Driving More Partner-Sourced Leads From Webinars w/ Justin Zimmerman

Webinars are back.

According to a recent report from Crossbeam, webinar utilization is now back to pre-pandemic levels and continues to grow.

But as soon as I tell you that, you’re immediately reminded of the fact that your last webinar saw just 25 registrants and only a few attendees, right?

If everyone’s doing webinars again, they must be seeing some success, so how do we get there? How do we drive more qualified leads from webinars, and what’s their proper place in our funnel?

That’s what we’re covering in today’s episode of Partnership Unpacked.

Welcome back to Partnership Unpacked, where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates, influencer marketing, and relationship building… oh, and you get to learn too! Subscribe to learn how you can amplify your growth strategy – with a solid takeaway every episode from partnership experts in the industry.

A few years ago, I was tasked to run a series of webinars with partners for us here at Agorapulse. I’d been hosting large virtual summits with multiple speakers and sessions, but hadn’t really planned one-off webinars.

And it showed in the numbers.

While one of the webinars saw over a hundred registrants, the others were all well below that and were considered a failure. I turned my attention back to massive virtual summits and those work great, but I can’t do more than one per quarter due to bandwidth.

If you’re anything like me, you’re hoping that webinars can be a tool for bringing in new sales leads and funneling existing prospects closer to won-closed. How do we build a repeatable, scalable process for executing webinars that deliver on that promise?

That’s exactly what Justin Zimmerman is going to talk to us about.

Justin has spent years in the partnership world and saw there a huge gap – and potential – for brands who were underutilizing webinars and partnerships. He’d experienced the same pains we all have with underperforming experiences, and then cracked the code. He started seeing more and more success with his initiatives and began to share that knowledge and experience with others. He now consults big brands on their webinar strategy, has playbooks available for others to learn from that we’ll get into today, and regularly takes the stage to share his wisdom with the crowd.

I talked to Justin Zimmerman about:

♉️ Why brands should invest in partner webinars

♉️ How to leverage partners and webinars

♉️ What your webinars goals should be

Learn more about Justin Zimmerman

Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode

Full Notes & Transcript:

(Lightly edited)

Driving More Partner-Sourced Leads From Webinars with Justin Zimmerman

[00:00:00] Mike Allton: Webinars are back according to a recent report from crossbeam webinar. Utilization is now back to pre pandemic levels and continues to grow. But as soon as I tell you that you’re immediately reminded of the fact that your last webinar saw just 25 registrants and only a few attendees, right? Everyone’s doing webinars again.

They must be seeing some success. So how do we get there? webinars and what’s their proper place in our funnel? That’s what we’re covering in today’s episode of partnership.

This is Partnership Unpacked, your go to guide to growing your business through partnerships quickly. I’m your host, Mike Alton, and each episode unpacks the winning strategies and latest trends, from influencer marketing to brand partnerships, and ideas that you can apply to your own business to grow exponentially.

And now, let’s get started. The rest of today’s episode, welcome back to partnership unpacked, where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates, influencer marketing, and relationship building. Oh, and you get to learn to subscribe to learn how you can amplify your growth strategy with a solid takeaway every episode from partnership experts.

Now, a few years ago, I was tasked to run a series of webinars with partners for us here at Agorapulse. I’d been hosting large virtual summits with multiple speakers and sessions, but hadn’t really planned one off webinars. And it showed in the numbers. While one of the webinars saw over a hundred registrants, the others were all well below that and were considered a Failure.

I turned my attention back to massive virtual summits and those were great, but I can’t do more than one per quarter due to bandwidth. If you’re a thing like me, you’re hoping that webinars can be a tool for bringing in new sales leads and funneling existing prospects closer to one closed. How do we build a repeatable scalable process for executing webinars that deliver on that promise?

That’s exactly what Justin Zimmerman is going to talk to us about. Justin has spent years in the partnership world and saw there a huge gap in And potential for brands who are under utilizing webinars and partnerships. He’d experienced the same pains we all have with underperforming experiences, and then correct the code.

He started seeing more and more success with his initiatives and begin to share that knowledge and experience with others. He now consults big brands on their webinar strategy as playbooks available for others to learn from, and we’ll get into that today and regularly takes the stage to share his wisdom with the crowd.

Hey, Justin, welcome to the show.

[00:02:34] Justin Zimmerman: Hey, Mike. Thanks so much. And I’ve got to say, this is the best introduction, especially live that I’ve experienced being on this side of the virtual equation. And so from the little montage you played the beginning, I feel like I’m entering into a real show. There’s a nice warm feeling.

So I think you’ve got a great setup and flow that you’ve perfected over time. And so people can really tell when something’s dialed in. And so I hope today to share as much possible. For those who are just listening in the podcast and those for you who are watching, I’ll be going through a detailed version of what I’m holding here, which is my guide to launching multi partner webinars that drive thousand plus registrants.

And so this is what I speak on. This is what I teach. This is what I consult on. And as you can see here, it’s probably about, Oh, about 70 pages long, this particular book. And so if you’re watching this right now, I’ll flip to what everybody wants to hear and see is a little QR code. If you hold your phone up to the screen.

It should pop up a little email that says, send me the slides. And so this should pop up and you can pause the video if you’re watching the recording. And if you happen to just listening to the audio, there’ll be a link with a way to get this whole slide deck, which I’ll be covering bits and pieces of today that really talk about how to And what I do to drive not just massive registrations, but also the precursor to that are which are how do you find the right partners?

How do you activate those partners? How do you create the right titles that get people interested in clicking and showing up? But actually, most importantly, one of the things I’m going to talk about, which is just a total 1 80 from where I started with this about 10 or 15 years ago, is not making the goal of the webinar attendance Transcribed But prioritizing, optimizing for finding in market leads, those who are actually in a state of readiness to try and buy your product.

And so there’s a huge amount of opportunity that can be done. And as my friend, Mark, who used to be the CMO over at Airmeet said is, Justin, you’ve built. A discovery at scale system through the use of webinars and partners. And so how do you discover who’s in market right now, coming through all your opt in channels, especially webinars.

[00:04:35] Mike Allton: Love it. Love it. We love Mark. We’re huge fans of the work that he’s done at Airmeet and previously at HubSpot. And we’re Longtime partners of Airmeet, my next event, the virtual summits I mentioned, they’re all hosted on Airmeet, but you talked about how 10 or 15 years ago, this is not what you were doing.

How did you get started in partnerships? And tell us more about the actual work that you’re doing today.

[00:04:55] Justin Zimmerman: So the short version is, and there’s a slide in there of me kind of, uh, Much younger, but also kind of a much fatter where, yeah, I’ll show the picture here for those of you who want to see, cause it’s like slide number one.

And I actually talk about this is that I was never really good at SEO or PPC, but I was always good at reaching out into a marketplace or industry or channel and finding a like minded influencers. If you wanted to call them that, then they were really speakers and coaches. Those were the influencers back in the day.

We actually had to look in a magazine and pick the phone up and yeah. Do all these different like manual actions to get in contact with them, to then build a relationship with the company who had your target audiences. And so I was always good at identifying, connecting with, motivating, and then ultimately creating a project management structure, which people really don’t give enough credit or value to is when you have an amazing sales team.

system or process people line up behind it and they will follow it. And so if you’ve got a good one, you know, you can leverage that to get partners, which is actually part of the playbook as well. And so I just found great companies who had like minded audiences for my companies that I worked with or worked at and started doing co marketing events of specifically around webinars.

Back in that picture, you’ll see, uh, let’s say it was 2017, right? So, you know, I’ve been able to drive. Thousands and thousands and thousands of new, fresh eyeballs across the thresholds of a registration process over and over and over and over and over again, regardless of industry, regardless of product, regardless of entity type, whether it’s influencer or B2B or agency, it’s just kind of, you follow these certain key principles and dynamics.

And then you do this particular work and then you do generate just massive audiences. And especially with the new systems that I’ve put into place, boy, this week was a great week. Not just registrants, not just attendees, but what I call WQLs, webinar qualified leads, people who’ve raised their hand and you’ve identified as good fits for your product and service.

And also qualified to talk to your sales team. And so there’s this whole motion that I’ve developed around it. Now that I’m dealing with a larger price points and more sophisticated, complex sales teams on how to connect the webinar process directly to pipeline.

[00:07:05] Mike Allton: And we’re going to dig out and pull apart all of that.

But first I kind of want to address what might be the elephant in the room for some folks. And that is that webinars have been around for a long time. The very name webinar is. Quite frankly, a little bit dated and some of us are doing them wrong. Some of us have been doing them the same way for over a decade and they’re not working very well.

So what’s the problem with normal webinars and the funnels that most marketing teams. Are running. Why aren’t they working?

[00:07:35] Justin Zimmerman: Well, you know, a webinar is like any particular content piece that you create. And so it’s only going to be as good as the level of understanding you have around the pain points and problems that you’re trying to address and solve your customers and your ability to articulate those problems through copy.

And so the 1st point in Yes. That if you don’t have a really strong sense of how to articulate that value, then you’re not going to be able to articulate that to partners. You’re going to be able to articulate that to customers, and then you’re especially not going to be able to articulate that live.

And so one of the things that I help companies and customer clients do is figure out what is not just a better together story, but what is that forward facing, very catchy, problem solving, Title and approach that gets people to register and click. And so that’s really one of the first challenges that I see people have in webinars is they’ll throw together almost lazy marketing.

It’s like, Hey, I know we should be doing webinars. And my boss told me to go do one. And so I’ve just. You know, gathered up a collection of people who I think are experts. And then we throw a microphone in front of them. And you see this both at live events, you know, that panel that you see at an event, and they’re just trying to fill space.

And so if there’s not like a, a serious intention and structure behind that. Then you’re going to get the outcomes that everyone else gets, right? And so if you don’t have an outstanding method, you don’t have an outstanding process, then you’re not going to get outstanding results. And so most people, they’re just kind of asked to go do a webinar.

They look around left, they look around, right. They see what everybody else is doing. They copy that same model and they get the results. Everybody else gets, which is from my experience and why they. Call me up is less than satisfactory. You know, we got, like you said, 50 or 60 people registered 20 or 30 showed up and we got no leads or no business or one potential demo.

And so if you’re getting results like that, it’s not that webinars are broken. That’s like saying Instagram is broken. That’s like saying YouTube is broken. It’s just that your event or your. Video or your post just didn’t get any likes or clicks because you know what it takes to get likes and clicks. It takes a certain amount of understanding of how to not crack the Google algorithm or the YouTube algorithm or the Instagram algorithm.

It’s how to crack your customer’s interest and desire algorithm because you don’t have to deal with all that. When you’re dealing with partners, you get to come up with a title. There’s no filter. You just come up with the right approach and angle. And if you get your partners aligned, they will email that to you.

Traffic to your site. And as an example, you know, this week, and the thing I try to focus on is what is that tactical practical advice, those playbooks, if you would, that are a most attractive to your audience. And so as an example, with one post this week, with one influencer that I was working with on one test project, we drove in one day, almost 1200 unique views to our site.

And over, I think 600 opt ins and registrants that generated probably close to 67 SQLs for our team. And so I know with the right copy, with the right partner, with the right offer that you can drive massive amounts of traffic immediately and put points on the board for you and your partner and your team.

[00:10:45] Mike Allton: I just want to underline and stress the point that you just made, because it’s brilliant. It’s not about. The tool that you’re using for the webinar. It’s not about whether or not the CTA button at the end was blue or red or green. It’s about the content that you’re delivering to your audience. Are you speaking to them on their level about actual pains that they’re experiencing today and offering real solutions?

So that you pique their interest and then can move them down the funnel. I love that. Thank you for sharing that. We’re going to make sure that everybody listens to that segment twice, because it’s true. Like you said, whether you’re talking about a webinar or Instagram or a blog post or a summit, whatever kind of content you’re creating as a brand.

You have to be talking to your audience, addressing their pain. So let’s talk for a moment about the webinars themselves, because you mentioned finding a panel of people. And this is something that I don’t consume enough webinars myself. So I don’t really understand if there’s a good, better, best approach to actually structuring the webinar.

Should they be presentations? Are interviews best? Are panels great? If you’re like you said, bringing the right people together to talk about a very specific topic. And is there a recommended. Do you recommend brands go every single week? We have a new webinar coming or does that not matter?

[00:11:59] Justin Zimmerman: Great question.

So last question, first move it, the speed at which you’re currently at and what that means is, and this is part of the aligning work that I do with the teams is usually a once a month cadence is like the crawl twice a month. Is the walk in once a week is the run. And for me, that’s probably about as much as a B2B SaaS team can put out there.

There are some dedicated, we’ll call it audience acquisition, media style companies that work around and with the B2B SaaS space, and they’ll do it. They’ll do a daily show, but that’s their business model. And so, you know, most of the companies that we work with, they’re, they’re not in the business of being webinar producers.

I mean, so I would say start with trying to get to a once a month cadence and then work your way to twice a month. And then ultimately once a week, because the quality. Of the content obviously is what matters, but then also your internal ops and systems have to catch up. And so again, I’ve got a framework that like, you know, any good sports team, you know, they run plays and the more they run that particular play, the better they get at it.

And so like webinars are. If you’re just cobbling them together, you know, once every quarter, you’re not going to have enough speed and cadence like a bicycle. If you’re not moving fast enough, what happens on a bicycle, right? You fall over. And so there needs to be a certain amount of speed and momentum with your webinar cadence just to keep The team sharp just to keep the content flowing.

And most importantly, there’s a level of expectation that you need to be setting with your audience, because if you’re doing a good job and providing great value to your audience, then they’re going to want to show up. They’re going to want to hear these things. They’re going to want to consume that con.

And so that’s why I see on average 350 to 500 registrants per webinar. And my goal for every webinar is a thousand that doesn’t always happen. But you know, it shows me that. When people, and especially the ones that I hear is that, Hey, Justin, I’ve never taken notes during a webinar. Yours was so good. I actually wrote and learned things down.

So that what happens is when you get good at these or you provide or learn how to get good at either creating the value for your audience internally. And I’ve got a position I take on, should you be creating your content or should you be outsourcing your content? And I’ll get into what outsourcing means in a second, because one will do one thing and one will provide the other is that they will come back.

And they will ask for, and you’ll gain a competitive advantage because while everyone else’s webinars that they’re showing up to are not reaching the level of value that is motivating to your audience to show up for when yours do. Yours becomes that number one show. There’s a reason why there’s 10, 000 podcasts out there and why the top 10 are the top 10.

10, right? It’s not by accident. It’s like they know how to deliver the value that their audience is listening for. Their customers are wanting, and they’re continuing to double down on that as a skill. Like anything, you know, repetition is the mother of skill. I think that’s a Tony Robbins quote. And so just like Any motion, the more you do it, the better you get at it, the faster you can go, the more audience you can acquire, the more leads you can generate, the more partners you can partner with.

And so it’s just like, are you going to commit to and dedicate three to six months, one or two quarters to get your cadence and your operations up, or are you going to give it a try, say it didn’t work and then give up on the medium. And so, you know, unless there’s like a gym exercise, marketing. Is often not set and forget as much as we love to.

It’s just, you got to go at it over and over again. And webinars are one of those gym memberships that you just can’t buy. You have to show up to and do the work to get the results.

[00:15:36] Mike Allton: All right, so we’re gonna build the orange theory framework for webinars. Love it. Now you said something that really just connected some dots for me and I want to run it past you.

This wasn’t something I told you I was gonna ask, but you talked about webinars as a show. Now you’re talking to a guy who’s been running live video shows for years. That’s why, you know, and I appreciate that you said how well formatted the approach to this particular podcast is because I’ve been running hundreds of actual live video productions.

Should I be treating a new webinar? Series that I’m going to do next year, like a show and have, you know, weekly guests and weekly topics that are, you know, focused on our target ICP and that sort of thing. Would that be a good approach to you? You think so?

[00:16:16] Justin Zimmerman: Yeah, I mean, the word show, you know, is a word that we should play around with here.

And so that’s the way I think about it. And I’ll define how I think about it right now, because it really ties into the strategy. And so here’s why I arrived where I arrived. The more webinars you do with the more partners that you can do, the more traffic you can drive, the more you can build both your brand level awareness to webinars, which is why I like webinars, which is when you use the lead qualification system that I’ve built into the webinar registration process, the more actual leads you can generate.

And so like more partners, more traffic, more audience awareness, brand. And then more leads. And so the more of those you can do, the more of that you can have. Now, the problem with the approach I was previously using was I would sit down and it would take me one month of energy to put together a webinar.

And I was going into just deep content creation. I have a post from a while ago that got a lot of traction and applause was like, is the future of. Product marketing, partner marketing, because if you look at the facts around, especially in the B to B tech space, if the decade of ecosystem is real and customers are only buying products when they connect with this product and that product, well, then our job as partner marketers or product marketers, I don’t depends on what side you look at is to understand the joint value propositions and then demonstrate those value propositions to those potential customers.

Now, here’s the problem. It’s hard enough to understand one product. Let alone two products and one of those products not even being a product that you work for a company that you work at so I would partner with a company I would sit down and I would actually use their product with my product and I would put together those joint value proposition webinars and I would tell you they are extremely time consuming to create and so I realized that.

In order to optimize for what am I gonna optimize for attendance? Am I gonna optimize for content creation or am I gonna optimize for lead flow and identification of in-market leads? And so as soon as I made the shift from, which is why I have an upcoming presentation called something like How to Convert Webinar Traffic into Pipeline even if they don’t Attend something like that.

This is a nice polished version of that is ’cause I’m now optimizing my registration process. Not to get them to attend the webinar, not to get them to consume and become the most educated customers. Cause one, I can’t do four webinars of that highest level, deep value. And I couldn’t expect and ask anybody else who’s in the role of product marketer or partner marketer to do the same cause it’s just an impossible task.

And so then I realized if I take a step back and I treat the webinar series or webinar program like a show. And then I find our partners to have them come on and becomes a very quick, easy. Yes. I say, Hey, I’m going to invite you on my show. And what you’re going to do is I want you to demonstrate the value of your product to our customers, but I want you to market this to your customers as well.

And then when they come through my registration process, that’s my system for then identifying like an x ray machine at the airport, you know, who. Is the right person to stop and talk to who’s the right person to pull out of the line and say, Hey, oh, I see your, uh, sales manager, who’s currently looking for a new X, Y, Z tool.

You’re currently using this competitor and you know, you’re also got 50 seats. And so I find a way to capture that data at the moment of registration. So now I’m using webinars. Like you should be using any opt in medium, self serve demos, gated demos, eBooks, anything like that. To run and collect first party data to identify who’s here to learn.

Here’s here to listen and who’s here to try and buy all the listens and learners kind of go through the process as normal, no extra effort paid to them, but double downing on the campaigns and follow up at the moment of registration to identify who’s in market. And I’ve got this whole sales process I’ve got mapped out.

Maybe I’ll share a link in the comments. You can see the whole thing. And so then with that said, my goal is to make partnerships. And then volume of traffic with ICP matching partners, as many of those as possible. And then they come on, they bring their content and I make some slight modifications to how their content is presented on my show in a way that allows me to also talk about my product as they talk about their product.

And so that way there’s a repeatable aspect to what I bring to the webinar. It’s kind of the same positioning. Over and over and over again. So that way I have a stock piece of sales content on the webinar that integrates with their approach. And so now I’m essentially, like I said before, whether it’s Instagram or YouTube or any social media, you’re running like a webinar, social media with your partner’s content as the fuel and your.

Demo sales pitch softly baked into the process the same way that you would have an ad run in the beginning of a Joe Rogan podcast, or the same way that you would have an ad in the beginning of some sort of sponsored video on YouTube. And so you learn how to bake in and make those transitions happen.

And so now you’ve got scale in. Acquisition of marketing partners. You’ve got scale in content. You’ve got volume of partner traffic coming through. And then with my lead identification system, I’ve built for this process, which I’m actually going to be turning that into a tool others can use as well. So if you want to DM me about that, it builds right into your webinar flow as it stands right now.

So no, like crazy coding that it takes previously to build these things identifies. Who’s those people are and then routes them to your sales process. And now you’ve got lead flow, partner flow, partners are happy. Cause they’re talking about their product. You’re happy because they’re bringing content and in customers, and you’ve got a repeatable process doesn’t take a month’s worth of time of your energy to create content around.

[00:21:49] Mike Allton: Okay, I love all this. I’m literally taking notes as we talk. I joke that when I say at the outset of these shows that I’m picking people’s brains, I’m being serious. I brought Justin on here so that I could ask these questions and he could help me think about how I’m approaching webinars for Agorapulse and you guys that are listening right now.

You get to learn too. So Justin, you talked about those qualification questions for our webinars and our summits. We ask things like how many social profiles are you managing and how many people are on your social team? Because those are our sales qualification questions. Are those the kinds of questions you’re talking about?

[00:22:24] Justin Zimmerman: Absolutely. Okay. And so now I caution and then recommend in the process, everybody knows every marketer knows if you were to provide a webinar form and we’ve all seen them that has seven questions on it, you’re not going to answer it. Right. And so I’ve figured out an approach and system that has your regular, like an Amazon checkout process.

I’ve built this little, we’ll call it flow tool. One of the names I’m throwing around is demand cap as in demand capture. Or demand cap.co or io, something like that because it’s really about identifying who’s in market and capturing that demand. Having a conversation with those people before they go talk to your competitors and they capture that demand.

And so what are those key five seven. Sales questions that most marketers don’t think about. And so I’m looking down funnel, I’m looking into the sales process, working with companies to pull out that discovery. As Mark said, you’re doing this discovery at scale system and then building into this step two of the process.

It’s almost like a little insert or survey that happens right after they register. It’s like one, two, and then three. There’s actually some personalization can happen on the third confirmation then starts to get what I call get your sales message. In front of your audience in a targeted way, as soon as possible.

Because if you really look what webinars are designed to do, and there’s a couple of risks I’d identified, and I’ll bring this back to the registration process in a second around those SQL questions is that as a long time webinar creator for so many years, I was like, man, I got to get as many people to register.

I got to get as many people to attend. And I got as many people to stay to the end to hear my sales message and pitch. And so there was a couple of risks and I can’t get into all of them right now, But, uh, one of the biggest risks of the two biggest risks are the pitch risk and the attendance risk. And so for most marketers, they don’t have a really clear articulatable pitch at the end that gets people to really just like irresistibly say, I must get a trial.

I must get a demo. Most often the offer is just kind of more of, Hey, we’ve got a trial. If you’d like to take a demo, learn more, you know, click on that. There’s not a lot of energy or urgency in that to the person delivering the pitch often isn’t a skilled salesperson who understands how to close from the stage.

And so with that, I realized that marketers need most webinar hosts need something that they’re comfortable with. They need a way to soft sell, identify those who are in market, say things that are not going to put them out of their comfort zone because. Frankly, most people don’t want to be pushed into things outside their comfort zone.

I don’t believe in selling. I don’t believe in closing. I don’t want to be salesy. I’m not here to change that. Although I think people should practice a little bit more of that, but I’m never going to win that battle. So I go, if I go to where most people who host webinars are and the KPIs that their events are tied to, I go, at least I can help them with this.

Next step in the process is how do we get that sales message To the right people in ears earlier in the process. And so if we’ve got a risk around the delivery of the pitch and we have a risk around the pitch itself, and we have a risk around people showing up to the end to hear the pitch, what can we do possibly to move that forward in time, de risk the webinar investment process, you put all this energy into the deck, you put all this energy into marketing, but all this energy in line with partners to hear, to have five people hear it, right.

And so because webinars have on a great day, you know, 50 percent on an average day, 25 percent of people to show up. What about the other 70 percent who are never going to be on the webinar, never going to show up to hear the close? What can you say and do earlier in the process? Again, optimizing not for attendance, but optimizing for lead identification.

These 5 to 7 key questions that are part of the sales process that people willingly, and I’ve got the data to show 70 to 73 percent of people who come through my step two of my process will raise their hand, tell me who they are, where they are, what they need, all this other stuff, and we don’t have to rely on third party data.

We capture first party data, and then I have the systems and tools connected to that reg step to then follow up and flow through into the sales channels. And boy, if you could see what was on my screen this week, it was like. I call it like hitting 777 at Vegas. I’m not a gambler, but I know what that means.

And it’s just all day for like just jackpotting, spitting out like sales qualified leads. And it was just like, okay, not only is the traffic source work, but also this lead qualification system works. And so what I would say is, and it’s somewhat complicated to build these reg Who knew? Like, I didn’t know it was going to be so hard.

Every client I come on board with to try to build this process into their webinar registration flow. It takes weeks. I got to coordinate with the CMS owner. I got to coordinate with the front end developer. I got to coordinate with the CRM owner and like the, By the time that’s all done, the weeks have gone by.

And so I go, what if there was a tool then in a matter of minutes, I could sit down, we could have a conversation or a little workshop around your top five sales questions. We could dial it in and then boom, done. Like connect your registrations to the web form process and you’re good to go. And so that’s the thing I’m solving for is because if you are going to do webinars, the number one risk.

Is people aren’t going to show to hear your sales message at the end. And so what can you say earlier in the process to find out who those people are based on role, title, identification, and get that sales message in front of them right away.

[00:27:45] Mike Allton: Folks. I hope your brain is just absolutely spinning with, with ideas.

We’re learning how to not ignore webinars, but actually optimize them and make them a valuable, valuable channel for our businesses here to talk to us about how to use social media as a channel is our CMO, Daryl.

[00:28:02] Darryl Praill: It’s the Arc de Triomphe. Can you imagine if you’re in charge, if you’re the CMO of marketing Paris, what are your main channels?

Wow. The Arc de Triomphe, there’s the Eiffel Tower, there’s the Louvre. Those are your channels you’re going to use to drive tourism dollars in. Okay. Now, but you’re not the CMO of Paris. In fact, you’re the CMO of your company product service. So what are your main channels? So I’m going to guess the things like pay per click, maybe trade shows events.

Maybe content. Those are all pretty predictable, right? Let me ask you this question. Are you treating social media as a main channel? By the way, only 1. 8 percent of you today measure social media and can prove an ROI in that investment. HubSpot and Gartner say social media is the number one channel to invest in this year.

Are you doing it? If not, I can tell you why you’re not doing it because you don’t have the tools. You don’t have the mentality and that’s okay. We’ve got you covered. You change the mentality. We’ll give you the tool. Burpulse tracks all the ROI for you. One place to manage all your social media activity.

Your number one channel. Change your success. Treat social media as a channel. One CMO to another. My name is Daryl. I’m with Goltz. I’ll talk to you soon.

[00:29:20] Mike Allton: You see what I did there? I didn’t wait until the end for the CTA, right in the middle. Just subtle. Made it applicable. What we were talking about, everything that Justin was just talking about. So man, what’s your criteria for doing webinars with partners who’ve been talking about this idea of bringing partners in, but how do you actually.

[00:29:37] Justin Zimmerman: There’s a couple of ways to pick them. Again, my traffic map would be helpful to have on the screen, but there are seven or eight, I would say, categories of partners that I have figured out how to activate and are kind of my go to motions. And so first one on the top of the list is oftentimes. Partner of partners.

And so if you have existing partners, there’s a good chance that their app and tool is also helping the job to be done that your partners are a part of that you’re a part of. And so there are usually actions, behaviors, tools, systems that either happen before your product gets used. During your product use or afterwards.

And so if you can take an X ray of, you know, your systems and tools, and then go look at your partners of partners to see how they stack together in the job that we’ve done of your customer, that’s an easy way to say, Oh, this is a good partner, this is a good partner. And so what I ended up doing sometimes, and even this last week was go to the marketplace and integration listings of my partners to see their partners.

Then I asked for an introduction. I asked for a little bit information around, and then there’s really some key criteria. It’s just because they are partners of partners. From an integration standpoint, which another thing I’m famous for saying is integrations don’t equal partnerships. So that’s kind of the first thing what I would look for in a partner to partner introduction is, Hey, have you worked with them before?

What level results have you driven? Are the things you’ve done to drive those results with them? And are they easy and fun to work with? Because those are kind of the three main things that I’ve seen as characteristics. Once you have kind of a alignment from a technological and ICP overlap, or those other things, because you could have, you know, the most fancy, amazing, best You know, app integration tool that complements you and your customers would love, but if the other company doesn’t have the resources, the bandwidth, the expertise, the willingness, the timeframes, it doesn’t really matter how big their email list, how many customers they have and how great their product is.

Those other conditions don’t exist. You’re not going to get what you need to get done with them.

[00:31:38] Mike Allton: Makes complete sense. And that’s something that I’m really looking forward to digging into with their own webinar program and what I want to do and accomplish with partners in the coming year. So, like I said, I’m used to running these huge summits.

I’m planning an agency summit where we will have 20 partners and 2030 speakers. And I just spread that out, I think.

[00:31:58] Justin Zimmerman: So they, they stack together and they pull apart. And so my thoughts on summits are they’re really good for a lot of In fact, I’m actually helping a partner hacker slash near bound with their partner summit right now on some of the things that I’m, I’m coaching them.

They act, they’ve hired me to come in and help them optimize for ROI. And so one of the things that, you know, in retrospect that I would say is the reason why webinars I think are better and there’s pros and cons to virtual summits is that with a webinar. You can have a targeted audience, a targeted outcome, and with that, you know, those exact calls to action and within that piece of content within that registration flow, you know how to pick and choose those people coming through.

Right? And so there’s just there’s just a level of specificity that allows you to extract ROI from targeted single webinar events, whereas with most Transcribed Virtual events and most virtual event software, you have a big, huge, you know, event where it’s attracting this person in that reason. So there’s a lot of noise that gets lost that you can’t signal on because, you know, unless you have a registration process that is dynamic to the source of traffic, which actually is what I’m building is when the UTM code equals this.

You know, show the set of ICP identifying questions. So that way you can dynamically score leads based on inbound traffic. But for most webinar systems, most webinar registration processes again, that is the key area in which you’re going to collect your data and is the most obvious, but um, Right in front of us missed opportunity to capture that data and generate leads because everybody thinks it’s the close at the end.

It’s actually at the beginning with webinar summits. You just have a standard first name, last name, a couple identifying things, but there’s no way to really have that targeted dynamic level. Things that we were just talking about that are unique to your particular businesses sales process. Right. So a big summit, you’re going to get a lot of top of funnel, a lot of eyeballs, but you don’t have a measurable targetable way to extract true SQLs from that.

Whereas in a singular webinar approach you do now with that said, what I like about the way you could stack, you know, let’s just say once a year, you’ve got this great summit that you want to put on, you know, your partner or evangelist mastermind group for blah, blah, blah. Well, let’s just say. Again, most marketing is about testing what works and what doesn’t work.

Well, one of the things you need to test that works and doesn’t work, even if you do validate through some of the conversations I mentioned before around how do you validate partners, will they do what they say? And if they do, then on a single webinar promotion, Then now all of a sudden, this is a great partner for the summit.

This is a great partner because now through a single webinar, you’ve identified both great content delivery and you’ve been able to identify great traffic generation or however you convert that traffic. Maybe you can generate traffic from a partner, but maybe they don’t actually produce SQLs. And so now if you use your weekly, that’s why I talk about weekly.

If you use a weekly webinar cadence, you’ve got a great testing engine for partners, great testing engine for topics and title, great. Testing engine for traffic generation. And of course, most importantly, a great testing engine for SQL is that you route to your sales team. And so if you do 10 weeks, you’ve got 10 opportunities to identify 10 great partners who may be at the end of the year, you stack them together.

You pick only the best to come speak at your event, only the best to come promote that event. And so for me, you know, marketing is this. aggregation of tests and experiments that leads you to validate certain options and certain opportunities, certain partners, certain titles versus others. And so again, that’s why I’ve arrived at don’t optimize for attendance, optimize for SQL generation using a multi step registration process like the one I’ve developed.

[00:35:38] Mike Allton: That is such a terrific observation of using webinars to kind of vet your potential event speakers, whether they’re live or in person or online yet another note that I’ve taken. So thank you for that. But we’re talking about the idea of doing weekly webinars. How often do we email? I heard you on a webinar the other day talking about emailing.

Let’s just say a lot. Can you email too much?

[00:36:03] Justin Zimmerman: You can email too much, you know, there’s a level of testing that you need to figure out. I’ve seen no issue at all in emailing twice a week. And so if you think about your lists, you have a list and sub lists. Most companies have a blog and content list and most companies have a customer list.

And most of the time they’ll do some level of marketing to webinars from those lists. And so I have seen no issue at all marketing twice a week to those lists to come to events. And then once you start getting sub lists of people who are consuming the content and you’re engaging the content, I’ll market four times to those people in a week.

There’s a Tuesday and there’s a Thursday for the regular kind of top of funnel list, the top, you know, invitation list, if you want to call it that it’s comprised of customers, blog subscribers, everybody. And there’s a sub list of people who are already Consuming and activated to come to these events and use our content and I’ll email them on Wednesdays and Saturdays

Interesting.

So

[00:36:58] Mike Allton: I would agree and this is something again that you said on the webinar that email is likely every brands number one channel for driving Attendance right, right to webinar. What other channels are working for you and actually getting people into this webinar funnel?

[00:37:13] Justin Zimmerman: Yeah, there’s two other channels.

If you want to think about them that way, if you have a SAS app and it’s one of those apps, people are living in having a way to position in app banner top of the fold top right there. And there’s a lot like everything. If you hear the word webinar. You know, it’s a very big catch all for what could be a very successful or miserably failing content experiment.

Same thing with in app pop ups. And so there are ones that I’ve seen do phenomenally well, and I’ve seen ones that just are invisible and don’t get any clicks at all. And same copy. In fact, actually same copy, different placement, different colors, wildly different results. And so I’ve seen that work really well.

And then, you know, to your guy’s business model, boy has some of the influencer social media projects that I’ve been working on, have they started to, depending on the campaign and post outperform email, and so like this week, which is why I’m smiling so much. Finally, finally, finally, I got, I coached. One of my company’s paid influencers to caress him into using the things I know really, really, really work.

He finally did them. And we went from a 0. 15 click through rate. So, you know, like that’s pretty low, right? And this doesn’t sound like much more, but it’s 10 times bigger. This week we got like a 1. 5. I think it’s coming out to like 4 percent click through rate. And we’re talking about impressions per post to click through in the comment link, not in the body of the post.

This is LinkedIn influencers. So, and we’re talking about a hundred thousand to 200, 000 impressions. So that’s the type of numbers and impressions that we’re getting times, whatever that CTR is. And so we got a 10 X return using this one style following this methodology. Of course, there’s a lot to unpack there, but, and so now that I’ve got a model.

And it’s all documented in this one spreadsheet, I can now go to the influencers and say, Hey, I know exactly almost on a cost per click basis, right? If a influencer can generate 100, 000 impressions a month, I know how much it’s worth for us to pay that influencer to run this type of post to run this type of engagement, because I know it’s going to perform.

In this particular way, I’ve got a couple more experiments to validate that a hundred percent, but my gut, which is where we start with a lot of these things, tells me that I’ll know exactly how much to pay an influencer to run this post to make it worth our time and money. And so then now all of a sudden we can buy influencers and we know what we’re getting systematic.

Now I can go to the CFO and who’s actually funding this project with me to get as much as it’s worth to spend on these paper posts, which is what I’m But again, if you’ve heard Gary V talk about it, you know, it’s true. It’s like, you gotta know the creative, you gotta know, and coming back to even webinars, it’s like, if you don’t know topic, you don’t know title, you don’t know what’s important to your audience, then you don’t know which influencer to talk to, what creative to help set up with them and what calls to action that then drive to the next step in the funnel, which in this case was a webinar.

To get them engaged and into your, and then through my multi step process to get them into, you know, the pipeline. So again, if you don’t understand creative and you don’t understand your customers, that’s the first place to start with all this. And you’re really just curating, you know, content and traffic for the benefit of their eyeballs.

And then you just got eBooks and you’ve got webinars. You’ve got all these different ways to do it. And I’ve just found webinars to be a really, really good reason to give people To give you their information. That’s what I really, that’s what I’ve come down to after 20 years, almost of doing this, like, is that really what webinars have become?

It’s just a really good reason for people to give you their information. If you think about it that way, you’re like, Oh, I’m in the business of first party data collection. That’s as marketers, we’re in the business of first party data collection. Webinars are a reason to get that first party and a lot of it.

And then our next job is to create qualified conversations for sales. And it doesn’t matter about the content as much. It doesn’t matter about how many people showed up at your webinar. It doesn’t matter how many people watch the replay. It matters. How many people are you able to come through that registration process?

And qualify for your sales team. And what is the data that you’re collecting around that? That’s aligning your sales and marketing efforts. And who cares about the traffic, whether it’s influencer B2B tech partner, you know, paid sponsorship, SEO, PPC. It’s all the same. You’re trying to drive that traffic from the market.

Through a registration process to collect first party data. So that way you can pick and choose demand capture mode, who to talk to sales.

[00:41:43] Mike Allton: Couldn’t agree more. And I love that you keep underscoring how important it is to have quality content in the webinar. Cause again, just like anything else, a blog post, a YouTube video, if you put out content, Crap, you’re not going to give anyone any reason to follow you or to come back and consume more.

And so that needs to be one of the important things that we’re looking at when you start, like you said, with that customer. And this has been fascinating. I’ve enjoyed this conversation so much. I only have one more question for you. And I can’t believe we’ve already gotten to the end. How important. Our relationships to you.

How important have they been to you in your career?

[00:42:16] Justin Zimmerman: I mean, everything I left my job, let’s just say my job became unavailable at the beginning of 2022. And I thought to myself, do I want to go back and submit myself to the will and. Discretion of what others think best, or am I finally at a stage in point in my life where I’m going to believe in myself, make a bet on myself and go to market with the things that I think are going to be revolutionary and take the risk, which is what I’ve done and invest in my own approach.

And then prove to the world without having to ask for permission or funding that this is the right approach that works. And so I wouldn’t be where I am today with one, a belief in myself, but then two, gosh, like, I think it will be probably three years before, you know, I feel like I’m at the place where I’m at, and I’m probably halfway through that point.

I’m at year one, 1. 5. And I was telling someone the other day, I go, the value of relationships, or this is a three year journey. I realize I’m on now. And like year one was all about community, all about connection, all about contacts, all about having conversations, all about going to conferences, all about going to events, building out my personal relationships till my Dunbar number, like, which I think is like one 50.

The total number of people you can relatively keep in remembering your head is completely maxed out. And so for me. I don’t feel alone, even though I work alone in my business. Um, I’ve created a, my own Slack channel, which is essentially its own community of all my customers, all of my contacts, a group for just partner marketers, a group for just partner consultants.

And so every chance I can get at making a really important connection with someone who I feel connection and affinity with. I. Have a personal CRM system. I follow up with everybody. They live inside my Slack channel. You’re probably getting an email from me right now, if you’re listening to this. And so I wouldn’t have the developers that I have now who are helping me work on these technical projects.

One year ago, I couldn’t imagine any of the stuff that I have and is working for me. And I would say it’s all because of showing up on social, making great connections and having a fantastic community that I’ve contributed to and supported.

[00:44:28] Mike Allton: Love it. And I can vouch for everything you just said, because I’ve seen you in action on LinkedIn.

I’ve seen the conversations. I can tell the relationships that have been built over time and the impact that it’s having on you. So I applaud you for that. And I gotta tell you, everyone listening, there’s so much more that we could have unpacked, but we are out of time. So if you’re doing webinars and they’re not working for you, you need to get in touch with Justin.

Justin, tell them how they can get in touch with you best. Where should they go? How should they follow you?

[00:44:58] Justin Zimmerman: If you’re interested in webinars and you want some level of support, coaching, feedback, if you go to partnerwebinar. com, you’ll see a page with my face on it. Really simple, just a way to book a time with me.

And we can talk about what level of products or services that might be aligned with where you are in your business. Partner webinar, lead generation and pipeline creation process.

[00:45:23] Mike Allton: Fantastic. That’s all we’ve got for today, friends. We will have all those links and more in the show notes below. Take a look at them, subscribe.

We’ll see you next time. for listening to another episode of partnership unpacked hosted by Mike Alton and powered by Agorapulse, the number one rated social media management solution. Which you can learn more about at agorapulse. com. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your favorite podcast player.

Be sure to leave us a review. Your feedback is important to us. And if you want to be part of our audience during live broadcasts, take a look at our calendar at agorapulse. com forward slash calendar. Until

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