. So visit compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five to see how they can help you meet your 2027 revenue goals. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five. And boom, they're able to schedule that demo with the enhanced offer of getting the free plan right away, and they can take that action. So you can see how in these couple of steps, we're taking advantage, we're leveraging that high intent moment.

30:27Pro tip here, don't drop them off on a Calendly or HubSpot meeting page where the name of the event doesn't match the intent, the offer from that question during the survey. So you can see how the name here, get your customized GEO strategy in minutes, matches is what the offer was in the question. Because as with everything in marketing, other than a thank you page, nothing's 100%. So you'll get people who say yes, but not book, right? And so what you want to do is reinforce what they said yes to with the title, as well as the like what you'll get bullets here on that page. So yeah, that's kind of what a real live example in B2B SaaS looks like.

31:03We've been doing this for over six months for this client with some really good results. This is brilliant. At first, when you said the 30 meetings, I was like, how? Wow, but it makes so much sense. And I feel like this is a pretty low lift thing. Like, I'm loving this. Thank you for coming so prepared. This is amazing. Yeah, and I think that I saw got tagged in a post yesterday on LinkedIn where someone had attended the Exit 5 Live that we talked about earlier. And small marketing team, they're like, we saw if we could kind of cobble this together. We were hesitant. And I think she said it was maybe like 75 or 80 % of people completed the survey.

31:39I don't know if they had like the calendar booking option built in as the third step, but that was really encouraging to me. Like you said, that a lot of teams, it's not rocket science, but it's very doable for even some small marketing teams that might be listening to this. Well, especially with AI now too, like you can, I don't know, feed it the transcript from this podcast and say, I want to do this. Walk me through how to do it. Yeah. Now is the time. Now is the time, especially if you're already running webinars. It's like one extra, two extra steps. All right, let's do mistake number three.

32:10All right, mistake number three is having a live show with no clear next step. And I was way guilty of this, you guys, right? I've heard this, I think it's an old Irish proverb that says for every mile of road, there are two miles of ditch. And so that means that like wherever you are, there's two potential mistakes you can make. You can veer over into the ditch on the right or you can veer over into the ditch on the left. And I think for marketers, correct me if I'm wrong, if you feel this way, Dasha, it. I feel like one ditch is we get way too salesy. We just blast people. We're going around trying to hug strangers saying, do you want a demo?

32:43Do you want a demo? Do you want a demo? And they've never met our brand before. The other ditch is we're just broadly educating people so much that it's not tied to the problem that we solve. And we're not being clear about if you do want help, if you are in that 5 % that's in market in my ICP right now, what the heck do I do? For me, I veered way off into that second ditch, which led to some great brand building. But like I said, the demand gen results weren't necessarily there. And so I think about it this way. One, you want your webinar to do one of two things. It should educate people in a way that shows them exactly how to do the thing that your product can do.

33:26But then you say, well, we've shown you in the last hour exactly how to do this thing. If you want to do it, it's going to take you X amount of hours. If you use our product, we built it using this framework to help accelerate things. And instead of taking 40 hours, it's going to take 45 minutes, right? And so you're holding true to that educational promise that you made, but you're giving people two options, right? The second thing it could do, which is similar, but a little bit different, is it should solve a problem, but then uncover another problem that is like the next step in the process that your product solves.

34:02And so an example might be, well, with AI search, let's take that as an example, right? Like we've shown you how to find out where your brand is showing up in AI search. Here's how you prompt the models. Here's the prompts you should look at. Here's how you do it in Claude. Well, after that, now you're going to have a strategy. Who's going to execute it? Do you have time to do the execution. Well, that's where a product like say Visto comes in that sort to keep kind of using them as an example. So I think one of those either like, here's how you do it and give them the DIY or the done for you solution with your product or service, or we taught you how to do this thing.

34:40The next thing is actually maybe a little harder. And if you want to fast track those results, our product can step in for you. So I think that's the first part. And then it's about how do you frame that offer in the right part during the live show, but curious your thoughts on kind of those two ditches and two ways to avoid the ditches that I was talking about there. The two ditches resonate so hard. I think as a marketer, you were told, don't be too salesy. And so you end up in the, okay, I'm educating, I'm educating, I'm educating, I'm never actually calling to action. So yeah, definitely resonates.

35:13And I think you're, I mean, you're literally living it. You're, you've come on a podcast, you're giving away kind of all the, all the secrets. You're giving us the secret sauce to running our own webinars. it doesn't mean that every marketer has capacity to go and implement all of this stuff. Even with AI, we are dealing with this right now with ad creative. We said goodbye to our creative agency. We brought paid in-house. And guess what? Our in-house demand gen person is so busy. And he's saying, Dasher, I've become a bottleneck. We need to update our creative. And yes, I can say, okay, well, what about AI?

35:47Plug AI into Higgs field. But someone still has to sit down in front of a computer with AI, plug in Higgs field, come up with a creative idea and create all of those. And he just does not have the time because he's also doing partnerships and all this other stuff. So I love the idea of giving someone kind of an off ramp to like take everything they've learned and just let you do it if they don't want to do it themselves. Yeah. The way I've kind of framed it and I've y 'all feel free to steal this is I almost frame it as like, not a take a next step or not. Like I kind of lay out three paths for folks.

36:18I say, Hey, we've been talking through this stuff for the last 45 minutes. Hopefully you've learned some things, right? Hit thumbs up in the chat if you've learned some things. Kind of get everybody's attention, right? Three things are going to happen from here. One, you're going to do nothing with it. I hope that's not you. Statistics show that that's going to be most of you, unfortunately, but I hope that's not you. Number two, you're going to do it yourself. Great. Here's another resource to implement what you and keep giving, right? Third, you're going to realize you don't have the time, the bandwidth, the resources, the expertise to do all this yourself.

36:48and kind of that third option that's always left to us is get some help for someone to do it for you or a tool that can help you do it. So it's not so do it yourself. And so by framing it that way, taking the next step with your brand isn't a pitch. It's just a, hey, here are three options. Which path do you want to choose? Choose your own adventure, if you will. So that has worked well for me. And I think that applies to any sort of offer, whether you've got a service, a solution, a low ticket item, a high ticket item. And then I would say that the last point on this, I can share my screen again, if this is helpful, is how you present the offer during the webinar.

37:22So I've got an example from a webinar we actually just ran yesterday for our client Blazel, who is a really great tool that helps B2B marketing teams get their whole team active on LinkedIn. And so obviously they want people who are interested in their own LinkedIn performance, as well as that of their team, maybe their CEO, like, how's my CEO doing? How do they compare to others in our niche? And so instead of waiting until after the Q &A, right, to kind of sneak in that, hey, if you guys want, you could book a demo. Like maybe there's a link in the chat or just go to our website, right? Sometimes we won't even do that.

38:02We don't even give them a link to freaking click. So the first thing you can do is make sure you move your offer up front before the Q &A, right? It allows for that natural break that I was just talking about to give them those three options. And you say, hey, if you're choosing option three, we've got something for you. So what we did was we said, hey, you can get your free personal LinkedIn report card. It's going to analyze your last 12 months, your post history. It's going to benchmark you against your peers and competitors. And, you know, if you book this call, you get your report card. We'll show you the results.

38:32You will get a chance to see how the Blazor app can help accelerate what you want to do on LinkedIn across your team and your executives and whatever your thought leadership motion is. So instead of saying, hey, maybe book a demo, we tied it to something concrete. It's a lead magnet that has a name. There's a reason for the call. Like we're going to review your results and talk about how Blazor can help accelerate them. And if you'll notice, there's a big old QR button or excuse me, QR code on screen that people can scan or they can click the link in chat. And so by doing a few of these tweaks, which again, none of it's total rocket science.

39:08Like I'm not blowing anybody's minds here. But if you're asking yourself, have I checked all these boxes with how my CTA lands on my webinars, you're probably missing at least a few of them. So I thought that was hopefully some good show and tell for those that are viewing and not watching or viewing and not listening, I should say. Yeah, that was awesome. Caitlin came on our live show last week and ran Dave and I's LinkedIn profiles through that free tool. So it's all coming full circle. Oh, nice. Nice. I love the free offer idea. Shout out to Caitlin at Blazal. I think she was a guest. Yeah, she was a guest on the live show.

39:42Yeah. Awesome. I love it. Cool. And how many people can you expect to take action on the offer? Do you have any stats on that? You know, that's a good question. Well, I haven't broken it down from specifically like how many attendees you have live and how many convert typically on the live show. What I have seen is that if you're doing both of these, you're doing that two-step signup flow and getting rid of the dead end upon signup. and you're doing a live offer like this, kind of an optimized CTA, most of the webinars that we're running for our clients, if you look at the total number of registrants, it's usually between 8 % and 12 % of people that are taking that next step.

40:23So think if I got 200 people registered for the webinar, I should maybe see about 20 people book a demo, right? Which is about five times the industry average because of the 250 B2B marketers that we surveyed this year, like I said, they either don't know their conversion rate or they're hovering around 2 % if they do know what that is. So that's been pretty steady over the last 16 months. One question for you, Slash, something I hope you're going to say. Does any of this work if you show up to a webinar and the AI, the webinar content itself is just slop? If you apply, we're going to talk about five mistakes, we're going to get to the last two, but does this work if your webinar content is garbage?

41:05I mean, it might work in the short term, like you might catch people with like, hey, here's a, here's a hot topic, you take them through the survey, they book a call, right? And then it's kind of on the quality of your sales process and your product, right? But one, if they show up, and they don't even get 45 minutes in because they're dropping off because the content sucks, they're not even going to get to it. And two, you're going to burn so many bridges that even the folks that maybe do convert, you know, that book that call, and then they do go to the webinar after the call. It's like, no, I don't even want to deal with this company.

41:36So I would say, you know, mistake number three is not having a clear CTA in your live show. But 3A is having a really crappy live show. So I almost like that goes without saying, but I'm glad that you bring that up because none of this works if it's all just kind of bait and switch marketing. I totally led you with that question, but I just want someone listening. Like, I think often as marketers, we look for the next tactic, the next thing that we can do. And this is all great. But I think the thing that doesn't change about marketing at all is you just have to have a good product. And if you think of your webinar or your live show as a product, you have to have a compelling product to show people.

42:13And you cannot fast track your way there, even if you have a two-step signup flow or a QR code you show at the end. Like you have to think about the content too. And so if you're listening to this, start with compelling content that's actually interesting, especially in the age of AI slob. It's my little soapbox moment. Yeah. And the encouraging thing is like, I bet there are a lot of these B2B marketers that are like you and I that have maybe driven into that ditch of just educating, doing great content and not seeing the conversions. I actually like I named it. I called it the conversion cliff, right?

42:46Like you're getting webinar signups because your content's great. You've built a brand, right? People are listening to the podcast version too, but you're hitting this cliff of where it's just falling off. And so if you have that base, but you're feeling that conversion cliff, that's really where, again, just a few of these small tweaks throughout your webinar playbook can really make a big difference. Does this work for, let's say you're running a webinar that it's not geared towards prospects, but it's geared towards your existing customers. And maybe you're trying to like land and expand. Have you run land and expand strategies with clients?

43:18I'm just thinking selfishly, we've got a webinar coming up geared towards our customers. Should we be doing some of this stuff? I absolutely think so. So we're going to do just some live on the fly consulting, I guess, here. Because in answer to your first question, I haven't run this and I don't have metrics to tell you, Adasha, this is what you should expect. We ran this land and expand campaign like I did with kind of those others with Visto and Blazl. However, I think it's very, very similar. If you're thinking about the content in one of those two ways, right? The content educates them on this other problem that you solve, which is maybe solved by upgrading to a higher tier plan with more features or adding on another piece to your platform that they don't have now, right?

43:57I would frame it the same way. So think about that current customer base. What other problems can you solve for them and show them, educate them on solving it themselves, but give them the option to get some help. Frame the survey questions similarly, right? You might not need to ask some basic things that you already know about them, size of company and those sorts of things. So in those five to six questions you have in your survey, if you do a two-step sign-up flow like we recommend, you have even more room to kind of do some like pain agitation qualification questions. Because I've had people who've booked calls after going through these sorts of surveys, which by the way, you can do behind any lead magnet.

44:36I've done them behind research surveys. I've done them behind eBooks. I've done them behind other templates. Once you realize and get this honed in for webinars, it's like, oh, this is pretty cool. We can do this behind lots of lead magnets. but that aside, you have more room to ask some of those questions to kind of lead them. Cause I've had people say like, well, you asked me like three questions about like, do I know this? How am I performing here? How confident am I in this? And then you offer me a book, a call to learn a framework to help with this or learn more about a product that solves X, Y, and Z.

45:07I was like, I was primed and ready to go. So I think the same holds true for land and expand. So hopefully that's helpful in like three minutes of off the cuff advice. I appreciate the live consulting. We did not, I did not prep Logan for this, but this is the benefit of podcasting. I get free consulting. I've said that so many times in the podcast host, I'm right there with you. Okay. Mistake number four. Mistake number four is only splitting your follow-up into attended versus not attended, right? And while that is a signal, I'm a big fan of using the survey data that you've collected, which we talked about earlier.

45:4290 % of the people who are signing up for your webinar complete the survey, right? About 10 % of people are taking that next action right away. So that means there's a good chunk of people who have given you more first party data, but they haven't taken an action yet, right? And so what can you do with that to personalize and prioritize your follow-up? So if you're a marketing leader and you're running webinars and one of your frustrations, No one's live, but hopefully some of you are going to relate to this. You hand off a bunch of leads to sales and not a whole lot of follow-up happens. Well, one thing you could do on our end, maybe there is the fault of sales.

46:23And I've lived on both sides of the fence, sales and marketing. So I feel like I can speak to both. What if, Dasha, your next webinar, you handed not only first name, last name email, but you said, hey, here's everybody who registered. Here's the ones that attended. Also, here are the survey answers that they filled out. Here are the poll questions that they answered. Stack rank them by these criteria. Maybe you do that for them and you say, hey, out of these 200, here are the 25 that really you should go after with this messaging. Here's the next group of 50 you should go after with that messaging.

46:53And so not only surveys, we didn't even really touch on polls and data you can get from your live audience, but that's kind of similar to the survey, right? Ask multiple choice questions that kind of lead people and segment them by them raising their own hand. And you can use both of those to do much more segmented follow-up, whether you're a team that's relying more on nurture drip campaigns or you're handing off those leads to sales. I love that. Something that we do that's worked really well. I mean, two things. One, I have BDRs reporting into marketing. So we don't kick things over the fence to sales.

47:28We have BDRs follow-up. And because they report into marketing, it's literally their job to go do that. So a little bit more follow through there. But the other thing is if you have your webinar platform or whatever you're using, hook up to HubSpot, you can actually create a segment for them. And you can have like high priority leads, medium priority and feed them the information in the system where they already live. For us, that's HubSpot. The BBRs are already hanging out there. They can see like all of the enriched data for that account as well. If it existed, do we have prior relationship with them?

48:01that way they can say, hey, John, I saw you attended the webinar. Also, we tried to sell to you in like 2018. And at the time, it wasn't the right time because you were doing XYZ. So it allows them to have this like really personalized outreach. But yeah, I guess my advice is like, if you're able to get all this data into a system where your team already hangs out and make it just like so easy, we call it like a low friction ask. I think low friction asks are great, no matter what you're doing. But for sales and people who are busy in general, Yeah, the lower friction you can make it, the better.

48:31Yeah, I love it. All right, round us out. What is mistake number five? Mistake number five, letting the webinar end when the webinar ends, right? To me, that is just the beginning of the content process. You've done so much to put together this content that just letting it die on the shelf is like a travesty of justice, really, right? And so I think the first thing that we typically do is we've actually moved our webinars on to Riverside because I love the quality that you get from Riverside. Just like in podcasting like this, you get separate high quality tracks. There makes clipping a lot easier plus, you know, higher quality video.

49:10But that's really just the start. Like I've seen Exit 5 do this really, really well. You mentioned it earlier, Maria and Marissa and the team doing a great job of this. you know, sometimes people want that content, but they don't want it in that live format. So don't just make your emails just promoting the next webinar, break down that 45 minute to an hour conversation into a full breakdown into a newsletter that is just standalone valuable content. Obviously you can do that with LinkedIn posts, with blog content as well. But I think oftentimes like blogs and video clips are where people start with webinar repurposing.

49:46And I I think one of the lowest hanging fruit is looking at your highest performing webinar. And can that be turned into another sort of lead magnet for another sort of learner, right? Some of us are visual learners. Some of us are auditory. Some are kinesthetic, that sort. And you've got all sorts in your audience, no matter what your ICP is. So can you turn that into a lead magnet that's a template or some sort of interactive lead magnet? I saw some data from Neil Patel recently that was like interactive lead magnets, which are way easier for us to produce now that vibe coding is such a thing, feeding that transcript into Claude and working out some sort of interactive kind of step-by-step thing, I think is kind of low-hanging fruit that if you're doing nothing else to repurpose your webinar content, maybe actually start there because then you've got a new lead magnet.

50:35Maybe that's feeding your paid social campaigns because your current direct CTA isn't really producing. You need something that's more middle of the funnel, something like that. So I think there are just a few pieces of low hanging fruit that a lot of us are just walking past day after day with repurposing webinars. I think that's a great segue to probably one of my last questions, which is what parts of this can you use AI for? Like when you say repurpose, my head goes, okay, yeah, AI can help me with that. What have you been using AI for for your clients? And what is your overall workflow if you're open to sharing?

51:07Yeah. So this is something that changed here recently for me. After running nearly 100 webinars, I have a process down. I know what my checklist is. I've obviously refined some prompts. I've refined those prompts with title writing. I actually analyzed a bunch of content from YouTube strategists about writing really good titles for YouTube, right? Pulled out the best of that and baked that into my webinar planning prompt because I think oftentimes webinar titles just really suck. We don't put any time or effort or energy into them. And so even though like things like that were going well in this prompt, I was still kind of one-shotting it.

51:49Like I had a really good prompt, but it was giving me the title, what's going to be the URL slug, the landing page copy, the email copy, the second email copy, the LinkedIn posts, those sorts of things. But when you're planning a webinar or any sort of campaign, like you're usually starting from the top and then things are going to flow downhill. For instance, like once you have the title, that's going to help you write better landing page copy. And once you have kind of those, like what you're going to get bullets on the landing page, and you've really thought about those and honed them in, that should carry over to your emails, to your posts, those sorts of things.

52:20You shouldn't be reinventing the wheel. And I found that like when I was using Claude to kind of one-shot my webinar plan, even though it was better than nothing, and obviously I was editing it, I was going through kind of a lot. And so what I did was actually I changed that prompt. It's kind of giving me something like the landing page copy, and then I'm giving it some feedback. And then I might approve or decline it, Or I might give it, hey, here's my rewrite based on what you did. Now lock that into memory and move on to the next asset that you know to do, like the SEO description. And also give me a few options.

52:56All right, let's use this version. And so just by doing that, by changing my prompt instead of really well-trained prompt to kind of give me everything, give me one thing at a time, and then output all that to one markdown file that's easily going to go into Google Drive. And now I can use that. But my next steps are like automating more of that of like once that goes here and I've worked with Claude not to just one shot it. How do I automate some of those next steps, which I'm behind some of my peers there with kind of taking agents and co-work and Claude code to kind of some of those next steps.

53:31But to me, it's kind of repeating some of those repeatable things, putting the human in the loop as we're all kind of maybe tired of hearing these days. but it's really important and changing that up made a difference for me. When I was little, all I wanted to do when I grew up is to be a human in a loop. So, so happy it happened for me. That's so good. Okay. I mean, yes, I think in general, what I found with AI is the way I explain it to my team, we recently had this initiative to like get everyone at the company, quote unquote, AI pilled. You can think of AI as having like 100 % brain calories or like 100 points.

54:10and you can choose to put those 100 points towards like 20 different things. Like let's say there's like a webinar checklist that has 20 steps, writing the title, writing the slug, writing the description. You can spend 100 tokens on like all of those things at once and you're going to get a little bit of effort across all of them. Or you can do one task at a time and every single task gets 100 little brain calorie points, which is obviously going to produce way better results, right? If I want someone that's just thinking about the title, I want someone that's just thinking about the description.

54:42So yeah, I love the no one shot prompt. It's also a really good point. I actually learned this from Caitlin at Blaisle that we were mentioning earlier in our webinar we did yesterday. She was talking about how their app helps you write content in your voice. And one of the things she's learned from their engineering team is you want a different agent to judge the quality of another agent's output. And like the quickest way to do that is maybe even if you're just on ChatGPT and Claude and going back and forth because they're not going to do a good job of kind of grading their own output. And so it just kind of follows that kind of quote unquote best practice with AI that I didn't even realize until, you know, someone smarter than me educated me a little bit this week.

55:23Totally. You can set up loops too. Something that we've done is like, let's say, you know, that three personas are going to attend your webinar. Once you have your final markdown, you share it with AI and you say, create a loop. I want it to be reviewed by, let's say you've got the VP of sales and then the VP of IT and then the CMO and give me feedback as all three. And that way you have like three, a loop where it's going to keep optimizing it until all three of your critics get them back with amazing feedback. I like that. Super fun. You get to like create the synthetic committee that's evaluating your work.

55:55All right, Logan, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was awesome. I love guests like you who come prepared with so much like rich tactic. Like, I feel like I don't even know how this is going to get repackaged into a newsletter because I feel like you gave us so much to work with. So thank you for being generous. It'll be a long newsletter, hopefully. Yeah, it's going to be a long, long newsletter. Where can people find you? Yeah, so I would say three things from here. If you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, I'm really easy to find. Logan Lyles, last name is L-Y-L-E-S. Really easy to find there.

56:24If you want to learn more about what we do and how we can help your webinar program, go to demandshift.co. But that's probably not going to be most of you. So I actually came prepared. If you go to demandshift.co slash report, I mentioned way back at the beginning in the episode, we surveyed over 250 B2B marketers around all sorts of areas. Like how many webinar registrants do you get? What tactics are working for you? What's your conversion rate to book sales call? These sorts of metrics that a lot of people aren't sharing publicly. And we're sharing a report from all of that data here soon. And you can join the waitlist.

56:58So go to demandshift.co slash report. if you want to dive deeper into some webinar-specific data for B2B teams like yours. You did the thing. You walked the walk. Walk the talk. I try to drink my own champagne, eat your own dog food. None of those ever really encapsulate it, but try to do the thing that you're teaching on. So hopefully that resonates with everybody. I love it. Thank you so much for coming on the pod. That's the show. Thanks for having me.

57:30If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at Exit 5, and you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com. Our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing, and there's no better place to do that than with us at Exit 5. There's nearly 5 ,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers, building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group, or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest.

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59:56Thank you.